Today, for your reflection, a poem I wrote decades go. I offer it today in memory of Judy Ward, RSM who passed away on September 27, 2025. Her life will be celebrated on October 2nd in a Mass of Christian Burialin the chapel at Mt. St. Mary, where Judy attended school, became a Sister of Mercy, and taught for many years.
Judy, a gifted artist, did so much to encourage me and to illustrate and promulgate my work. I will miss her generous kindness and her friendship.
October is a time when nature changes clothes. Leaves, like miniature volcanoes, flare up and die, ashes at the foot of a silent, seemingly immortal tree. Geese, having dawdled all summer in veiled expectation, suddenly leap into the clouds and disappear. These solemn miracles may incline us to consider our own impermanence and the gossamer phenomenon we call life.
Healing
Music: A Playlist of Autumn Music
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?
I hope that, where you live, it is a glorious day – a perfect vestibule to a season of amazing beauty. In the northern hemisphere, Nature prepares to shed the plush accretions of summer in a multi-colored ritual of leave-taking. It is time to return to the essentials – back to the branch, back to the buried root, back to the bare, sturdy reality that will anchor us in eventual winter.
Each day, some green leaf or blade will ignite like a phoenix – a blaze of scarlet or gold, only to extinguish that flame for a long winter’s sleep. Nature knows when things are finished. It knows when it has had enough. It knows its need for a season of emptying, for a clearing of the clutter, for the deep hibernation of its spirit.
But we humans often ignore the need for an “autumning” of our spirits. We try to live every moment in the high energy of summer – producing, moving, anticipating, and stuffing our lives with abundance.
But simplicity, solitude, and clarity are necessary for our spirit to renew itself. Autumn is the perfect time to examine prayerfully the harvest of our lives – reaping the essentials and sifting out the superfluous. In the quiet shade of a rusting tree, we may discover what we truly love, deeply believe, and really need to be fully happy.
Take time on these crystal days to ask yourself what is essential in your life. If something besides them inhibits you, let it go.
Nurture your “essentials” with attention and care. Don’t take them for granted. After the flare of life’s summer has passed, these are the things that will sustain you: a strong faith, a faithful love, and a loving compassion. Tend them in this season of harvest
Music: The Four Seasons: Autumn – Antonio Vivaldi
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?
Annie Dillard is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author who writes soul-stirring narrative non-fiction. Her book, A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, was almost a second Bible for me when I studied literature in college.
One wonderful section has become part of my own philosophy of life. In it, Annie describes an encounter with a weasel. She portrays the experience in intricate and inspiring detail, using it to present her own theories on the value of intense dedication, clarity of purpose, and “the dignity of living without bias or motive.” In other words, she talks about living life openly and purely, of honoring the world around you, and of striving for simplicity.
She recounts the story of a farmer who shot an eagle and found, affixed to its throat, the dried-out skull of a long-dead weasel. This weasel, even as it died, seized the hope of life and fought to hold on to it. The story always makes me consider the question, “What in my life is important enough for me to hold on to it even to the death?” In other words, what are my very deepest values? So often we say we value something but we fail to make the choices it requires. We “value” exercise, but we never take the time to do it. We “value” health, but we continue habits that are not healthy. We “value” life, but we drink and drive, fail to wear our seatbelts and speed.
But like Dillard’s weasel, if we really value something, we sink our teeth into the very heart of it and we don’t let go, no matter what. Those kinds of radical values define who we are in the world. People see through to our hearts. They know if we have sunk our teeth into honesty or insincerity, into compassion or self-interest, into the common good or self-promotion. No matter what we “say”, our true values always show.
Our families, communities, and friends depend on us to be a person with strong values. Every day we are challenged to put these values first in our decisions and our behaviors. It’s not always easy. Sometimes we must be like the weasel clinging to the throat of the eagle. Nevertheless, we are asked to have the same intensity and clarity about our choices as responsible members of the human family.
Test yourself. What choice would you make in the face of the “eagle’s talon”? When people look into your heart, what do they see shining there? With sincere focus and right intention, we can live with purity of heart. Annie Dillard puts it this way: “We could, you know. We can live any way we want. … The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn’t “attack” anything; a weasel lives as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.”
How blessed our lives are when we live in such perfect freedom!
If you would enjoy reading more about Annie’s weasel, here is a short essay she wrote on the subject:
September has barely poked its nose through the door, but already we see signs of Autumn. A slight gold shimmers on the trees. Geese gather in noisy expectation. Early morning sheds its night veil in slower layers of magenta and blue. There have even been a few sweet nights when we can open the windows wide and sleep in the suggestively crisp air. All the signs are there — it is a new season – “The Season of Freshness”.
“Fresh” is a powerful word. Who can resist the crisply-aproned waiter suggesting, “Fresh ground pepper?” Who can ignore the aroma of fresh baked bread? Some of us even remember with appreciation the scent of linens fresh from our mother’s clothesline.
Let this beautiful season remind us that each day the Creator shakes out a fresh beginning for every one of us. With every radiant morning, the slate is clear with mercy. The opportunity to re-create the world awaits us. Our lives, our work, our relationships are the fresh bread of God’s hope for us. Within them, we are invited to reveal the powerful grace which runs just under the visibility of the ordinary. It whispers to us, “You are Beloved, and I want your life to be a fountain of joy.”
September is for fresh beginnings: a sparkling season, an unmarked semester, a turning of the garden, a clean page. It is nature’s way of saying forgiveness is possible, life is resilient, hope is eternal. Imagine September as the white-aproned waiter inviting you to freshness. At the Creator’s table, the tablecloth is clean and the sacred menu is forgiveness, hope, mercy and renewed beginnings. Don’t miss this opportunity to assess what needs refreshment in your life. Feast on September’s graces! They can be life-changing!
Music: September Song – Alexis Ffrench
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?
Today is the 80th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Dona Nobis Pacem – Yo-Yo Ma and Illia Bondarenko
On a hot August 6th over 40 years ago, I sat quietly in the Nevada desert just outside Las Vegas. Most maps call the place the Nevada Test Site. Established as the Atomic Energy Commission’s on-continent proving ground, the Nevada Test Site has seen multiple decades of nuclear weapons testing.
But to the native peoples, the land is known as Newe Sogobia (Earth Mother), or the Western Shoshone homelands.
I had come to the place with over 200 other peace activists to pray for the end of nuclear wars, bombings and weapons proliferation. As part of our prayer, each one of us found a private spot in that massive desert where we could sit alone to meditate. I rested by a low bush to capture its small shady triangle in the dry, threatening heat even of that early morning.
At first, to the unappreciative eye, the desert seems a monochromatic place. The earth, the few stones, the sparse vegetation all appear to wear a beige garment of anonymity – almost as if they are saying, “Don’t see me. Don’t change me by noticing me.” But after many minutes of peeling away the multiple blindfolds we all carry, I became aware of muted majesty breaking from that desert like tender life from an egg.
A tiny hummingbird, the color of slate and sand, hovered inches from my hand. It drew my eyes to another small white object hidden under the lowest branches of the bush. It was a perfectly executed origami crane, no bigger than my thumb. I learned later of the Japanese activists who had preceded us into the desert, and whose custom it was to leave behind these beautiful “peace cranes” as mute reminders of the horrors of Hiroshima and of the hope for universal peace.
Later that evening, thinking about the cranes, I found myself straddling a confusing range of emotions. In the late 40’s and 50’s, I had grown up in a household that despised Japan. On my mother’s birthday in 1945, her 19 year old brother had been killed at Iwo Jima. It was a scar my mother bore the rest of her life.
But as with many scars we have earned or inherited in life, the years had taught me that there is an inner grace to every pain. Holding one of the delicate cranes, I thought about the innumerable Japanese lives – mostly innocent civilians – that had been lost or disfigured on August 6, 1945. I thought about the fact that life is never served by war – whether that war is global, local or personal. War serves only death.
The quest for peace is a complicated and endless pursuit. I ask myself – and each of you – to renew that quest today by harboring peace in our own lives. Refuse to solve conflicts by aggression. Look beyond the battle to the person. Be an agent of mutuality not of domination. Resist the normalization and glorification of violence and war, and defend their victims.
Eighty years after Hiroshima, we still see abominable inhumanity exploding in Gaza, Ukraine, Haiti, Sudan, and the immigrant communities of the Americas. We cannot be silent in the face of what we see. We are called to witness for peace and justice by our words, our attitudes, our votes, and our advocacy.
God knows our world – our streets – need this from us. If we unfold the wings of our own hearts, perhaps the crane of peace can be freed to change the world.
Music: Peace Train – Cat Stevens
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?
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?
There was a quote floating around the internet some time ago. It was a loose translation from the classic poem “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”. The quote, popularized through the film “Unfaithful”, goes like this:
“Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.”
There are so many ways to interpret this quote! We might see it as a cheap excuse to ignore the responsibilities of life and live in a fantasyland (along the lines of that famous song, “Don’t Worry. Be Happy”). We might see the quote as a failure to acknowledge the suffering and difficulty life sometimes brings us. Or we may see it as an invitation to let nothing in life destroy our joy.
How we interpret this saying has a lot to do with our personal definition of the word “happy.” If we think of happiness as freedom from any sorrow, burden, or difficulty, then the quote is unattainable. But if we view happiness as a deep, abiding peace and self-confidence, steadfast in the face of challenge, then the quote can open up a rich world of application.
With this deeper view of what it means to be happy, the quote invites us to live in our “now”. This particular moment is all that we really have. We can no longer influence the past, and the future is beyond our grasp. This moment is where we have the power to create possibility. In the action of this moment, we shape our world. Most of us won’t ever make the newspaper headlines or history books. Simple things – the things we need to pay attention to in our everyday lives – will make our mark on the world.
Each day, there seem to be so many realities asking for our attention. Certainly our families, our work, our communities are all seeking our focus. But other inanimate things call us as well: that undiagnosed knock in our car engine, the leak in the basement, the bad weather forecast, the unpaid bills on the kitchen table. All of these call on our attention, and can block us from living in the moment fully and joyously. But with discipline, it is possible.
We’ve all been around people who live in the deep moment. They pay exquisite attention to us, and to the life we share with all Creation. They seem able to peel away what is unimportant and to re-focus us on the essentials. They don’t do a lot of talking, but they do a lot of quality listening. When they speak, their words plant themselves inside us and create a sheltering shade for our decisions.
How do these “deep moment” people do that? The secret may lie in a few simple intentional choices: • know to whom your life belongs and trust that Creator to sustain you no matter what happens. • build some time – no matter how brief – into each day to acknowledge and connect to that Abiding Presence in your life. • continually choose to see every person and every encounter as an opportunity for grace and possibility.
Living in such a way is simple but it is not easy. It requires the commitment of a spiritual athlete whose goal is to fully engage life. But look at it this way. Wouldn’t it be sad to come to the end of this one precious life and to realize that we had missed the whole point!
Music: Jesu, Joy of Our Desiring – J. S. Bach (New Age version by Lanfranco Perini)
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?
It could have been at the coaxing of the first mild, peaceful spring night. Its soft breezes and lingering sunlight might have redeemed me from the scars of winter.
A nearby high school was holding a dance. The music pulsated throughout the neighborhood like the heartbeat of an excited giant. Any hope of a peaceful evening died with the first note. Yes, I had succumbed to the old person’s complaint that I so derided in my own youth: “They call THAT music?!”
But eventually, I stopped resisting the thrumping bass and let myself imagine the joyful young dancers perfectly liberated within their chosen music.
What a great gift it is to dance, to have reason to dance, to have someone to dance with!
Do you remember the dances of your early years: girls and boys huddled along opposite walls around a vacant dance floor? Remember the furtive glances across that chasm to assess who might be brave enough to enter the music with you? And then somehow, the invitation was given, the possibility embraced, and we gave ourselves to the song.
The music of life is playing all around us. But we may be lingering at the edge of the great song of Creation. Standing in the middle of the dance floor, God looks at each of us and beckons us to step into the melody.
Music: I Hope You Dance – Lee Ann Womack
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?
I know that readers of this blog are people of deep prayer. Your faith, love, and generosity have built my spirit and lifted my heart many times.
On this National Day of Prayer, I encourage us all to focus on our deepest beliefs about what sustains us in life. Ask that Source of Love, Peace, and Wisdom – by whatever Name you give – to heal our broken world and to make us people of truth, generosity, and goodness.
As we pray, remember those who struggle with life, with faith, with hope. Wrap your prayer around their need this day. If you are one who struggles today with these things, let your spirit hand that struggle over to the prayers of those who lift you up and to the Source of Life Who longs to embrace you.
The Creator and Source of Life wants to heal and encourage us all. Today, in a more conscious way, let us seek that healing and encouragement together. In particular, let us pray for our nation and for our world, that we may find healing from the terrible divisions generated among us by political aggression and despotic greed.
Prose: from C.S. Lewis
For many years after my conversion, I never used any ready-made forms except the Lord’s Prayer. In fact, I tried to pray without words at all – not to verbalize the mental acts. Even in praying for others, I believe I tended to avoid their names and substituted mental images of them. I still think that the prayer without words is the best – if one can really achieve it.
Music: The Prayer – Celine Dion, Andrea Bocelli
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?
Tears of the Earth- Michael Hoppè and Tim Whheater
The Buriers of Jesus
In this world, we know much of dying. It is the inverse of our living. It is what we do here, alone, and with each other.
What we do not know is death itself. We think we know, but these are death’s imposters: isolation, self-absorption, dark despair.
The only persons who, living, may have fathomed death were the buriers of Jesus who carried him through space immediately bereft of God. All creation was a tomb, and they within it, tombed.
Those buriers of Christ watched God’s own Body blanch to white, to blue, distancing Itself to pallor on the far horizon that is all lost possibility.
They listened, paralyzed, as Life sucked Breath from the miracle of Christ, in horror at the blasphemy Rejected Gift had turned to.
Left with just the ivory casing of a once warm God, the buriers of Jesus tendered it in perfumed cloths.
The rest of earth was dry, unscented. Herbs and flowers closed against the giving of themselves to air that held the final breath of Christ. They dared not fracture the least of his remains.
Even earth, unbreathing, accepted Christ into her womb, a mother turned within to mourn her own Stillborn Redemption.
No other moment anywhere in time has known a death like that. It was so infinite, so huge it ripples now to every life, a nameless anguish, distancing itself to pallor in the pining soul.
Music: In Paradisum – Michael Hoppé
In paradisum deducant te angeli; in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres, et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem. Chorus angelorum te suscipiat, et cum Lazaro quondam paupere æternam habeas requiem.
May the angels lead you into paradise; may the martyrs receive you at your arrival and lead you to the holy city Jerusalem. May choirs of angels receive you and with Lazarus who once was poor, may you have eternal rest.
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?
Lavish Mercy 