Category: spirituality

Via, Veritas et Vida

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Discipleship, Eastertide, Faith, Jesus, spirituality, TruthLeave a comment

Friday of the Second Week of Easter
May 3, 2019

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Jn14_6 way truthToday, in Mercy, Jesus clearly tells us who he is for us:

I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.

Jesus is the one, immovable Light in any darkness or confusion that engulfs us. How comforting and centering that thought – if only we can remember it!

Each of us, no doubt, has lost and found our way hundreds of times in our lives.

We have all been tossed back and forth on the half-truths, white lies, and deceptive silences of ourselves and others.

We have walked a razor line along the cliffs of death either of our beloveds or in our own spirits.

If we came through those times, it was because God found us, opened our hearts to the truth, breathed a Divine Recovery into our souls.

We are so often like Philip whose feast with James we celebrate today. Philip lived in the abundance of Christ’s presence. He listened every day to His blessed Word. Yet, after years of being with Jesus, Philip says

“Master, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.”

Jesus sounds a little surprised. He responds to Philip:

“Have I been with you for so long a time
and you still do not know me, Philip?
Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.
How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?
Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?”

God has been with us too from the moment Divine Life was breathed into us. We can completely trust that Presence, that Way, that Truth, that Life.

Such trust can transform our lives!

Music: O Via, Vita, Veritas – (perhaps outdated in tone, but lovely in melody and sentiment ) by Blessed Giacomo Alberione

O VIA, VITA, VERITAS!

O Via, Vita, Veritas, o Jesu!
Lucens per omnes semitas, o Jesu!
Te sequemur, trahe nos / Credulos ac servulos.
Te collaudamus / In Te speramus / Amamus Te / Dulcissime, o Jesu!

In verbo tuo stabimus, o Jesu!
Crucis pugnam pugnabimus, o Jesu!
Dediti Ecclesiæ / Veritatis regiæ.
Te collaudamus / In Te speramus / Amamus Te / Dulcissime, o Jesu!

Our Way, our Truth, our Life divine – O Jesus, our Lord!
On ev’ry path as Light you shine – O Master adored!
Lead us so we shall fulfill,
Through our faith and works, your will.
We praise and bless you, / Our hope confess you!
In love we sing, / Eternal King, / O Master adored! 

Your word we’ll keep with all our might – O Jesus, our Lord!
The battle of the cross we’ll fight – O master adored!
Docile to your Church we’ll be,
By your truths led joyously.
We praise and bless you, / Our hope confess you!
In love we sing, / Eternal King, O Master adored!

Infinite Grace

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Courage, Discipleship, Eastertide, Faith, spirituality2 Comments

Thursday of the Second Week of Easter
May 2, 2019

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Today, in Mercy,  in our reading from Acts, the disciples continue to show immense courage in preaching the Word.  They are bursting with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, soon to be confirmed in them on Pentecost.

Jn3_34

We, too, have these gifts confirmed in us, not only when we receive the sacrament of Confirmation, but each time we open our hearts without reserve to the Holy Spirit and her ensuing abundance:

Wisdom
Understanding
Counsel, or Right Judgment
Fortitude, or Courage
Knowledge
Piety, or Reverence
Fear of the Lord, or Awesome Wonder

Sometimes, we unfortunately forget to call on these infinite gifts as we navigate life’s challenges. It is a blessing to remember that we are not doing this thing called “Life” alone, just as the early disciples were charged by the power of God.

Our Gospel confirms the availability of God’s unbounded Grace to all who believe:

For the one whom God sent speaks the words of God.
He does not ration his gift of the Spirit.
The Father loves the Son and has given everything over to him.
Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life.

Let’s consciously claim that unrationed grace today! Oh, what a difference it might make in our lives!

Music: Mozart: Veni Sancte Spiritus (Latin and English Lyrics below)

Veni sancte Spiritus:
Reple tuorum corda fidelium:
et tui amoris in eis ignem accende.
qui per diversitatem linguarum cunctarum
gentes in unitate fidei congregasti.
Alleluia.

Come Holy Spirit:
fill the hearts of your faithful,
and kindle your love in them.
You have gathered the nations
together in the unity of faith.
Alleluia.

Be Born Again

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Conversion, Discipleship, Eastertide, Eternal Life, Faith, spirituality2 Comments

Monday, April 29, 2019
Memorial of Saint Catherine of Siena, Doctor of the Church

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Jn.3_5JPG

Today, in Mercy, we move out of the intense blessings of Easter’s Octave into a time called “Eastertide”. For the next six weeks, we will continue to pray with Acts and John’s Gospel.

Eastertide is a time of great joy in the Church. This joy takes voice in special prayers used only, or with greater frequency, during this time, for example:

Vidi Aquam

Te Deum

Regina Caeli

and a proliferation of Alleluias

We, as Church, are celebrating our rebirth in Christ. It is a miracle even to have been given the gift of life. But, as Jesus tells Nicodemus in today’s Gospel, it is a gift beyond description to be reborn in the Spirit of God:

What is born of flesh is flesh
and what is born of spirit is spirit.
Do not be amazed that I told you,
“You must be born from above”.

Let’s pray in thanksgiving today for the gift of life for ourselves and all those we love. Let us pray for the continual rebirth of our spirits in the abundant Easter grace of the Risen Christ. (Below the music is a Birthday Prayer that you might save for your own birthday celebration.)

Music: Gradual and Alleluia – Catholic Songs, Gregorian Chant

“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you… (Jeremiah 5:1)

 On this, the day of your birth, God says to you:

Of all the myriad gifts of my creation, this is the day I made you. Rest in that thought. I made you –  For this time in history, to be in the world with these people, to live in this place, to know these times, these cultures, this evolution of my creation.

 On the day I made you, I made thousands of other creatures. Human beings, each reflecting some facet of my infinite image. Beautiful birds, riotous monkeys, infinitesimal ants. My lava broke through earth’s crusts to form new islands. I folded unseen mountains into yet undiscovered gorges, bent rivers into surprise journeys, washed entire beaches onto new shores. I was busy the day I made you. War raged and I welcomed its many victims into heaven. More creatures died on your birthday than were born. More came home to me than went out to begin their journey.

 But you were one who went out. When I opened my hand and breathed your journey into you, I smiled. I saw the wonders that could bless the world because of you. I saw a rainbow of love, generosity, mutuality, happiness, encouragement, and faith gathered like an unhatched egg in your heart. I saw the storms and winds that would release that prism in your soul. I saw it spread across a wide sky because of all the years and experiences that I would give you.

 I saw the hint of sunrise in you. Its name was mercy. It was a gift fired by the energy of My own heart. I looked beyond you to the cold and shadowed world that you would comfort with its light and warmth.

 I was happy on the day I made you. I was filled with hope for the blessing you would be. I am still filled with joy, hope and love for you on this your long-after birthday. You have tried to live my sacred dream for you.

As the sun rises glorious in the eastern sky, I promise you a future full of love.  Notice that the western sky reflects the brilliance of the sunrise, just as all the years now past assure you of my presence at the core of your life. You have been and are infinitely loved. Be love in return.  Your days are replete with mercy. Be mercy in return. Be born again this day!

©Renee Yann, RSM

 

 

Witnesses 2

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Community, Courage, Faith, Love, Mercy, spirituality5 Comments

On Friday night, my religious community shares the joy of celebrating the lives of such witnesses, our Sisters marking 25, 50, 60, 70, 75, 80 and 85 years of faithful, merciful service. I  list their names with two poems I used while praying for them this morning. Please join us in grateful prayer for these dear Sisters today.

25 years
Mary Paula Cancienne

50 years
Anna Salzman

60 years
Kathleen Boyce
Joan Freney
Kathleen Gennett
Janet Henry
Maryann Horan
Marie Bernadette Kinniry
Louise Marie Luby
Eleanor McCann
Maureen Murray
Barbara Ann Newton
Katherine O’Donnell
Anne Quigley
Joan Scary
Margaret Taylor
Anne Woodeshick

70 Years
Joan Donahue
Muriel Kershaw
Miriam Theresa Lavelle

75 Years
Margaret Kelly (RIP last week)
Mary Rita Robinson
Helen Cahill

80 Years
Elaine Buckley

85 Years
Mary Berenice Eltz

Poem 1:  The Neophyte by Alice Meynelle
Picture1( This poem was given to me decades ago by one of our old Sisters.  The poem describes how, at first profession, the young novice – in faith – gives ALL her years to God, even before she lives through them.)

Who knows what days I answer for to-day?
Giving the bud I give the flower. I bow
This yet unfaded and a faded brow;
Bending these knees and feeble knees, I pray.

Thoughts yet unripe in me I bend one way
Give one repose to pain I know not now,
One check to joy that comes, I guess not how.
I dedicate my fields when Spring is grey.

O rash! (I smile) to pledge my hidden wheat.
I fold to-day at altars far apart
Hands trembling with what toils? In their retreat

I seal my love to-be, my folded art.
I light the tapers at my head and feet,
And lay the crucifix on this silent heart.

Poem 2: Silver by Jeannette Encinias

( This beautiful poem makes me think about what God would say to our dear sisters as they are blessed to age into God’s Love over decade upon decade.)

Elaine

“How many years of beauty do I have left?
she asks me.
How many more do you want?
Here. Here is 34. Here is 50.

When you are 80 years old
and your beauty rises in ways
your cells cannot even imagine now
and your wild bones grow luminous and
ripe, having carried the weight
of a passionate life.

When your hair is aflame
with winter
and you have decades of
learning and leaving and loving
sewn into
the corners of your eyes
and the children come
to find their own history
in your face.

When you know what it feels like to fail
ferociously
and have gained the
capacity
to rise and rise and rise again.

When you can make your tea
on a quiet and ridiculously lonely afternoon
and still have a song in your heart
Queen owl wings beating
beneath the cotton of your sweater.
Because your beauty began there
beneath the sweater and the skin,
remember?

This is when I will take you
into my arms and coo
YOU BRAVE AND GLORIOUS THING
you’ve come so far.
I see you.
Your beauty is breathtaking.”

Song: My Tribute – To God Be the Glory

 

Witnesses

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Church, Community, Conversion, Discipleship, Eastertide, Faith, spirituality1 Comment

Easter Saturday, April 27, 2010

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Acts4_20 witness

Today, in Mercy, in our reading from Acts, we see how the courage and inspiration of the disciples amazed to surrounding community.

The disciples had been known as ordinary women and men, but the power of their new-found witness was stunning:

The leaders, elders, and scribes were amazed,
and they recognized them as the companions of Jesus.
Then when they saw the man who had been cured
standing there with them,
they could say nothing in reply.

This powerful witness in the disciples was not a showy, self-promoting swagger. 

Rather, they had been radically transformed by their faith in Jesus Christ. The power poured out of them, like light from a Star.

What would it be like if the witness of our faith were so vibrant that we moved the world to wonder! What if our lives could not help but speak through our actions of mercy, justice, truth and peace?

Music:  I Will Stand as a Witness of Christ
(Please see note below song. Thanks.)

On Friday night, my religious community shares the joy of celebrating the lives of such witnesses, our Sisters marking 25, 50, 60, 70, 75, 80 and 85 years of faithful, merciful service. In an additional post, I will list their names with two poems I used while praying for them this morning.

Please join us in grateful prayer for these dear Sisters today.

God’s Forever Covenant

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Eternal Life, Faith, Jesus, Lent, Mercy, spirituality, Thanksgiving1 Comment

Thursday, April 11, 2019

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Today, in Mercy,  our readings focus on the inviolable power of covenant.  

gn17_Covenant

The word “covenant” is derived from the Latin “convenire ”- to gather, to assemble, to fit.

We get the sense of an artist pulling together the pieces of a mosaic to form a masterpiece. Or we may think of a poet choosing the perfect words to convey feelings otherwise unwordable.

In our first reading, God fashions his covenant by weaving together the family lines descending from Abraham:

I will maintain my covenant with you
and your descendants after you
throughout the ages as an everlasting pact,
to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.

Jesus deepens the Abrahamic promise by revealing that he is the Son of God sent to fulfill the ancient promise:

Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you,
before Abraham came to be, I AM.”

These promises are passed on to us in many ways. Today’s reading might remind us of the role our families have played in transmitting the faith to us. They, together with our early teachers, opened our hearts to the amazing possibilities of grace.

I pray in thanksgiving today for my parents and all the generations who formed them. I pray for the good Sisters who modeled a captivating holiness to me. I pray for my beloved Mercy family as they continue to show me the face of God.

For whom would you offer a grateful prayer today? You might simply say their names in your prayer, or write their names in your own mosaic of thanksgiving. Or just listen to this music and let them bless your heart today.

Music:  By Faith – Keith & Kristyn Getty

I Will Raise Up a Sign

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Discipleship, dying, Faith, Jesus, Lent, spiritualityLeave a comment

Tuesday, April 9, 2019

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Today, in Mercy, there are some common threads running through our readings.

Jn8_28 sign

In the passage from Numbers, we have a restless crowd, confused and hungry, feeling directionless in a vast wilderness. They demand an answer from Moses:

Why have you brought us up from Egypt to die in this desert,
where there is no food or water?
We are disgusted with this wretched food!”

To make things worse, God, annoyed at their complaints, sends a bunch of snakes to hassle them.

In John’s Gospel, a disgruntled gathering of Pharisees pesters Jesus for a resolution to their questions. Even after all Jesus’ signs and preaching, they ask Him, “Who are you?”

In both instances, it is impossible for the questioners to receive the answer they seek because they lack faith.

In both instances, they are told that a sign will be lifted up before them and that then they will understand.

We’re on a life’s journey, at times confused and disgruntled, just like those ancient Hebrews.

We may be locked in faithless expectations of God, just like those debating Pharisees.

In our difficulties and challenges, will we be able to see the sign that God offers us? Not the one we design or demand – but the unexpected one rising up out of the depths of our faith?

Music: By Grace Alone – David Ward

When the Hour Comes…

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Courage, Discipleship, dying, Eternal Life, Faith, Gospel, Jesus, Lent, spirituality, suffering1 Comment

Friday, April 5, 2019

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Today, in Mercy, John let’s us know how difficult things were for Jesus. Even very early in John’s Gospel, doubt, criticism, jealousy, and hatred swirl around Jesus. He realizes that people are trying to kill Him. All this because he does good and preaches love! How can that be?

Jn7_30 hourJPG

Jesus upset the apple cart, and many people didn’t like that. They preferred control over love, familiarity over faith. There were others who wanted a more violent shake-up, a political overthrow rather than a spiritual transformation. Basically, people wanted to remake Jesus’s message in their own design. And we’ve been doing the same thing ever since.

Eventually these opposing forces meet in the contradiction of the Cross – that place where Love seems to lose, and Life seems to die. But when Jesus’s hour comes – that timeless moment when Eternal Love and Life break open in the Resurrection – our faith in Christ will be confirmed.

We pray today for all those experiencing great trauma or testing in their lives. May their faith sustain, restore and surprise them.

We pray for ourselves that, like Jesus, when our “hour comes” we are ready because we have already deepened and steadied our hearts in prayer and fidelity.

Music: I Need Thee Every Hour – Annie Hawks (May 28, 1836 – January 3, 1918), an American poet and Gospel hymnist who wrote a number of hymns with her pastor, Robert Lowry.

In 1872, the hymn by which Hawks is most widely known, “I Need Thee Every Hour”, was written. It is said to have been translated into more foreign languages than any other modern hymn at the time of her death. Hawks stated:— “For myself, the hymn was prophetic rather than expressive of my own experiences, for it was wafted out to the world on the wings of love and joy, instead of under the stress of personal sorrow.”

Be Light!

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Discipleship, Eternal Life, Faith, Gospel, Jesus, Lent, spiritualityLeave a comment

Thursday, April 4, 2019

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Jn5_35 light

Today, in Mercy, the Gospel gives us Jesus claiming his throne. He is setting his disciples straight before he is no longer with them. He drives home each of the pillars of his Messiahship, like so many stakes in the ground:

  • I have testimony greater than John’s.
  • The works that the Father gave me to accomplish,these works that I perform testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me.
  • The Father has testified on my behalf.
  • I came in the name of my Father.

Jesus is saying these things to his persecutors, but he says them for the benefit of his surrounding disciples. He wants them to remember these things to sustain them in the dark times to come.

In this passage, Jesus also pays a glorious compliment to John the Baptist:

He was a burning and shining lamp.

Now Jesus wants his followers, fired by their faith, to burn with an even greater light. He wants us to do the same, to burn with a flame steadied by Christ’s assurances, by the stunning testimony of his Passion, Death and Resurrection.

Music:  But Who May Abide the Day of His Coming – Handel

But who may abide the day of His coming, and who shall stand when He appeareth? For He is like a refiner’s fire.

God Remembers Us

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

Wednesday, April 3, 2019

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Today, in Mercy, we have, from Isaiah, one of most beloved and comforting passages in Scripture:

But Zion said, “The LORD has forsaken me;
my Lord has forgotten me.”
Can a mother forget her infant,
be without tenderness for the child of her womb?
Even should she forget,
I will never forget you.

Isaiah49_15 Mother

Not to forget is to remember. And to “re-member” is to put back together all the pieces that have fallen apart.

Because God “remembers” us at every moment in our lives, we are held together in that Divine Memory through all the exigencies of time. We are held together in the wholeness of our Creation, in the fullness of grace that God imagines for us. Even when we cannot feel or believe it, God continues to dream us into Eternal Life.

Whenever we feel in our hearts a lament like Zion’s

“The Lord has forsaken me…” 

let us place ourselves in the heart of our Mother God Who cradles us with infinite, unconditional affection and tenderness, Who is alway re-membering us.

Music: God Our Mother – The Litugists

This song, though short, is a good one to repeat as a mantra as we pray. Lyrics below

God our Father
Giver of daily bread
Blessing our hands and covering our heads

God our Mother
Leading us into peace
Drawing and comforting all those in need

Hallowed, hallowed be thy name
Hallowed, hallowed be thy name
Hallowed, hallowed be thy name in all the earth

Jesus, brother, guiding our very step
Deliver us and grant places of rest
Jesus, savior, grabbing us from the grave
Cheating the fall and bringing the light of day