Category: Meditation

This year’s Christmas season is not laden with the expectations of extended family celebrations, festive Christmas meals, and open doors to visitors come to share the joy of the days of rest and peace that fill the Christmas season.

Pandemic loss and grief weigh upon these Christmas days and bring shadows to our hearts.

Maybe we feel empty. Like the world has stopped. Worry for the future seeps into the celebration of God-with-us who was born among us…. And…where is he for me? Now?

Your heart’s cry, whatever it may be, let it blend with the wail of the Infant King that midnight at his birth.

At birth a baby wails if they are not reunited with their mother after a few seconds. They cry because they may be bruised and sore from the trauma of birth. Perhaps they are cold. “Crying is the key to life,” one doctor said as he described the big difference from when baby is delivered to when she takes her first cry. When they’re born, they appear lifeless and purple. But when they make that first cry, the baby goes from being purple to pink, and they start moving, even opening their eyes for the first time. “It truly is a miracle!”

We all have been bruised by this year. Our hearts are sore from the trauma of loss and constant fear of an unseen enemy that can cause the death of loved ones. We have been isolated from anyone who has been our support in life. We’ve lost jobs, money, business, opportunities, graduations, weddings….

Crying is the key to life.

In the days after Christmas, allow your tears to mingle with the Infant’s cry. Throughout his life Jesus cried. He wept at the tomb of Lazarus. He wept over Jerusalem. He wept in the Garden of Gethsemane. And I’m sure he wept when he met his mother after the resurrection. Tears are a part of hoping.

My heart’s pain becomes focused when I cry. Finding someone to receive my tears is really important, even if it is a simple phone call to someone who will understand.

Tears say, “I acknowledge that this hurts. These tears cleanse and heal my heart’s brokenness and sorrow. They make way for the miracle of life, new life, new hope, renewal.” Jesus’ tears were shed at moments when the birth of renewal was underway: new life for Lazarus, entering into the drama of the passion as he wept over Jerusalem, the new life that would emerge from the passion into resurrection….

At every moment Jesus is working something new upon the face of the earth. The Holy Spirit is even at this moment being poured out upon all peoples.

Jesus’ human tears shed at moments of disappointment, grief, and fear, kept him steady and present in the emptiness of all that was missing and all that he was living. Tears keep us from running away. Tears help us bridge isolation as we reach out to another or allow us to hold the pain of someone else.

Tears keep us present until the dawn begins to break. They make sure we don’t miss the inflow of compassionate relief that gives us rest after the bitterness of our weeping. They force us to reach out to someone who at that moment is standing in the dawn and able to offer to us a few words that like a life raft carry us to safety.

So this Christmas, if tears are there waiting to be shed, let them mingle with the tears of Jesus who is our God-with-us. Reach out to another as you enter your sorrow. Be patient as the darkness of a cloudy night gives way to the first break of a tentative dawn’s beauty. Step into the newness that only faith acknowledges. God is at work in whatever you are living, that whatever is taking over your life is momentarily about to give way to God’s new power in your life.

After all, life, I believe, really is a miracle!

In the past couple of days the presentations and prayer guides are beginning to come in for our 3-hour virtual retreat led by Sr Martha and myself, following the guidance of St Elizabeth of the Trinity. This is the first of our Tabernacle of the Heart retreats. (The second will be on grieving through the lens of another woman mystic: Catherine of Siena.)

So I thought I’d just give you a sense of what’s to come, hoping you’d like to join us. The retreat will be next Saturday, November 14. We will hold the retreat twice on that day, once in the morning and once in the evening so people can choose the time best for them. Can’t come on that day but still interested. We’ll be sending everyone files for the retreat: video, audio, and text. So if you come, you’ll have them to go through again at your own pace. If you can’t be there in person, you can make a private retreat on a day of your choice. Now, to some of the wonderful things filling my inbox for the retreat!

Excerpted from one of Sr Martha’s talks:

Your own personal story is where God wants to be this Fall day in 2020…no where else. God is committed to you. Are YOU committed to you? The insights and the graces I need to move forward in life’s journey, those that you need TODAY, will unfold today. The other insights and graces you need down the line, will unfold at that time. Back to the gardener analogy…no gardener in her right mind would dump a swimming pool of water on a seed, walk away and say, OK, I’ve given it all that it needs for this year to grow! God doesn’t do that with us either. He is in a dynamic, active relationship with each one of us….and his grace, some call grace “his loving us,” will guide me on the journey as I come to that next step.

Each of us here has what she needs to make the journey of CHRIST alive in me today. We can be sure of it, because God is a good gardener and will not let His lilies, roses and violets go unwatered and unfertilized. No way…

Excerpted from one of the presentations of Jeannette de Beavuoir:

What Elizabeth longed for with all her soul was to seek the Trinity dwelling in the deepest sanctuary of her heart, to listen to that Mystery, the very essence of which is Divine Silence. For that she entered the cloister of Carmel, entered the exterior cloister of the walls. Once inside, she entered more deeply into the inner cloister of her heart to seek the indwelling Trinity which had invaded her soul from the first moment of baptism. She declared: “I am Elizabeth of the Trinity, that is, Elizabeth who disappears, who is lost, who lets herself be invaded by the Three.” One of her favorite Carmelite mottos was this one: “Alone with the great Alone.”

The ultimate goal of a Carmelite nun is not different from that of other Christians; it is the perfection of charity. It is, however—thanks to a special grace of God her specific vocation–as fully understood, the unique excellence of this end, of the greatness, purity, and tenderness of God, whom St Francis loved to call “the Beautiful.” She has known “the great love” of Ephesians 2:4 with which the Father has loved her freely, and understood that such love should be preferred to everyone else, love without measure until the total gift of self. A Carmelite could not imagine even for a moment that she no longer loved the one who has loved her so much that he gave himself for her; however, she also desires to respond with a greater love, with the gift of her life. The enclosure is therefore a choice of love, of the supreme love of a creature for her Creator.

Elizabeth was no doubt a saint of the cloister. But she is perhaps even more a saint for those of us who live outside of it….

Excerpted from the video by Sr. Kathryn:

Since your baptism the Trinity has dwelt within you. Your soul is a little heaven on earth. God never leaves you alone. Just as he waits for someone to visit him in the Eucharist, he waits for us to visit him within our own heart. “You will always find Him there, longing to do you good.”

So the question is, how do you enter your own heart.

I had been a person lost in my head…in my thoughts and rationalizations and plans for the future and stories about what was happening in the present. So much so that I lived many years ago with perpetual headaches.

The past and future exist only in our minds and thoughts. They are now in the hands of God, not in ours. When we are lost in them, we let slip through our fingers the only moments we can actually intentionally seize for the glory of God and the care of others and our own soul.

So the question is, how do we enter our heart? How do we stay in the present…

That’s just a taste… We’ll be bringing together the retreat this week and praying for all the retreatants in a very special way. If you feel St Elizabeth of the Trinity saying to you that she wishes to be your sister in the spiritual life, learn more about the retreat by clicking here. I hope we see you there!

We were told numberless times going into Election Day that this election was the most important election of our lifetime. On this weekend after casting our votes, we’re still living on the adrenaline of heightened concerns, hopes, and emotions…

At this point for our emotional and spiritual health, we may want to hit PAUSE and remember that no matter what is decided in this election, God has a purpose that unfolds in history, a purpose that cannot be overturned.

There is no way for us to know how this will end, no real possibility of us figuring it out or of changing the outcome to what we think the final result should be. And even after all the results are in, there will be heated discussion and commentary on whether the results are accurate. Hope is the belief that we are held in the midst of this chaos. Hope is the belief that we are cared for most tenderly even if we cannot see in the way forward how God is leading us.

Today I invite you to let the dust settle and to soak in the sense of safety and trust that is the bedrock of Psalm 23.

I recently saw on my Facebook wall a quote which read: “The older you get, the more quiet you become. Life humbles you so deeply as you age. You realize how much nonsense you’ve wasted time on.”

Until we come to terms that life is a gradual, difficult, gloriously transformative undoing of everything we have built up for ourselves and of ourselves, it will continue to perplex and, in some cases, embitter us.

Just the other day I sat beside a priest friend, sharing my spiritual journey, my self-discoveries that were not that pretty. Of course, I had explanations ready at hand. I thought they added perspective. My friend said, “Those are just excuses. Everything you’re saying is just ego.”

Just ego…. The nonsense I’ve wasted time on.

We get caught up in our younger years in wildly exciting things, dreams for what we could do or be, determination to make improvements, change things, build things….

But life tends to lead us out of these sunshine beginnings into the stormy years of our undoing. Then back into sunshine, then onward to shadow….

The elders of the Jews who were tasked with rebuilding the house of God in Jerusalem, had been sent there from their captivity in exile in Babylon. The glories of the former Temple, all that Jerusalem had been for the Chosen People since King David, had been lost. They were beginning again, and anyone who has begun again to rebuild from the ashes knows that it is hard and discouraging work. To rebuild is to face the unknown, to construct in faith, to hope in God, to place ourselves under his mercy, to walk blindly along the paths marked out for us…at his bidding, for his glory, according to his plan.

In the Gospel, we can imagine Mary standing on the outside of the crowd that surrounded the house where her Son was preaching. With his words, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and act on it,” Mary’s heart had to have skipped a beat. The relationship of mother-son that she had known since Jesus’ Bethlehem-birth had now to give way to something larger that she didn’t yet understand. These words, certainly a confirmation of her holiness, defined the moment when she realized definitively that her motherhood was not her own, that it never was meant to be her private joy. All that she had been in her mysterious and magnificent YES to the Father, was now public “property,” so to speak, for everyone else’s benefit. She had to move over to make room for us. I often think of what Mary must have been thinking and feeling as she turned and walked home that evening….

In our lives, we are led into progressively deeper poverty in which all we once knew as normal becomes shrouded in a future of uncertainty. We walk forward lighter, simpler, more quiet and humble, perhaps less significant. If this is happening to you rejoice. You are being led on the path of holiness which can only culminate in glory.