Category: Uncategorized

Risk Believing in Divine Possibilities

Published on by Sr. Kathryn J Hermes, FSPLeave a comment

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-c76rx-be908e

When situation in life are dark, frightening, uncertain, it is likely that we will feel apprehensive, fearful, maybe paralyzed. These three women in today’s podcast, show us the power of risking to believe that God is always bringing about life in our situations in life. They risked believing not in human possibilities, but in divine ones. And so can we.

ENJOYED THIS ARTICLE? HERE ARE 5 WAYS TO GO DEEPER…

God has amazing ways of knocking on people’s hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 6 ways you can join me on the journey:

  1. Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST
  2. Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way.
  3. Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life’s Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace.  Enroll in the free 5-day email series introducing Reclaim Regret.
  4. Enroll in courses on Midlife, Contemplative Prayer, and a do-it-yourself downloadable Surviving Depression retreat
  5. Become a part of the HeartWork Community, a place where you can ask the hard questions and find a path to a life that is free, fulfilling and fruitful.

 

How to Free Yourself from Inner Prisons

Published on by Sr. Kathryn J Hermes, FSPLeave a comment

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-wrtzy-be8fcd

This experience of personal discovery and deep prayer explores the prisons within that hold us captive. In prayer we desire to be progressively transformed into who we really are before the face of God who truly IS. This may or may not change our outer situation, but as we remain in God’s presence, our inner being shines with that radiance. And through varying circumstances, everyone (including ourselves) can see God loving into existence our most authentic self, the person he created us to be.

Using the image of a prison, explore imprisoning situations you have lived through or are currently living in. These situations could have been created by someone’s attitudes toward you; a situation of injustice or abuse; events in your childhood; your own fears or shyness; a financial or physical tragedy; a betrayal, etc. What have you’re your imprisoning situations?

Reflecting on these imprisoning situations, you may become aware of certain “life lessons” that were impressed upon you over the years. These “life lessons” may have seemed helpful for a time, but may be obstacles to growth and maturity at this point in your life.

These injunctions became signposts to survival. We came to believe that, in order to be accepted or loved, we needed to:

  • disappear,
  • not think,
  • conform,
  • remain a child, or
  • protect ourselves from love.

Thus, we began to shut off the truest part of who we are.

Now is the time when God invites you to be free of all that.

ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER…

God has amazing ways of knocking on people’s hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey. You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com.

Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST.

Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way.

Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life’s Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace.

Become a part of the HeartWork Community, a place where you can ask the hard questions and find a path to a life that is free, fulfilling and fruitful.

Journey with the Holy Spirit: The Gift of Wisdom

Published on by Sr. Kathryn J Hermes, FSPLeave a comment

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-99w2a-bccc02

It belongs to the gift of wisdom to contemplate the divine. Through a special instinct and movement of the Spirit we penetrate the very life of the Trinity. Those who experience the power of the gift of wisdom understand the words of the psalmist, “Taste and see how good the Lord is” (Ps 34: 9). The word taste means that there is a certain delight that is more than just feeling or excitement. There is an impulse that is truly divine that gives our hearts an ineffable joy that seems to be from heaven itself. Indeed, the gift of wisdom is surpassed only by the beatific vision which will be ours in eternity.

Souls that are under the Holy Spirit’s gift of wisdom love God because he is infinitely good and lovable. They love God for his own sake, not for any human motive of self-interest. Because they see God within them, they see God also in all things, in the smallest detail of their life, and in a special way in their neighbor. It is the gift of wisdom that allows us to see Christ in the poor, in those who suffer, in the heart even of the “enemy.” They are happy to deprive themselves, putting the interests of others before them.

When the Spirit actively operates within us with the gift of wisdom, we do not judge things from a purely natural and human point of view. When things don’t develop the way people want them to, it is not surprising that they accuse others for deliberately or inadvertently being the cause of their problems. Truly spiritual people, wise people, evaluate things, even unfortunate or contrary events, from God’s point of view and in a supernatural light, with a spirit of equanimity.

Journey with the Holy Spirit: The Gift of Fear of the Lord

Published on by Sr. Kathryn J Hermes, FSPLeave a comment

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-nwqxj-bccbf0

In Scripture “to fear God” is to be in awe of his power and knowledge. To fear God requires a daring heart!

Only a heart that fears God can be joyful. Fear is a word that we typically interpret as referring to a state of emotional distress in the face of some danger to our personal safety. The term “fear of the Lord” appears over 100 times in the Old Testament. For example: And now, Israel, what does the Lord, your God ask of you but to fear the Lord, your God, and follow his ways exactly, to love and serve the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul (Deuteronomy 10:12). However, in the New Testament, the term is only mentioned two times and has been transformed into a sense of awe that is joyful rather than horrified. It is the gift of fear that gives us an unmistakable and irrefutable sense of God’s closeness and his ultimate victory over all evil in the world.

The gift of fear of the Lord gives us a greater sense of the greatness of God that should spark in our hearts a sense of amazement and awe that could bring us down to our knees. If we abandon astonishment we are left with a mediocre piousness.

To St. Bonaventure fear of the Lord was “the most beautiful tree planted in the heart of a holy man which God waters continuously”  [II.6].  This “most beautiful tree” bears the precious fruit of love and reverence for God. Fear of the Lord for St. Bonaventure was the sort of trembling before experiences of God’s majesty that we hear perfectly encapsulated in the hymn:

Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
And with fear and trembling stand;
Ponder nothing earthly minded,
For with blessing in His hand,
Christ our God to earth descendeth
Our full homage to demand.

The fear that St. Bonaventure had in mind is sort of a continuum that spans a certain range—depending upon one’s perfection in the life of grace—from “servile fear” to “filial fear” to a fear cast out by love which has taken over one’s whole heart (cf. 1 John 4:17-18).

Journey with the Holy Spirit: The Gift of Piety

Published on by Sr. Kathryn J Hermes, FSPLeave a comment

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-ppfnx-b6f752

We are starting this week a journey with the Holy Spirit through a contemplation of his seven gifts.

Today we are meditating on the gift of piety. I sat down for a conversation with Jeannette de Beauvoir and talked about what the gift of piety is, how it helps us grow in greater union with God, how it blesses our life, and how to prepare for this gift of the Holy Spirit.

It is the gift of piety that surprises us with an affection for God as our beloved Father and an absolute child-like love. As we go through the situations of our life that could make us tremble, we walk instead with a filial confidence in the heavenly Father from whom all things come. Jordan Aumann states: “Intimately penetrated with the sentiment of its adoptive divine filiation, the soul abandons itself calmly and confidently to the heavenly Father. it is not preoccupied with any care, and nothing is capable of disturbing its unalterable peace, even for an instant. The souls asks nothing and rejects nothing. It is not concerned about health or sickness, a long life or a short life, consolations or aridity, persecution or praise, activity or idleness. It is completely submissive to the will of God and seeks only to glorify God with all its powers…. These souls run to God as a child runs to its Father.”

An Invitation: to become a part of my HeartWork community!

Welcome to the HeartWork Community.

A blend of spiritual guidance, mentorship, and counselling, the HeartWork community is a place where you can ask the hard questions and find a path to a life that is free, fulfilling and fruitful.

Sometimes we can’t touch the sunrise within us because we are numb from the effort to keep pushing through the wounding of present or past situations and events in our life. But at a certain point, we can’t ignore our heart’s desire for more.

What is HeartWork
Here at the HeartWork Community we learn a simple and practical process of watchfulness “at the door of your heart” in the spirit of the Eastern Fathers, who teach that the process for healing the heart is through a patient and sacred watchfulness which gives rise to the deep experience of wonder that bubbles up from the heart.

For the past twenty years I’ve written about moving through our brokenness into the light of God. My best-selling title based on my own experience, Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach, has been translated into 12 languages and is in its third edition. My newest book, Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life’s Disappointments, has just been released. For years I’ve offered HeartWork personally on an individual basis to whoever wants to pursue the hard questions in their own life and grow in an integrated spiritual-human formation. As much as that has helped people over the years, I realize that many more people could benefit from HeartWork if there were various ways a person could access the program. I so believe that HeartWork can help people that I want to make it available to as many as possible. That’s why I created the HeartWork community at http://pauline.org/heartwork.

I hope I’ll see you around.

Sign up for my letter (not a newsletter) and investigate my facebook group at: http://touchingthesunrise.com

Interview with Sr Jackie Jean-Marie Gitonga, FSP

Published on by Sr. Kathryn J Hermes, FSPLeave a comment

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-uie7c-b6f728

It is a joy to share with you this week an interview with Sr Jackie Jean-Marie Gitonga who made her perpetual profession in her home town in Kenya. She shares with us the cultural high points and the profoundly personal reflections of professing her vows as a Daughter of St Paul for all her life.

An Invitation: to become a part of my HeartWork community!

Welcome to the HeartWork Community.

A blend of spiritual guidance, mentorship, and counselling, the HeartWork community is a place where you can ask the hard questions and find a path to a life that is free, fulfilling and fruitful.

Sometimes we can’t touch the sunrise within us because we are numb from the effort to keep pushing through the wounding of present or past situations and events in our life. But at a certain point, we can’t ignore our heart’s desire for more.

What is HeartWork
Here at the HeartWork Community we learn a simple and practical process of watchfulness “at the door of your heart” in the spirit of the Eastern Fathers, who teach that the process for healing the heart is through a patient and sacred watchfulness which gives rise to the deep experience of wonder that bubbles up from the heart.

For the past twenty years I’ve written about moving through our brokenness into the light of God. My best-selling title based on my own experience, Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach, has been translated into 12 languages and is in its third edition. My newest book, Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life’s Disappointments, has just been released. For years I’ve offered HeartWork personally on an individual basis to whoever wants to pursue the hard questions in their own life and grow in an integrated spiritual-human formation. As much as that has helped people over the years, I realize that many more people could benefit from HeartWork if there were various ways a person could access the program. I so believe that HeartWork can help people that I want to make it available to as many as possible. That’s why I created the HeartWork community at http://pauline.org/heartwork.

I hope I’ll see you around.

Sign up for my letter (not a newsletter) and investigate my facebook group at: http://touchingthesunrise.com