Jesus said:
“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened,
and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,
for I am meek and humble of heart;
and you will find rest for yourselves.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”
– Matthew 11:28-30
Uncategorized
Perhaps going nowhere is better, I don’t know.
– Thomas Merton, journal entry, July, 18, 1967
Photo: Paris, February 2008
#969
nope
a quiet conscience
No, not at all…
“If humankind could have known God without the world, God would never have created the world.” – Meister Eckhart
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
Should God expect any less of us…
The desire we must possess, according to Bonaventure, is essentially the desire of the heart for the good. What would Bonaventure say to a contemporary world that upholds money, wealth, power, and prestige as the principal desires? His answer would probably be that given to the Poor Clare Nun: desire God alone. Pure desire is what Bonaventure teaches and his advice on how to strive for this is simple: one must turn one’s entire heart, mind, and soul to God. Since that which brings happiness and peace rests in God, only the desire for God can lead to happiness and peace. In the incarnation, God has turned his entire being, all that he has and all that he is, to us. Should God expect any less of us than what God has given and continues to give to us?
– —from the book Crucified Love: Bonaventure’s Mysticism of the Crucified Christ by Ilia Delio, OSF
There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done…every man shall be his own priest.
– Walt Whitman, preface to The Leaves of Grass, 1855
Photo: Portland, ME – January 2018
Slowly in prayer – Matthew Lippman
Photo by Silvia Corradin on Pexels.com
To be thankful for the Starbucks lady, Lucy,
who is pissed at me for asking too many questions
about my damn phone app
is one thing.
To be thankful for my wife plastering my face to the bathroom floor
with pancake batter
for missing the bus
is another thing.
I tried to be thankful for my eyes this morning
even though one of them is filled with puss
and the other with marigold juice.
Marigold juice is the stuff that comes from the flower
when you put it between your palms and rub, slowly in prayer,
even though nothing comes out.
It’s the imagined juice of God,
the thing you can’t see when you are not being thankful.
I try to be thankful for the lack of energy that is my laziness
and my lonely best friend with no wife and children
knowing I am as lonely as he
with one wife and two daughters.
Sometimes we travel five minutes to the pier in Red Hook
and it takes hours in our loneliness to know, in our thankfulness,
that if we held hands it’d be a quiet romance for the ages.
I’ll admit, I’m thankful for Justin Timberlake
because he’s better than Beethoven
and my friend Aaron
who lived in the woods with an axe and never used it once.
I try hard to forget love,
to abandon love,
so that one day I will actually be able to love.
Until then, I am thankful that Lucy wanted to spit in my coffee,
or imagined that she did,
and thanked her profusely
for showing me which buttons to push
and how to do it, with just the right amount of pressure,
the whole tips of all my fingers dancing like stars
through the blackness
of a mocha latte, black.
