And the Lord replied, “Who, then, is the faithful and prudent steward whom the master will put in charge of his servants to distribute the food allowance at the proper time? Blessed is that servant whom his master on arrival finds doing so. Truly, I say to you, he will put him in charge of all his property. Luke 12:42-44
In the language of his times, Jesus defines the attributes of a good steward: faithfulness, loyalty, dependability, justice, and mercy. We are the stewards of God’s Creation, given into our hands by our loving Creator.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy: We pray to recognize God’s trust invested in us. Through our relationships with all God’s creatures, may we tend faithfully to all that God has loved into being.
Thought: from poet Jane Kenyon
Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.
Music: Elk Creek in the Fall – Kathryn Kaye
As the weather begins to change, I think this is a nice song to use for meditation as it brings us into relationship with natural Creation.
And people were bringing children to him that he might touch them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this he became indignant and said to them, “Let the children come to me; do not prevent them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Amen, I say to you, whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it.” Then he embraced them and blessed them, placing his hands on them. Mark 10:13-16
Jesus once again makes it clear that the Reign of God flows unreservedly to the humble, poor, and childlike among us. The roaring cataract of that Lavish Mercy cannot be prevented by any human interference, control, or ignorance.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy: May we learn to trust God’s love as a child trusts that of a loving parent. Childlike faith is not immature. It has been deepened and seasoned through a life of prayerful service and reverent relationship with God and all Creation.
Poetry: Nada Te Turbe – St. Teresa of Avila
Nada te turbe nada te espante Todo se pasa Dios nose muda. La paciencia todo alcanza. Quien a Dios tiene nada le falta Solo Dios basta.
Let nothing disturb you, nothing frighten you, All things are passing. God never changes. Patience obtains all things. Whoever has God lacks nothing. God is enough.
Music: Nada Te Turbe – A Virtual Choir of Carmelites
Have you ever in your lifetime commanded the morning and shown the dawn its place For taking hold of the ends of the earth, till the wicked are shaken from its surface? The earth is changed as is clay by the seal, and dyed as though it were a garment; But from the wicked the light is withheld, and the arm of pride is shattered. Job 38:1, 12-15
The character of this passage from Job fits so perfectly the spirituality of Francis of Assisi whom we honor today. Francis had a deep veneration for all Creation where he saw God’s beauty and vitality. Francis’s heart anguished for those unable to share in that beauty because of the burden of poverty.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy: May we be inspired by Francis’s example, and Job’s honesty to develop a generous and reverent sharing of Creation’s gifts.
Poetry: Saint Francis and the Sow – Galway Kinnel
The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing; though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing; as Saint Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow, and told her in words and in touch blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow began remembering all down her thick length, from the earthen snout all the way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail, from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine down through the great broken heart to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
Music: St. Francis Preaching to the Birds – Franz Liszt (performed by Brandon Hawksley)
I dwell in the shelter of the Most High. and abide in the shadow of the Holy One. I say, “You are my refuge and stronghold, my God in whom I put my trust. You will deliver me from the snare of the hunter and from all manner of evils. You will cover me with your pinions and hide me in the shadow of your wings. I need not be afraid of any terror of the night, or danger of the day. I will be strong in the face of difficulty and face the trials of my life with calm assurance. I need not fear illness or injury, people who roar like lions or hiss like snakes, You will tread on my fears.I hear you whisper,
“I am bound to you in love, therefore I will help you in times of trouble. I am with you when you call for me. I will dwell in your heart through the years of your life. Psalm 91 (interpreted by Christine Robinson)
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy: We pray with the angels. They are not chubby little cherubs on Christmas cards. Rather, they are magnificent beings with whom we share God’s breath. They worship God with all their vitality, and guide us so that we may someday share in their sacred ministry.
We honor our angels, asking to learn from the purity of their love for God.
Prose: from Thomas Merton
The angels are our brothers/sisters and fellow servants in a world of freedom and of grace. Like us, they are saved by Christ the Lord and King of Angels. With Christ their King and sent by his command, they come to us as invisible messengers of his divine will, as mysterious protectors and friends in the spiritual order. Their presence around us, unimaginable, tender, solicitous, and mighty, terrible as it is gentle, is more and more forgotten while the personal horizon of our spiritual vision shrinks and closes in upon ourselves.
Music: Adoro Te Devote – written by Thomas Aquinas, sung by Juliano Ravanello
What advantage have workers from their toil? I have considered the task that God has appointed for us to be busied about. The Infinite One has made everything appropriate to its time, and has put the timeless into their hearts, without our ever discovering, from beginning to end, the work which God has done. Ecclesiastes 3:9-11
Three thousand years ago, in the Book of Ecclesiastes, a writer called Kohelet meditated on God’s Mercy experienced over a lifetime. Like the writer, we may have done the same thing at various significant times in our lives.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy: We place our lives against the timepiece pictured above. We may pray over a specific time of challenge and grace. Or we may consider the whole pattern of mercy passing slowly yet constantly through our lives, like the ticking of a steadfast clock.
Poetry: XC Domine, refugium – Malcolm Suite In this poem, Guite refers to a poem by Philip Larkin which may be read here: https://allpoetry.com/Cut-Grass
XC Domine, refugium Malcolm Guite
A cosy comforter, a lucky charm? Not with this psalmist, for he praises God From everlasting ages, in his psalm.
A God of refuge –yes – and yet a God Who knows the death that comes before each birth, Who sees each generation die, a God
Before whom all the ages of the earth Are like a passing day, like the cut grass In Larkin’s limpid verse: ‘brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale’. So we and all things pass, And God endures beyond us. Yet he cares For our brief lives, his loving tenderness
Extends to all his creatures, our swift years Are precious in his sight. In Christ he shares Our grief and he will wipe away our tears.
Jesus said to the crowd: “No one who lights a lamp conceals it with a vessel or sets it under a bed; rather, he places it on a lampstand so that those who enter may see the light. For there is nothing hidden that will not become visible, and nothing secret that will not be known and come to light. Take care, then, how you hear. To anyone who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he seems to have will be taken away.” Luke 8:16-18
Jesus indicates that the only way to spread light in the world is to do it together. Some have been given more, some less. But pooling all we have creates a Divine Fire illuminating a shadowy world.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy: We ask for the courage to recognize, claim, and offer our light in a world that longs for it. We ask for the humility and insight to encourage holy fire in others.
Poetry: I Understand This Light to Be My Home – Mai Der Vang, the author of Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), which recounts the Hmong exodus from Laos and the fate of thousands of refugees seeking asylum. The book received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets.
In the awareness, I am brought closer to my being from long before. In my awareness, there is only what I can take from the small spaces of
knowing, an earnest ascendance imparted by way of transmissions from the grid, a voice calls out unbroken below and above as the aura of faraway light.
There is a light that
shimmers so deep it never goes anywhere but to shimmer.
Light assumes its job is to shimmer, and so it is, but more than that, light is ancestral. Light is witness. Light is prehistory,
blueprint of vibrations shifting through all directions of time.
Light as hidden winter that leads to shadow as the growth. Light as first language of source. Light as both terrestrial and celestial. Light of long nights far up
in the sky, I stare to the heavens and weep for the stars whose light I have always known and understood to be my rooting.
I once shared a life with the name of this light as I know it in the stars who gave me
my body. As I know it in the frequencies of my footsteps,
as I hear it in the code of a landscape imprinted on my fingers, as I spirit my eyes open from the inside, as I know and understand this light to be kin.
Consider then the pain of leaving this light, of losing the stars to spaces
no longer lit by its truth. I am shaped in the spaces where the light does not reach, a need for what does not shimmer
but opening to the shadow to receive just as much light. I miss this light always.
Then more light.
Ever more light. Deficit of light to bring more light.
Template of light to bring more love.
That is my one true wish, as I know and understand
this light to be my home, as a knowing up there in the galaxy is me,
and I am up there in my bones built from stars.
Music: Dark Sky Island – Enya – a beautiful song in which she names some of the stars.
If Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some among you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then neither has Christ been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then empty too is our preaching; empty, too, your faith. 1 Corinthians 15:12-14
Paul takes his listeners to the foundation of their faith – the Resurrection. Believing in it, we are freed from our greatest common fear – the fear of Death.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy: In rising from the dead, Jesus changed Darkness to Light. Every dawn transforms our nights to Easter if we allow Christ to rise in us, making all things new.
Poetry: excerpts from The Exultet
O wonder of your humble care for us! O love, O charity beyond all telling, to ransom a slave you gave away your Son! O truly necessary sin of Adam, destroyed completely by the Death of Christ! O happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!
O truly blessed night, worthy alone to know the time and hour when Christ rose from the underworld!
This is the night of which it is written: The night shall be as bright as day, dazzling is the night for me, and full of gladness.
The Lord GOD opens my ear that I may hear; and I have not rebelled, have not turned back. I gave my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who plucked my beard; my face I did not shield from buffets and spitting.
The Lord GOD is my help, therefore I am not disgraced; I have set my face like flint, knowing that I shall not be put to shame. Isaiah 50:5-7
This solemn reading from Isaiah follows appropriately on yesterday’s honoring of the Holy Cross.
Isaiah writes of the prophet who, during the Babylonia Captivity, suffers for his testimony to the Truth.
The passage foretells Jesus’s embrace of his suffering for the sake of our Redemption.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy: As we pray with Isaiah and Jesus, we ask to deeply reverence God’s participation in the suffering of Creation – both in the human and the natural world.
Poetry: The Grandeur of God – Gerard Manley Hopkins
The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs- Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Music: Pie Jesu – Gabriel Fauré
The French creator of the soul-stirring Pie Jesu, Gabriel Fauré, was one of the premier composers and directors of the 19th/20th centuries though, surprisingly, he was not a man of deep faith. Yet, he must have had a mystical soul. The Pie Jesu is the centerpiece of Fauré’s Requiem, which he completed in 1890, and which is often considered his greatest composition. It is undoubtedly imbued with the deepest sentiments of devotion.
A requiem, as such, is a distinct musical genre and a Christian liturgical art form. In essence, it is a small symphony meant to provide deep solace to mourners at the loss of a loved one, although it is rarely played at funerals. Full requiems are generally too long for that! Nonetheless, all the great composers from the 15th century onward created their own requiems.
It is believed that Fauré composed this piece in honor of his own father a few years after the elder Fauré’s death, but the composer never revealed his motive. This Requiem was, fittingly, performed at Fauré’s own funeral in 1924.
Notes on the Requiem itself Fauré’s Requiem has seven sections, and the Pie Jesu (Merciful Jesus) is easily the most beautiful of the seven, but not by much. The Agnus Dei and In Paradisum are exquisite in their own right.
It is interesting to note that Fauré replaced the Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) of traditional requiems with the Pie Jesu, emphasizing mercy rather than judgment, and also anticipating in some way the Divine Mercy devotion of the 20th century.
In the video below, the incomparable lyric soprano, Kathleen Battle, performs her ravishing interpretation of the lovely Pie Jesu.
But Jesus realized the Pharisee’s intentions and said to the man with the withered hand, “Come up and stand before us.” And he rose and stood there. Then Jesus said to them, “I ask you, is it lawful to do good on the sabbath rather than to do evil, to save life rather than to destroy it?” Looking around at them all, he then said to him, “Stretch out your hand.” He did so and his hand was restored. Luke 6:8-10
In this reading, Jesus invites the crippled man to stretch out his hand – to reach beyond himself for the healing grace God offers. Jesus is inviting the Pharisees, who suffer from a crippled faith, to reach out as well. Is Jesus inviting you to stretch?
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy: I have included a picture of my beloved statue of giraffes. When I pray with this carving, no words are necessary. The youngster is stretching up to receive grace, nourishment, and love. For me, it is an image of our stretching up to God and God’s tender leaning toward us.
Poetry: Movement by Denise Levertov
Towards not being anyone else’s center of gravity
A wanting to love: not an other, and fall, but feel within one a flexible steel upright, parallel to the spine but longer, from which to stretch; one’s own grave springboard; the outlying spirit’s vertical trampoline.
So be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma. Ephesians 5:1-2
You are hungry. It is a cold, grey, and rainy day. You walk into your gently lit home needing rest and nourishment. Then, imagine the aroma of freshly baked bread, just lifted from the oven.
Jesus tells us that he is that Bread, given to feed the deep hungers of our soul, and the deep hungers of all Creation.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy: We pray for the graces we need to allow us a rich appreciation of Eucharist:
in our Church and its liturgies
in the world as we share life and ministry
in the reverence for all Creation which becomes complete by our completeness in Christ
Prose: from The Mass on the World – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Since once again, Lord — though this time not in the forests of the Aisne but in the steppes of Asia — I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real itself; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labours and sufferings of the world.
Over there, on the horizon, the sun has just touched with light the outermost fringe of the eastern sky. Once again, beneath this moving sheet of fire, the living surface of the earth wakes and trembles, and once again begins its fearful travail. I will place on my paten, O God, the harvest to be won by this renewal of labour. Into my chalice I shall pour all the sap which is to be pressed out this day from the earth’s fruits.
My paten and my chalice are the depths of a soul laid widely open to all the forces which in a moment will rise up from every corner of the earth and converge upon the Spirit. Grant me the remembrance and the mystic presence of all those whom the light is now awakening to the new day.
Music: Fresh Bread – Chuck Girard
Fresh bread, cool water, come and receive it Fresh bread, cool water, come and receive it Cease from your labors, come now and dine Fresh bread, cool water, come get the oil and wine
In every life there comes a time to dance In every life there comes a time to be still Sometimes you’re given’ out until there’s nothin’ left Then there’s a time that comes to be refreshed and filled
Repeat chorus
Come get the oil of gladness, and the bread of life Come get the living water, be refreshed tonight Come get the fruit of joy, come on and dance in the dirt We’ll get the mud off your shoes and Have you back to the table in time for dessert
Repeat chorus
There’s a season of labor, then a day of rest There’s a time of trial, then you pass the test There’s a time when the wind blows, then a time of peace There’s a time when you have to fast, then a time, a time when you feast
CHORUS
Come get the living water Come get the bread of life Come get the oil of gladness Be refreshed tonight Cease from your labor, come now and dine Fresh bread, cool water, come get the oil and wine
Lavish Mercy 