)
(photo: Greene, ME – January 2019)
I thank you, my God, for having in a thousand different ways led my eyes to discover the immense simplicity of things. Little by little, through the irresistible development of those yearnings you implanted in me as a child, through the influence of gifted friends who entered my life at certain moments to bring light and strength to my mind, and through the awakenings of spirit I owe to the successive initiations, gentle and terrible, which you caused me to undergo: through all these I have been brought to the point where I can no longer see anything, nor any longer breathe, outside that milieu in which all is made one. – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
mercy
Until we walk with despair
(Photo: Berkeley, CA – April 2006)
Until we walk with despair, and still have hope, we will not know that our hope was not just hope in ourselves, in our own successes, in our power to make a difference, in our image of what perfection should be. We need hope from a much deeper Source. We need a hope larger than ourselves.
Until we walk with personal issues of despair, we will never uncover the Real Hope on the other side of that despair. Until we allow the crash and crush of our images, we will never discover the Real Life beyond what only seems like death. Remember, death is an imaginary loss of an imaginary self, that is going to pass anyway.
This very journey is probably the heart of what Jesus came to reveal.
– Richard Rohr
#1040
from Requiem – Anna Akhmatova
This isn’t me, someone else suffers.
I couldn’t survive that. And what happened,
May it be covered in coarse black cloth,
Let them carry away the streetlights …
Night.
(portrait of Anna Akhmatova, Amedeo Modigliani)
look at humanity
Look at humanity, how lacking in light people are,
how they perish out of desire for perishable things.
Because of pride they keep separate from God,
dead to the spirit, living a lie.
Isn’t it amazing how their spirits are imprisoned,
while all the while they hold the key in their hands!
– Rumi
(Photo: Florence – July 2002)
small and ordinary “I”
It’s a gift to joyfully recognize and accept our own smallness and ordinariness. Then you are free with nothing to live up to, nothing to prove, and nothing to protect. Such freedom is my best description of Christian maturity, because once you know that your “I” is great and one with God, you can, ironically, be quite content with a small and ordinary “I.”
No grandstanding is henceforth necessary. Any question of your own importance or dignity has already been resolved from the inside out—once and for all. Such salvation is experienced now in small tastes, whetting our appetite for eternity.
– Richard Rohr
#1032
Franciscan Feast of The Stigmata
Today Franciscans around the world celebrate the Feast of the Stigmata, remembering the wounds of Christ imprinted on the body of St. Francis. The event is symbolic of Francis’s life. He suffered greatly and was profoundly misunderstood but his unwavering commitment to a God of unconditional love marked his life. Saints are not made in stain-glass windows. They are forged in the fires of rejection, displacement, perseverance and darkness because God is being born within. To live in Christ is to bear the weight of the world in evolution.
– Ilia Delio
found drawing – January 16, 2017
“And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation – some fact of my life – unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God’s world by mistake.” – AA Big Book
stop searching
stop thinking
stop trying
the way out
is there
found drawing – 12.22.2016
hours after
winter solstice
the day I wanted to die,
tried, and failed
I had failed at success
and succeeded in failure
today and every day
I am grateful for life
(… Some speak of the future
My love she speaks softly
She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all…)
– Bob Dylan, Love Minus Zero/No Limit
Edge of Atlantic 