Month: June 2025

Snowball Man

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Charity, Discipleship, Service, spiritualityLeave a comment
Summer Haze – Andrè Aguado

Friends invited me out to a swanky dinner one night. Every menu item was presented in an elegant and appetizing manner. One offering particularly struck me. To clear the palate, the upscale restaurant offered “shaved ice infused with delicate essence“.

Immediately, my mind returned to a hot summer street in 1950 or so. The relative cool of evening had begun to fall over the broiled city. Families sat out on their steps or lawn chairs to catch whatever breeze might pass through the tight city streets. From the distance, a bicycle bell announced the impending arrival of the “Snowball Man”. He pedaled through the neighborhoods on a crudely cobbled cart, his newly purchased ice block tracing the watermarks of his passage.

Both nickel and dime portions were offered, with complimentary choices of flavoring from the half-dozen bottles which framed the precious ice block. There was no refrigeration. Of necessity, he journeyed quickly and a dawdling kid would be passed over for the next certain one in line.

The Snowball Man carried a transitory treasure which, in time, melted quickly into only memory. Yet it is in that memory where his jingling existence is preserved in a sweet array of colorful flavors.

That night, sixty years later, in a noisy, overpriced restaurant, the memory reminded me that so much of life is fleeting and fragile. Like the vendor’s ice block, our chance to offer sweet refreshment to the world will quickly melt away. Catherine McAuley, the first Sister of Mercy, expressed it this way: “Do all you can for God’s people for time is short.”

Today, when many around you are thirsty and parched, how will you share and flavor the precious refreshment within you?

Music: Time in a Bottle – Jim Croce

As you listen to this beautiful song, think about going through time with God and God’s People.

For Your Reflection:

  • What feelings or reactions do I have after reading this reflection?
  • Do my feelings or reactions remind me of any passage or event in scripture, especially in the life of Christ? 
  • What actions might I take today because of my response to these readings?

Suggested Scripture: Ecclesiastes 3:1-14

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Monkey Bars

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Courage, Faith, Prayer, Psalms, spirituality1 Comment

June 22, 2025

Verde – Guido and Maurizio De Angelis

When I was a little girl, I hated the monkey bars. I knew it was cool to be able to do them — but I wasn’t any good at it! I can remember jumping up to hang on to the first bar, and thinking, “O.K. — this is as far as I can go”! For me, it was really a challenge to loosen the grip on one of those secure, sweaty hands and reach out in both hope and anxiety for the next stabilizing bar.

I remember one particularly challenging day at the playground. It had rained heavily the night before, and the ground under the bars was a muddy mess. Big Jimmy, the neighborhood bully, had challenged me to a monkey bar duel. Within a flash of the challenge, he had powerfully swung his way from one end to the other. He stood egging me on from his place of success.

I tentatively climbed up and hung on the first bar. Painstakingly, I lurched my way to the second. My hands were slippery, nervous pools. As I stretched for the third bar, I felt my grip slipping. I tried to re-grab — but I couldn’t. I hung by the fingernails of one hand over a two-inch muddy pool. There seemed to be no hope!

Suddenly I felt two strong hands around my little waist. They lifted me so that I could regain my grasp and they supported me while I hand-over-handed my way to the end. My Uncle Joe, who had been passing by the playground, saw me struggling and had come to my assistance. Without words, he told Big Jimmy, who was three years my senior, that someday I would catch up to him. But until then, I needed a little help to negotiate some of my challenges.

We’re not little kids anymore, but we can still get unnerved by the demands of life and of the world at large. The once-lithe body that reached for the monkey bars may now struggle to get out of a chair. The “Uncle Joe” saviors may no longer magically appear to support us when we are uncertain. The “Big Jimmy” bullies may seem to have poisoned our political culture with violence and fear. Yes, sometimes growing up and growing old can be worrisome.

No matter how challenging or scary life’s passages, God accompanies and supports us. There is no circumstance so muddy that God will not carry us through. No matter how slippery our grip feels, God’s hands are at the center of our lives, holding us in unassailable grace. We can trust God infinitely more than even our “Uncle Joe”s.

Yes, life can sometimes feel like we are swinging from slippery monkey bars, but by trust and faith, we can invite God’s loving support to surprise and uplift us.

Music: You Raise Me Up – Josh Groban

For Your Reflection

  • What feelings or reactions do I have after reading this reflection?
  • Do my feelings or reactions remind me of any passage or event in scripture, especially in the life of Christ? 
  • What actions might I take today because of my response to these readings?

Suggested Scripture: Psalm 28

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“Siste!” – “Just Stop!”

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn spirituality8 Comments

June 20, 2025

Our joys and sorrows fall like shadows
across the sundial of our lives

It is waning June. Up and down the long valleys of time, Earth moves toward Solstice, a word taken from the Latin “sistere” – to stop, as in “desist”.

In Southern lands, winter begins its slow climb through the cold. In the North, summer rolls lazily through the heat toward autumn respite. Through multiple millennia, Earth has made this resolute journey, assuring us of God’s infinite stability. It is an assurance we sorely need in our current times, so threatened by the destabilizing greed and evil self-interests of immoral leaders and their irresponsible partisans..

About this time ten years ago, our beloved Pope Francis placed this beautiful, magical earth in our hands with the publication of his magnificent encyclical Laudato Si’.

Timothy O’Malley, Director of the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy, says :

The greatest challenge of Laudato Si’
is the invitation it offers
for us to avoid the hopelessness
that too often infects the human condition.
Pope Francis invites us as Catholics to participate
in the re-creation of a culture of love.
This ecological culture, attentive to the whole human family,
offers the potential for not simply the renewal of nature
but of humanity itself.

Attentive to the challenge Francis offered, I hold the Earth this Solstice Morning like a rosary, drawing its broken surface between the fingers of my prayer. Every bead is a country, a culture, a people, a species, an environment – a life – riddled with a corresponding suffering. My fingertips ache with the pain of war, greed, violence, discrimination, and hate weeping from every bead.

We see this hate in attempts:

  • to demonize cultures other than our own
  • to destabilize democracies and militarize nations
  • to erase the people of Gaza
  • to steal Ukraine from its own people
  • to refuse humanitarian aid to struggling nations
  • to assault the Earth for the sole sake of profit
  • to suppress human rights based on uninformed prejudice

This hate is born of the same sin Pope Francis placed squarely before us. It is the sin of believing that we are separate from one another. It is the sin of acting from the false superiority and moral indifference such pretense allows. People who carry this hate to our hearts and homes have found an evil nurture in the diseased moral culture for which we all have some responsibility.

As I pray this morning to be enlightened toward my own response, I ask Earth itself to teach me. I hear the wisdom of Solstice suggest itself to my soul:

“Solstice” = Sol + Sistere: (Sun + Stop)

If the earth did not “stop” each June and each December, the world would careen into a devastation of heat or cold. But, by an exquisite self-awareness, our Earth chooses its perfect balance. She enlists me to do the same.

Might that be enough to continue this journey into the fullness of “Laudato Si” – just to stop those tendencies and choices in my life which place me in domination of any other creature? Might this be enough to confront today’s moral ugliness – just to stop the rhetoric and behaviors which feed separatism and prejudice?

Just to stop. With the Solstice, it is at least enough to try.

Julian Lennon is the son of Beatles great John Lennon.

John Lennon was murdered in 1980.

Summer Nights

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Eternal Life, Faith, healing, Hope, joy, spirituality2 Comments

June 15, 2025

Summer Nights – Tom Barabas

A perfect summer night is a treasure, isn’t it? … the kind you remember from when you were a kid:
• cool enough to play for hours without sweat and exhaustion…
• the long light lingering until almost nine o’clock…
• the jingle of the ice cream truck tantalizing in the distance….

It would have been fine with me if those nights had lasted forever. But like childhood, such summer nights do not last.

The challenge is this: can we retain the spirit of those nights in the heat or chill that follows In the long seasons of our adult responsibilities and choices, can we invoke our free and joyful inner child?

I remember one June Saturday a few years ago. I sat concentrating by my open window as a warm breeze drifted in. The street outside bustled with the sounds of the busy inner city. Inside, my mind bustled with all the work I had to accomplish in the short weekend.

Suddenly, like gentle bells amid the noise, children’s laughter threaded into my seriousness. Their roller skates softly clacked across the hard concrete of my sidewalk and my awareness. I thought to myself, “When was the last time you experienced pure, childlike joy and freedom? — AND what are you going to do about it?”

There are a few tender summer nights left in 2025. Turn the TV off and go out to your patio or front step. Play with your children. Listen for the ice cream truck. Sit on the porch with someone you enjoy and just talk. Or sit alone in the grateful stillness with our Creator Whose best gift to us is joyful freedom – Whose own playful heart created the zebra, the giraffe, the flamingo, the Blue-footed Booby … and, yes, even us 🙂

We know all too well that we were created to work. Let’s remind ourselves that we were also created to play with the simplicity and sincerity of our remembered childhood.

Music: Like a Child

For Your Reflection:

  • What feelings or reactions do I have after reading this reflection?
  • Do my feelings or reactions remind me of any passage or event in scripture, especially in the life of Christ? 
  • What actions might I take today because of my response to these readings?

Suggested Scripture: Psalm 131

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Pimple Balls

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Community, Creation, Faith, friendship, inclusivity, joy, peace, spirituality9 Comments

June 8, 2025

David Lanz – Return to the Heart

The neighborhoods of my youth were safe playgrounds. On a summer morning, a score of sparkling kids would tumble out onto the bricks like polished marbles rolling to their sparsely equipped games. Occasionally, some kid would have a new pimple ball, prompting an hours-long boxball game, guttered corners serving as bases.

When, over the weeks, that ball grew smooth and airless, we cut it in half, grabbed a doctored broomstick, and hit the halfball up over the electric wires fringing our city street. Top one wire, a single; top two, a double. Lose it on the roof and you had to find a four-inch length of hose to replace it. This until the next kid lost a tooth, got a dime from the tooth fairy, and contributed a new ball.

On those afternoons, the surrounding porches and stoops were dotted with grandparents in folding chairs, escaping the swelter of the unairconditioned houses. They served to arbitrate any particularly sticky play, precursors of instant replay. Behind the houses, our mothers held council together over their billowing clotheslines.

By the time our dads came home, carrying their empty black lunch pails, we shiny kids were dusty with city soot. The beach-chaired elders had solved all the problems of world affairs and our moms had rendered the house ready for the daily family dinner liturgy.

These were such simple times, so simple that they may seem even naïve in today’s complex society. But their symbols assure me that, though things change, they remain the same. The shared play, the community of conversation, the neighborly support group, the evening gathering to home – these were the holy anchors that fed our spirits and honed our souls.

The outline of these sacramentals may look different today, but their substance must remain if we are ever to be happy people – people who live in the world as playmates, neighbors, friends, and family. That, dear friends, is what we were created to be.

Music: Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

For Your Reflection:

  • What feelings or reactions do I have after reading this reflection?
  • Do my feelings or reactions remind me of any passage or event in scripture, especially in the life of Christ? 
  • What actions might I take today because of my response to these readings?

Suggested Scripture: Mark 12:28-29

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