Category: Scripture

The Darks and Lights of Scripture

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Faith, Gospel, Jesus, Scripture, spirituality3 Comments

Saturday of the Nineteenth Week in Ordinary Time
August 19, 2023

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/081923.cfm

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we have the last of our readings from the Book of Joshua, writings that tell the story of Israel from the conquest of Canaan to the Babylonian exile. Joshua is a difficult book to read for at least two reasons: it is dull and boring, and it is full of brutality and violence.

Modern scholars tend to agree that the bloody battles described in Joshua never happened and that the Book should be viewed more as legend or myth. So why is it even included in the Bible to which we look for inspiration in building a peaceful and just world? It is hard work to find nuggets of this kind of inspiration in the Book of Joshua! (But there are a few, I must admit. Here is one of my favorites:)

Actually, the Book of Joshua is not alone in the challenges it tosses at its readers.. There are many passages in the Hebrew Scriptures that might cause us to flinch at their tone or violence. They are particularly upsetting when they implicate God as a condoner of such violence.

God’s tone in today’s passage might strike us in this way:

Joshua in turn said to the people,
“You may not be able to serve the LORD, for he is a holy God;
he is a jealous God who will not forgive
your transgressions or your sins.
If, after the good he has done for you,
you forsake the LORD and serve strange gods,
he will do evil to you and destroy you.“

Joshua 24:19-20

When I read that passage I say to myself, “Wait a minute, Joshua!!! That’s not the God I know and love. So what can this passage teach me?”

Feminist theologian Carolyn Sharp writes that Joshua has “important potential to draw contemporary communities of faith into reflection on their own subjectivity, the power dynamics that energize and fracture their common life, and their need for robust and ongoing reformation. Joshua remains a disturbing book, and the first step toward ethical appropriation of its truth is to acknowledge that.”

We may choose to skip over disturbing and confusing passages like some found in Joshua. But the Church includes some of them in the liturgical readings because every scripture passage has something to teach us – just like every person has something to teach us.

From some people, we learn what we want to be like in life. And from others we learn exactly the opposite. So it is with scripture. Reading with a critical eye and a converted heart, we can benefit both from the positive and the negative energy in various Bible passages. And, as Christians, we must read all Scripture in the ultimate light of Jesus Christ and his Gospel.

Of course, as we pray with Scripture, we more readily appropriate those passages that touch our spirits with light and joy. We have such a passage in today’s Gospel:

Children were brought to Jesus
that he might lay his hands on them and pray.
The disciples rebuked them, but Jesus said,
“Let the children come to me, and do not prevent them;
for the Kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”
After he placed his hands on them, he went away.

Matthew 19:13-15

Poetry: God’s Grandeur – 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: Speak, O Lord – Stuart Townend

God’s Mercy Endures Forever

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Faith, Mercy, Psalms, Scripture, spirituality5 Comments

Friday of the Nineteenth Week in Ordinary Time
August 18, 2023

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/081823.cfm

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 136 – a short course in Bible history – some of which we also read in the first reading from Joshua:

Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel:
In times past your fathers, down to Terah,
father of Abraham and Nahor,
dwelt beyond the River and served other gods.
But I brought your father Abraham from the region beyond the River
and led him through the entire land of Canaan.
I made his descendants numerous, and gave him Isaac.
To Isaac I gave Jacob and Esau.
To Esau I assigned the mountain region of Seir in which to settle,
while Jacob and his children went down to Egypt ……

Joshua 24:2-4

Didn’t you love Bible History when you were in school? I remember my little 1950’s McLoughlin Notes and my old Benzinger Bible History book. 

An exciting Bible story was a welcome change to droll history and geography. Sister Stella Mercedes had the great Bible figures pinned over the blackboard, just above the permanent, perfectly painted border which warned me, (fruitlessly🤣), never to lie:

Oh, what a tangled net we weave, when first we practice to deceive.

Psalm 136 could serve as an index for those wonderful Old Testament stories. As Walter Brueggemann notes:

In Psalm 136, the whole history is again recited, punctuated this time with the repeated refrain, “for his steadfast love endures forever.” All of Israel’s history, indeed all of world history, is an arena that exhibits God’s abiding fidelity.

Walter Brueggemann: From Whom No Secrets Are Hid

With this encouragement, today we might reflect on what our own catalogue of God’s fidelity might look like. 

  • How has God’s mercy and love endured in my life? 
  • How has God loved, protected, and delivered me? 
  • How has God deepened in me the call to responsive love?

Poetry: We might like to pray with Rev. Christine Robinson’s prayer “Mercy Forever”:

Give thanks to God, who is good—
whose mercy endures forever.
Whose love expands with the expanding universe–
whose mercy endures forever.
Whose breath gives life to matter–
whose mercy endures forever.
Who animates life with spirit–
whose mercy endures forever.
Who plants a fierce unrest in our hearts–
whose mercy endures forever.
Who bends the universe towards justice–
whose mercy endures forever.
Who holds the whole world, and our hearts–
whose mercy endures forever.
Give thanks to God, who is good—
whose mercy endures forever.

Music: How Deep, How Simple – Kathryn Kaye

Come Away Awhile

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Faith, Prayer, Scripture, spirituality, Truth2 Comments

Memorial of Saint Alphonsus Liguori, Bishop and Doctor of the Church
Tuesday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time
August 1, 2023

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/080123.cfm

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, Moses goes on a rigorous forty day retreat:

So Moses stayed there with the LORD for forty days and forty nights,
without eating any food or drinking any water,
and he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant,
the ten commandments.

Exodus 33:28

The purpose of this intense retreat was for Moses to codify God’s law in his own heart. He is to be a witness and leader for God among the people. It was a law of relationship, written in stone for the people, but written in fire for Moses. If God’s intentions are not embedded in Moses’s own heart, his ministry will fail.

In our Gospel, the disciples go on a kind of retreat too. The crowds have been dismissed, and Jesus’s close friends sit down with him for an in-depth instruction in the meaning of his parables. They want to understand the mind and heart of Christ so that they can pattern their own on his Word.

A good retreat is like a spiritual spa experience. It can provide us with rest, clarity, nourishment, and stabilization. And good retreat direction, either through a spiritual guide or through the discipline of solitude, is invaluable to such a pursuit.

But while we can’t be on a formal retreat every day of our lives, we still need a daily “coming away” with God to center our spirits and to keep alive the holy fire within them.

Today might be a good day to evaluate those processes in our lives. Are they working for us? Or might our prayer and reflection time have become so routine as to lose its snap. Have we let life’s concerns slip into our solitude to the point of no longer hearing God’s whisperings? Or have we even truncated that time to meet those ever-expanding concerns?

We may feel so overwhelmed by life that we think we don’t have time for deep prayer. That’s like saying we don’t have time to breathe! If we don’t make the time for both of them, we will die. It’s that simple.

Sixty years ago, my Novice Director gave me a wonderful book. I return to it frequently to consider the spiritual discipline of my life. Here are two excerpts which seem to have bearing on today’s reflection and might inspire your considerations today:

When silence takes possession of you; when far from the racket of the human highway the sacred fire flames up in the stillness; when peace, which is the tranquillity of order, puts order in your thoughts, feelings, and investigations, you are in the supreme disposition for learning; you can bring your materials together; you can create; you are definitely at your working point; it is not the moment to dwell on wretched trifles, to half live while time runs by, and to sell heaven for nothings.

Retirement (retreat) is the laboratory of the spirit; interior solitude and silence are its two wings. All great works were prepared in the desert, including the redemption of the world

A.D. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

Poetry: The Stolen Child – William Butler Yeats
Using his love for Celtic lore and fantasy, Yeats imagines a return to innocence at the hands of magical creatures, the faeries. With imagery rich in natural wonder, the reader is invited to “come away” from a world impossible to understand, and to be restored in spiritual truth. Sounds like a retreat to me!

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping 
than he can understand.

Music: Inner Peace – Hennie Bekker

Chaos, Prayer, and Mercy

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Faith, Gospel, Scripture, spiritualityLeave a comment

Tuesday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time
July 4, 2023

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/070423.cfm

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we resume our readings from Genesis and Matthew – and they’re packed with action and inspiration!

Sodom and Gomorrha by Henry Osawa Tanner

(Note Lot’s wife left behind in white)

If you’re “of an age” like me, you might remember your old Bible History class and first hearing the story of Lot and his “mortonized” wife.

I spent a lot of my 7-year-old energy wondering what she looked like as a salty pillar. I even imagined how she might have melted in the next rain after the meteor set Sodom on fire.

But most of all, I felt bad for her. I mean, really, one glance backward and ZAP! And by correlation, I felt bad for myself because, even at that young age, I realized that I was quite capable of backward glances once God had spoken. And it scared me.

Was God really like that?!

Looking back on those childhood feelings, I consider how my faith and perception of God have evolved over the course of my now long life. The God of my grade school years was not the God of my late teens and twenties. Nor was that God of my young adulthood the God of my 50s and 60s.

Did God grow and change during those years? Of course not. It was I who deepened, widened, and mellowed in experience and grace.

The stories in Genesis, and throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, were told and interpreted over many centuries before they were ever written down. After being written down, they have continued to be studied and parsed even into our own times.

Just as we grow in the spiritual understanding of our own lives, we mature in our ability to look through the surface of scriptures to their deep and sacred meaning.

As Christians, we must read the ancient scriptures in the light of the Gospel. We have the advantage and responsibility to seek the deep spiritual understanding resident within these stories. Buried in a sometimes bizarre passage is the fundamental truth of God’s abiding Presence, no matter our circumstances.

The particular words used to convey these stories were designed for and by people of a very different culture from ours. Some of the concepts are relayed in a primitive manner that may not speak to a modern reader. But we can’t let ourselves get stuck on those cultural differences — the way I did when I was seven years old.

The story of Abraham, Lot and Lot’s wife is not a news report about some family that avoids a natural disaster save for one disobedient member.

It is instead a parable which invites us to consider God’s persistent desire for our wholeness despite our own resistance to that grace. If we continually harden our spirits to God’s invitation to relationship, it is we, not God, who make the choice to distance ourselves in spiritual exile.

Yet, Genesis tells us that, even if we make that distancing choice, all is not lost. We cannot cause God to disassociate from us, no matter how hard we might try. There is always a path back to the heart of God – even if it leads through a storm of brimstone.

As our Gospel assures us, even in the scariest of storms, our God is with us:

They came and woke him, saying,
“Lord, save us! We are perishing!”
He said to them, “Why are you terrified, O you of little faith?”
Then he got up, rebuked the winds and the sea,
and there was great calm.

Poetry: Lot’s Wife – Anna Akhmatova

And the just man trailed God's shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
"It's not too late, you can still look back
at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."
A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.
Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.

Music: The Love I Have for You , O Lord – sung by James Kilbane

God’s Promises

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Creation, Faith, Scripture, spirituality2 Comments

Monday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time
June 26, 2023

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/062623.cfm

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we begin a pilgrimage with the ancient believers who first received God’s call into a community of faith.

Today’s liturgy initiates a seven-week reading of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible), starting with three weeks of Genesis.

Walter Brueggemann, renowned Hebrew Scriptures scholar, writes that Genesis tells the story of two Divine calls:

  • the call of Creation as God’s handiwork (Genesis 1-11)
  • the call of the faith community as God’s witness (Genesis 12-50)

Gen. 1—11 concerns the affirmation that God calls the world into being to be God’s faithful world.
Gen. 12—50 concerns the affirmation that God calls a special people to be faithfully God’s people.
Genesis is a reflection upon and witness to these two calls. It is concerned with the gifts given in these calls, the demands announced in them, and the various responses evoked by them.

Walter Brueggemann – Genesis: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching

Our three weeks of readings, from Genesis 12 to 50, focus on that second call of the faith community and can offer us graced insights into our life in the Church and in the world.

As Genesis 11 closes, the condition of the world is rather dire. The descendants of Adam and Noah had been wandering around the Middle East, finally trying to settle down in ancient Babylonia. There they decide to build a city and a tower which they think will make them self-sufficient enough to avoid a second flood. God isn’t pleased. God wants them to be faithful and depend on God not themselves.

So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth,
and they stopped building the city.
That is why it was called Babel,
because there the LORD confused the speech of all the world.

Genesis 11:8-9

Then, in Genesis 12 (our reading today), God reaches into the scattered chaos with an astounding promise for two elderly, barren, and probably hopeless people. It is a call to renewed and deeper relationship, a call that God has been offering again and again since the beginning of time:

The LORD said to Abram:
“Go forth from the land of your kinsfolk
and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you.

“I will make of you a great nation,
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
so that you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you
and curse those who curse you.
All the communities of the earth
shall find blessing in you.”

Genesis 12:1-3

In prayer, we can take any scripture passage and separate its wordy threads to find ourselves. Each one of us, at least at some time in our lives, has been Abraham or Sarah – maybe a little bit alone, confused, feeling disconnected from God and neighbor. Or maybe feeling the weight of aging, tangled in familial labyrinths, or wounded from accumulated miscalculations in our life’s wanderings.

In whatever scattered chaos we may find ourselves, today’s first reading tells us to listen. God’s irrevocable promises are encircling and guiding us to renewed stability. Hearing God’s voice, “Abram went as the LORD directed him”. As we begin these weeks with Genesis, we are invited to do the same.

Poetry: from Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers

    I love Abraham, that old weather-beaten
unwavering nomad; when God called to him,
no tender hand wedged time into his stay.
His faith erupted him into a way
far-off and strange.  How many miles are there
from Ur to Haran?  Where does Canaan lie,
or slow mysterious Egypt sit and wait?
How could he think his ancient thigh would bear
nations, or how consent that Isaac die,
with never an outcry or an anguished prayer?
I think, alas, how I manipulate
dates and decisions, pull apart the dark,
dally with doubts here and with counsels there,
take out old maps and stare.
Was there a call at all, my fears remark.
I cry out: Abraham, old nomad you,
are you my father?  Come to me in pity.
Mine is a far and lonely journey too.

Music: The Yearning – Nicholas Gunn

Not Far

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Eternal Life, Faith, Gospel, Scripture, spiritualityLeave a comment

Thursday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time
June 8, 2023

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/060823.cfm

Today in God’s Lavish Mercy, our first reading invites us to a wedding and our Gospel shows us the way to heaven.

The marriage of Tobiah and Sarah is a nail-biter! Seven would-be husbands have already died in the honeymoon chamber! Sarah’s father is so convinced that Tobiah will be the eighth that, after the couple goes to bed, he digs a grave just in case. But Tobiah, like his father Tobit, is a good and just man. His heart is pure. Before they make love, Tobiah and Sarah pray and God hears their prayer, allowing Raphael to dispel the demon that has plagued Sarah’s earlier disastrous marriage attempts.

So what is happening here in terms of scriptural inspiration? Is this just a great beach book for the Jews scattered after the Assyrian captivity? Certainly not. The Book of Tobit offered spiritual stability to the uncertain world of the Jews in exile. In a clever story, the narrator outlines the essential guideposts for the believer to hold fast to their identity and faith – primarily with these concepts:

  • God is in charge and will remain faithful even if we do not. Imagine that!
  • Our faithfulness is demonstrated by religious fidelity, humility, prayer, patience and good works.
  • God’s faithfulness is demonstrated by bringing good even out of chaos and misfortune.

Our modern understandings are not that different from those of Tobit’s ancient author. In some sense, we all live “in exile”, at least from our final heavenly home. And God, of course, is still in charge. But we see God’s power in our lives not as preordained management but rather as a steadfast companionship in our own life’s unfolding drama.

Our life is not a book God has already written. In a mystery we cannot comprehend, our Omnipotent God chooses to live our lives with us, its direction unfolding as we continue to mature in God’s Love.

Our Gospel tells the story of a scribe deepening in that maturing process. He asks Jesus what is most important to live a good life. Jesus says what’s most important is love – love of God and love of neighbor. When the scribe responds in agreement, Jesus tells him that he is not far from the kingdom of God.

Perhaps our prayer today could be this: May deepening Love carry each of us all the way home to God’s heart.

Poetry: Heaven-Haven by Gerard Manley Hopkins

(A nun takes the veil)
I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.

Music: A Walk in Paradise – Darlene Koldenhaven

Don’t Miss Sirach!

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Creation, Faith, Gospel, Jesus, ordinary time, Scripture, spirituality4 Comments

Memorial of St. Justin, Martyr
June 1, 2023

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/060123.cfm

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with one of our last few readings from the Book of Sirach. On Saturday, we will finish this book and, on Monday, move on to the Book of Tobit.

Both Sirach and Tobit are considered deuterocanonical (or “second list”) books of the Bible. That’s a really big word that makes you sound smart but its meaning is simple. The term refers to a group of writings composed sometime in the 300 years before the birth of Christ. The Catholic Church considers them part of the Old Testament. Most Protestant denominations do not.

Therefore, my readers who are not Catholic may be unfamiliar with these books. The Protestant Bible is composed of the protocanonical (or “first list”) of books, the earlier texts which comprised the Hebrew scriptures. Catholic translations of the Bible include both proto and deutero books.

So who cares, you might be saying. Well, I think it’s helpful to realize that the formulation of what comprises the Bible was a fluid process. Jews, Catholics and Protestants mean different things when they say “my Bible”. We share many of the same readings, but may never have heard some others. Sirach and Tobit are good examples of those sometimes missed readings.

And what a shame it would be to miss the wise and lyrical Sirach who was a real poet writing around 200 years before Jesus was born. His work was preserved, popular and shared. Many references in the New Testament indicate that Jesus and the disciples were familiar with Sirach’s work. That’s cool, don’t you think? I like to think of Jesus listening to sacred stories or reading books like Sirach before he went to bed at night.

And maybe Jesus, as we might this morning, walked along the beach or sat by a dawn-lit window praying with these beautiful words:

Now will I recall God’s works;
what I have seen, I will describe.
At God’s word were his works brought into being;
they do his will as he has ordained for them.
As the rising sun is clear to all,
so the glory of the LORD fills all his works;
Yet even God’s holy ones must fail
in recounting the wonders of the LORD,
Though God has given these, his hosts, the strength
to stand firm before his glory.

Sirach 2:15-17

Our Gospel may lead us to pray with Bartimeus, begging for the kind of sight Sirach describes – an inner sight that comes from allowing God to plumb our hearts:

He plumbs the depths and penetrates the heart;
their innermost being he understands.
The Most High possesses all knowledge,
and sees from of old the things that are to come:
He makes known the past and the future,
and reveals the deepest secrets.

Sirach 42:18-19

Poetry: how about if we just enjoy more of Sirach’s elegant poetry

How beautiful are all God's works!
even to the spark and fleeting vision!
The universe lives and abides forever;
to meet each need, each creature is preserved.
All of them differ, one from another,
yet none of them has God made in vain,
For each in turn, as it comes, is good;
can one ever see enough of their splendor?

Music: Across the Universe – John Lennon and the Beatles

This song reminds me that God’s Universe is everlasting. Nothing will change God’s Presence to us. The phrase “Jai Guru Deva” is a Sanskrit phrase which can be translated “Glory to the Shining Remover of Darkness”, reminding us of Bartimeus’s experience of being healed from his blindness.

“Ordinary” Assurance

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Discipleship, Eternal Life, Faith, Scripture, spiritualityLeave a comment

Tuesday of the Eighth Week in Ordinary Time
May 30, 2023

Today’s readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/053023.cfm

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we return to the Ordinary Time of the Church liturgical year. We might picture Ordinary Time as that great cycle of life which carries us through our “ordinary days”, the holy companion that helps us find God in our dailyness.

We left the ordinary cycle way back on February 22nd, when we launched into Lent, Holy Week, and Eastertide. Now we pick up where we left off and, over the next two weeks, will finish the Gospel of Mark and the Book of Tobit which we were reading in February.

How has your life been in the meantime?

As we begin our scriptural prayer today, we might want to list the ups and downs, the ins and outs of the past few months. Have we walked through these round-about days holding fast to the anchor of scriptural prayer? How have we changed, grown or deepened in the process?

I know it has been a time of immense change for me. The “me” who was reading Mark’s Gospel on February 21st was a different “me” from the one who will pick it up today.

Realizing the pattern and constancy of our liturgical cycle can be a stabilizing influence in our spiritual lives. The liturgical year is steadily revolving under the frenzied whirling of the world. The unfolding of the scriptures is constant and true at the still core of our sometimes spiraling lives.

As we left Mark in February, the rich young man had just walked away sad and Jesus was talking about a camel passing through the needle’s eye. The metaphor was meant to teach us how hard it can be to live the Christian life well. In today’s reading, Peter begins to ask how much harder can it get for them because the disciples have already given up everything for Jesus.

But Jesus doesn’t even let Peter finish before assuring him that his life will be blessedly different because of all that he has given over to Christ. It will not be without difficulty, but it will be eternally vital and confirmed in God. As we pray with this holy Gospel – in our ordinary time – may we be blessed with the same assurance.

Peter began to say to Jesus,
‘We have given up everything and followed you.”
Jesus said, “Amen, I say to you,
there is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters
or mother or father or children or lands
for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel
who will not receive a hundred times more now in this present age…
… with persecutions, and eternal life in the age to come.
But many that are first will be last, and the last will be first

Mark 18:28-31

Poetry: initial verses frrom Burnt Norton by T.S. Eliot

Burnt Northon is the first of the Four Quartets, a series of magnifcent (and at times confounding) poems that are well worth contemplating. Below Burnt Norton is a link to the whole work if you are interested.

segment from BURNT NORTON
(No. 1 of ‘Four Quartets’)

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

http://www.davidgorman.com/4quartets/1-norton.htm

Music: Blessed Assurance – written by Fanny J. Crosby, (1820 – 1915), was an American mission worker, poet, lyricist, and composer. She was a prolific hymnist, writing more than 8,000 hymns and gospel songs, with more than 100 million copies printed. She is also known for her teaching and her rescue mission work. By the end of the 19th century, she was a household name. Crosby was known as the “Queen of Gospel Song Writers” and as the “Mother of modern congregational singing in America”, with most American hymnals containing her work.

Alive in the Word!

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Faith, Jesus, Scripture, spiritualityLeave a comment

Saturday of the First Week in Ordinary Time
January 14, 2023

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/011423.cfm

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, our first reading describes the penetrating, all-seeing, all-discerning Word of God.  

heb4_2 word

Reading this, some of us may find it startling to think how well God knows us! The truth is God knows us fully, much better than we know ourselves.  And God loves us fully, again even better than we love ourselves.

The word of God is living and effective,
sharper than any two-edged sword,
penetrating even between soul and spirit,
joints and marrow,
and able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart.
No creature is concealed from him,
but everything is naked and exposed to the eyes of him
to whom we must render an account.

Hebrews 4:12-14

God already knows and understands the secrets we are slow to share, the hurts we have buried, the angers we try to shackle. God knows the fears we will not face, the regrets we cannot abandon, the sadness we cannot forget, the hopes we hesitate to speak.

God knows and loves it all.

Being present to the Word of God can help us learn to love and accept ourselves as God does.  

This Word can come to us in reading and listening.  It can come in images, nature  and silence. God’s Word is not bound by print or sound.  It speaks to us in every circumstance of our lives.

Today, we pray to have a deep love of God’s Word given to us in Scripture, spiritual reading, music, poetry, the beauty of Creation, and the wonder of life.  The Holy Word sees and loves us completely.  In that complete Love, may we come to know ourselves and to be fully ourselves in God’s Presence.

Poetry: The Word of God – George MacDonald
In this rather cryptic poem, I believe MacDonald’s point is this: where the Word of God has not inspired the heart, there is no real life and vigor – either in action (bud) or written word(letter).

Where the bud has never blown
Who for scent is debtor?
Where the spirit rests unknown
Fatal is the letter.
In thee, Jesus, Godhead-stored,
All things we inherit,
For thou art the very Word
And the very Spirit!

Music: Two Elegiac Melodies ~ Edvard Grieg 

Sweet Child, forgive us …

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Conversion, Faith, Scripture, spiritualityLeave a comment

Feast of the Holy Innocents, martyrs
December 28, 2022

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/122822.cfm

Jer 31_15 Ramah

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we are lifted to Light by John’s sacred words in our first reading:

Beloved:
This is the message that we have heard from Jesus Christ
and proclaim to you:
God is light, and in God there is no darkness at all.

1 John 1:5

Simply hearing it, we long to abide in that whole and healing Light.

But then we read our Gospel, among the saddest accounts in all of Scripture – the slaughter of the Holy Innocents. Their needless deaths come at the hands of a power-crazed and fearful man.  So hungry for his own aggrandizement, he tries to assure it by killing a generation of children.

It sounds impossible, doesn’t it, that anyone could be so hardened by evil? It sounds impossible that good people would execute this order of a mad man! It sounds impossible that human beings could be so blind to the sanctity of another’s life!

When Herod realized that he had been deceived by the magi,
he became furious.
He ordered the massacre of all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity
two years old and under,
in accordance with the time he had ascertained from the magi.
Then was fulfilled what had been said through Jeremiah the prophet:
A voice was heard in Ramah,
    sobbing and loud lamentation;
Rachel weeping for her children,
    and she would not be consoled,
    since they were no more.

Dear friends, we must confront our own blindness. We must look into the eyes of our 21st century children – the border children, the children of Ukraine, Russia, Sudan, Haiti, … the children of war, violence, drugs and poverty. We must hear the last cries of the children we fail to protect by adequate gun laws – the children of Columbine, Uvalde, Sandy Hook and on and on….

We must hear the cry of God, their Mother, and choose legislators and leaders who will honor life; who will shape global policies and relationships recognizing the common life we share in God – who will make true pro-life choices regarding gun control, arms sales, and an economy of endless war.

Our attitudes, our advocacy and our votes will either condemn or exonerate us when that Great Light ultimately reveals our hearts. When a society’s children become the victims of its indefensible corruption, we must say “Enough!”

Poetry: Holy Innocents – Christina Rossetti

Sleep, little Baby, sleep;
The holy Angels love thee,
And guard thy bed, and keep
A blessed watch above thee.
No spirit can come near
Nor evil beast to harm thee:
Sleep, Sweet, devoid of fear
Where nothing need alarm thee.

The Love which doth not sleep,
The eternal Arms surround thee:
The Shepherd of the sheep
In perfect love hath found thee.
Sleep through the holy night,
Christ-kept from snare and sorrow,
Until thou wake to light
And love and warmth to-morrow.

Music: A Coventry Carol – sung by Anúna

The “Coventry Carol” is an English Christmas carol dating from the 16th century. The carol was traditionally performed in Coventry in England as part of a mystery play called The Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors. The play depicts the Christmas story from chapter two in the Gospel of Matthew: the carol itself refers to the Massacre of the Innocents, in which Herod ordered all male infants under the age of two in Bethlehem to be killed, and takes the form of a lullaby sung by mothers of the doomed children. (Lyrics below)

Lullay, thou little tiny child
Sleep well, lully, lullay
And smile in dreaming, little one
Sleep well, lully, lullay
Oh sisters two, what may we do
To preserve on this day
This poor youngling for whom we sing
Sleep well, lully, lullay
Farewell, lully, lullay
Herod the king in his raging
Set forth upon this day
By his decree, no life spare thee
All children young to slay
All children young to slay
Then woe is me, poor child, for thee
And ever mourn and say
For thy parting, neither say nor sing
Farewell, lully, lullay
Farewell, lully, lullay
And when the stars fill darkened skies
In their far venture, stay
And smile as dreaming, little one
Farewell, lully, lullay
Dream now, lully, lullay