Author: Renee Yann, RSM

Sister Renee Yann, RSM, D.Min, is a writer and speaker on topics of spirituality, mission, and ethical business practice. After twenty years in teaching and social justice ministry, she served for over thirty years in various mission-related roles in Mercy Health System of Southeastern Pennsylvania.

Unless…

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Conversion, Creation, Cross, dying, Eternal Life, Faith, spirituality3 Comments

Feast of Saint Lawrence, Deacon and Martyr
August 10, 2024

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/081024.cfm

Jesus said to his disciples:
“Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies,
it remains just a grain of wheat;
but if it dies, it produces much fruit.
John 12:24

The great paradox of existence is that, in order to live, we must die. It is a truth endemic to all Creation. It is a reality lived out in all relationships.

Jesus cites this universal truth to teach his disciples the key to eternal life. We must die to self to find our life in God.

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy:
We prayerfully reflect on the times when this truth has been evident in our lives. When have we found new life? When have we experienced the freedom to grow? What had to die in us before these graces could transform us?

Poetry: Unless a Grain of Wheat – Malcolm Guite

Oh let me fall as grain to the good earth
And die away from all dry separation,
Die to my sole self, and find new birth
Within that very death, a dark fruition,
Deep in this crowded underground, to learn
The earthy otherness of every other,
To know that nothing is achieved alone
But only where these other fallen gather.

If I bear fruit and break through to bright air,
Then fall upon me with your freeing flail
To shuck this husk and leave me sheer and clear
As heaven-handled Hopkins, that my fall
May be more fruitful and my autumn still
A golden evening where your barns are full.

Music: Unless a Grain of Wheat Shall Fall – Bernadette Farrell

Deny

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Charity, Conversion, Courage, Creation, Discipleship, Eternal Life, Faith, Gospel, spiritualityLeave a comment

Friday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time
August 9, 2024

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/080924.cfm

Jesus said to his disciples,
“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself,
take up his cross, and follow me.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
Matthew 16: 24-25

This passage from Matthew is one of the most astounding challenges Jesus gave his disciples: deny yourself, take up your cross, follow me.

What does it really mean to deny oneself? Does it mean to become a doormat or a Milquetoast? Does it suggest repressing one’s personality or ambitions? To act like a nobody?

Of course not! So many places in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures assure us that we are unique, precious, and beloved of God. God doesn’t want us not to be ourselves because that’s who we were created to be!

I think denying oneself means not getting caught in the mirror of selfishness. Instead we are called to focus on Jesus and his absolute care for all Creation, especially those who are poor, sick, outcast, and troubled. We can’t really do that if we are consumed with self-interest.

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy:
We ask for the grace to be aware, brave, and faithful enough to put the good of others first for the sake of Christ.

Poetry: As the Ruin Falls – C.S. Lewis

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.

I never had a selfless thought since I was born.

I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love --a scholar's parrot may talk Greek--
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.

I see the chasm.
 And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man.
 And now the bridge is breaking.

For this I bless you as the ruin falls.
 The pains
You give me are more precious than all other gains.

Music: Deny Yourself – Paul Melley

Deny yourself.

Take up your cross
.
Despite the pain

Despite the cost.
Leave all behind

and follow me.

Deny yourself,

be free.

For what will it profit to gain the world
and lose your life? 

Those who would save their life will lose it.

What can you give in return for your life?

For those would lose their life will find it.

Deny yourself.

Come, take up your cross and daily follow me 

and you will have rich reward in heaven.

Those who have left their home and family for his sake

inherit one hundred fold,

inherit eternal life.
Deny yourself.

What can you give in return for your life?
For those who would lose their life,

lose their life will find it

Deny yourself

Lord, you reveal the depth 
of your life and your love
in your everlasting covenant.

Strengthen the faith we share,
fill our work with your love,
and bring all of us to grace,
to the grace you promise.



Covenant

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Discipleship, Faith, holiness, Love, spirituality2 Comments

Memorial of Saint Dominic, priest
August 8, 2024

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/080824.cfm

But this is the covenant that I will make 
with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD.
I will place my law within them, and write it upon their hearts; 
I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
No longer will they have need to teach their friends and relatives
how to know the LORD.
All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the LORD, 
for I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sin no more.
Jeremiah 31:33-34

In today’s first reading, Jeremiah’s love song with God continues. He tells the people that God will “marry” their hearts by writing the Divine Design within them, and that all shall be included in that covenant of Infinite Mercy.

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy:
In Jesus Christ, we are living in the fullness of that promise. Even in an apparently contradictory world, our faith impels us to believe, and to live a life which trusts that fulfillment.

Poetry: Draw Near – Scott Cairns

προσέλθετε (Come)

For near is where you’ll meet what you have wandered 
far to find. And near is where you’ll very likely see 
how far the near obtains. In the dark katholikon
the lighted candles lent their gold to give the eye
a more than common sense of what lay flickering
just beyond the ken, and lent the mind a likely
swoon just shy of apprehension. It was then
that time’s neat artifice fell in and made for us
a figure for when time would slip free altogether.
I have no sense of what this means to you, so little
sense of what to make of it myself, save one lit glimpse 
of how we live and move, a more expansive sense in Whom.

Music: Love Overflows – Michael Hoppé

One glass half empty
One glass half full,
Some may be dry now
Mine overflows.
See what you want to.
Each to their own.
My eyes are wide open
And love overflows

In the darkest hours
when you’re alone,
think of me, darling,
And love overflows.
In the darkest hours,
when you’re alone,
think of me, darling,
and love overflows.

Ancient

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn spirituality1 Comment

Wednesday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time
August 7, 2024

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/080724.cfm

As Israel comes forward to be given his rest,
the LORD appears to him from afar:
With age-old love I have loved you;
so I have kept my mercy toward you.
Again I will restore you, and you shall be rebuilt,
O virgin Israel;
Carrying your festive tambourines,
you shall go forth dancing with the merrymakers.
Jeremiah 31:2-4

What joy to realize that we are loved with an age-old love! Even Jeremiah, one of the gloomiest prophets, finds deep joy in that realization!

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy:
We listen to God assuring us of the ageless Divine Love we have been given. How have we known God’s Mercy? How have we been rebuilt? How have our hearts been returned to innocence? How have our spirits danced and delighted in the love God has for us?

Poetry: The Avowal – Denise Levertov 

As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.

Music: This Ancient Love – Carolyn McDade

Glory

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Eternal Life, Faith, holiness, Love, Praise, Prayer, spiritualityLeave a comment

Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord
August 6, 2024

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/080624.cfm

Beloved:
We did not follow cleverly devised myths
when we made known to you
the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,
but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty.
For he received honor and glory from God the Father
when that unique declaration came to him from the majestic glory,
“This is my Son, my beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven
while we were with him on the holy mountain.
Moreover, we possess the prophetic message that is altogether reliable.
You will do well to be attentive to it,
as to a lamp shining in a dark place,
until day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.
2 Peter 1:16-19

This beautiful passage from Peter shines with faith, adoration, and praise. It invites us to let go of our “thinking” about God and, instead, to bask in the Divine Glory of which our faith assures us.

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy:
The Feast of the Transfiguration beckons us to be with God in the way we would be with someone we deeply love – not analyzing the bliss, but resting in it gratefully and contentedly.

Poetry: Transfiguration – Malcolm Guite

For that one moment, ‘in and out of time’,
On that one mountain where all moments meet,
The daily veil that covers the sublime
In darkling glass fell dazzled at his feet.
There were no angels full of eyes and wings
Just living glory full of truth and grace.
The Love that dances at the heart of things
Shone out upon us from a human face
And to that light the light in us leaped up,
We felt it quicken somewhere deep within,
A sudden blaze of long-extinguished hope
Trembled and tingled through the tender skin.
Nor can this blackened sky, this darkened scar
Eclipse that glimpse of how things really are.

Music: Transfiguration – by Wren and Manalo

False

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Conversion, Courage, Eternal Life, Faith, spirituality, Truth2 Comments

Monday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time
August 5, 2024

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/080524.cfm

Remove from me the way of falsehood,
and favor me with your law.
Take not the word of truth from my mouth,
for in your ordinances is my hope.
Psalm 19:29,43

The passage from Jeremiah tells the story of the false prophet Hananiah who offered a counterfeit hope because he did not have a true relationship with God. Jeremiah’s message, which called for sincere repentance, was honest but not popular.

Today’s Psalm 19 is a prayer for the courage to listen to and live in God’s Truth, not to ascribe to a false message just because that is the one we want to hear.

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy:
We pray for the courage to hear God’s Word in the truth of our hearts, a truth created by living a life of prayer, spiritual honesty, repentance, and mercy.

Poetry: Tell All the Truth – Emily Dickinson

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

Music: Great Is Thy Faithfulness – written by Thomas Chisholm (1866–1960)

Bread

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Charity, Discipleship, Eternal Life, Faith, Gospel, Jesus, Love, spirituality2 Comments

Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
August 4, 2024

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/080424.cfm

Then the LORD said to Moses,
“I will now rain down bread from heaven for you.
Each day the people are to go out and gather their daily portion;
thus will I test them,
to see whether they follow my instructions or not.

“I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites.
Tell them: In the evening twilight you shall eat flesh,
and in the morning you shall have your fill of bread,
so that you may know that I, the LORD, am your God.”
Exodus 16:11-12

In both our readings, God recognizes physical hunger and ties it to spiritual strength.

In our Gospel, Jesus makes the connection clear. He tells his followers:

“For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven
and gives life to the world.”

No matter how much we are “fed”, we will never be satisfied until our nurture blesses the rest of the world as well as ourselves.

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy:
We ask to be more aware of, grateful for, and generous with the blessings we have received.

Poetry: Bread – Richard Levine

Each night, in a space he’d make
between waking and purpose,
my grandfather donned his one
suit, in our still dark house, and drove
through Brooklyn’s deserted streets
following trolley tracks to the bakery.
There he’d change into white
linen work clothes and cap,
and in the absence of women,
his hands were both loving, well
into dawn and throughout the day—
kneading, rolling out, shaping
each astonishing moment
of yeasty predictability
in that windowless world lit
by slightly swaying naked bulbs,
where the shadows staggered, woozy
with the aromatic warmth of the work.
Then, the suit and drive, again.
At our table, graced by a loaf
that steamed when we sliced it,
softened the butter and leavened
the very air we’d breathe,
he’d count us blessed.

Music: Bread for the World – Bernadette Farrell

Answer

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Conversion, Courage, Cross, Faith, Jesus, Prayer, Psalms, spirituality3 Comments

Saturday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time
August 3, 2024

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/080324.cfm

In today’s readings, both Jeremiah and John the Baptist encounter persecution. Jeremiah is saved, but John is not. Maybe both of them had questions about how, when they were so dedicated to God, evil yet pursued them. Perhaps they felt they had run into a spiritual wall. Ever felt like that?

Our Responsorial Psalm captures the longing for an answer – an understanding of how and why God works in our lives.

Lord, in your great love,
answer me.

Psalm 69:14

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy:
I think it’s safe to say that we all have questions about life and death, good and evil, grace and darkness, worldly success and spiritual peace, God’s Presence and God’s apparent absence.

Poetry: The Answer – Carl Sandberg

You have spoken the answer.
A child searches far sometimes
Into the red dust
                       On a dark rose leaf
And so you have gone far
                       For the answer is:
                                           Silence.

   In the republic
Of the winking stars
                       and spent cataclysms
Sure we are it is off there the answer is hidden and folded over,
Sleeping in the sun, careless whether it is Sunday or any other
    day of the week,

Knowing silence will bring all one way or another.

Have we not seen
Purple of the pansy
            out of the mulch
            and mold
            crawl
            into a dusk
            of velvet?
            blur of yellow?
Almost we thought from nowhere but it was the silence,
            the future,
            working.

Music: Popule Meus – Motet by Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611)

Ecce lignum crucis:
In quo salus mundi pependit,
Venite, adoremus.

Popule meus, quid feci tibi?
Aut in quo contristavi te?
Responde mihi.

Quia eduxi te de terra Aegypti,
Parasti Crucem Salvatori tuo.

Hagios o Theos. Sanctus Deus.
Hagios Ischyros. Sanctus Fortis.
Hagios Athanatos, eleison himas.
Sanctus Immortalis, miserere nobis.

Quia eduxi te per desertum
Quadraginta annis,
Et manna cibavi te,
Et introduxi te in terram satis bonam,
Parasti Crucem Salvatori tuo.

Hagios o Theos. Sanctus Deus.
Hagios Ischyros. Sanctus Fortis.
Hagios Athanatos, eleison himas.
Sanctus Immortalis, miserere nobis.

Ego propter te flagellavi Aegyptum
Cum primogenitis suis:
Et tu me flagellatum tradidisti.

Popule meus, quid feci tibi?
Aut in quo contristavi te?
Responde mihi.

Ego te eduxi de Aegypto,
Demerso Pharone in mare Rubrum,
Et tu me tradidisti
Principibus sacerdotum.

Popule meus, quid feci tibi?
Aut in quo contristavi te?
Responde mihi.

Ego ante te aperui mare,
Et tu aperuisti lancea latus meum.

Popule meus, quid feci tibi?
Aut in quo contristavi te?
Responde mihi.

Behold the wood of the cross:
On which hung the salvation of the world,
Come, let us adore.

O my people, what have I done to you?
Or wherein have I grieved you?
Answer me.

Because I led you out of the land of Egypt:
You have prepared a Cross for your Saviour.

O Holy God. O Holy God.
O Holy Strong One. O Holy Strong One.
O Holy and Immortal, have mercy upon us.
O Holy and Immortal, have mercy upon us.

Because I led you through the desert,
For forty years,
And fed you with manna,
And brought you into a land exceeding good,
You have prepared a Cross for your Savior.

O Holy God. O Holy God.
O Holy Strong One. O Holy Strong One.
O Holy and Immortal, have mercy upon us.
O Holy and Immortal, have mercy upon us.

For you I scourged Egypt,
And its firstborn,
And you have delivered me to be scourged.

O my people, what have I done to you?
Or wherein have I grieved you?
Answer me.

I brought you out of Egypt,
And sank Pharaoh in the Red Sea,
And you bave delivered Me
To the chief priests.

O my people, what have I done to you?
Or wherein have I grieved you?
Answer me.

I opened the sea before you,
And you have opened my side with a spear.

O my people, what have I done to you?
Or wherein have I grieved you?
Answer me.

Outcast

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn spiritualityLeave a comment

Friday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time
August 2, 2024

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/080224.cfm

Jesus came to his native place and taught the people in their synagogue.
They were astonished and said,
“Where did this man get such wisdom and mighty deeds?
Is he not the carpenter’s son?
Is not his mother named Mary
and his brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas?
Are not his sisters all with us?
Where did this man get all this?”
And they took offense at him.
But Jesus said to them,
“A prophet is not without honor except in his native place
and in his own house.”
And he did not work many mighty deeds there
because of their lack of faith.
Matthew 13:54-58

Today’s readings are painful and sad. Both Jeremiah and Jesus were outcast for trying to inform and help their own people. And the people suffered because of their hardness of heart.

Why do people resist the message of mercy and redemption? Walter Brueggemann says that “a prophet is someone that tries to articulate the world as though God were really active in the world.”

If one’s heart is too hard to trust and respond to God’s activity in the world, the words of the prophets are lost on them.

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy:
We pray that by informing our hearts with the Gospel, we may respond to God’s continuing call for our transformation.

Poetry: The opening lines from “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran

(The Prophet), the chosen and the beloved,
who was a dawn unto his own day,
had waited twelve years in the city of Orphalese
for his ship that was to return and bear him back
to the isle of his birth.
And in the twelfth year, on the seventh day of Ielool,
the month of reaping,
he climbed the hill without the city walls and looked seaward;
and he beheld his ship coming with the mist.
Then the gates of his heart were flung open,
and his joy flew far over the sea.
And he closed his eyes and prayed in the silences of his soul.
But as he descended the hill,
a sadness came upon him, and he thought in his heart:
How shall I go in peace and without sorrow?
Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city.
Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls,
and long were the nights of aloneness;
and who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret?
Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets,
and too many are the children of my longing
that walk naked among these hills,
and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache.
It is not a garment I cast off this day,
but a skin that I tear with my own hands.
Nor is it a thought I leave behind me,
but a heart made sweet with hunger and with thirst.

Yet I cannot tarry longer.
The sea that calls all things unto her calls me,
and I must embark.
For to stay, though the hours burn in the night,
is to freeze and crystallize and be bound in a mould.
Fain would I take with me all that is here. But how shall I?
A voice cannot carry the tongue and the lips that gave it wings.
Alone must it seek the ether.
And alone and without his nest shall the eagle fly across the sun.

Music: Sounds of Silence – Simon and Garfunkel