Category Archives: Reflection

News, Reflection

How Deep Are Your Roots?

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The following spiritual meditation was written by a religious sister who is a member of the Institute on Religious Life.

Dealing with the Storms of Life

 This morning before dawn the heavy rains brought down a large tree on the property near a house where a family―with parents, children and grandparents, are living. It blocked the street and took out power to the surrounding homes and to a nearby school, which registered a 2-hour delay as a result.  By mid morning all was well: the tree was chopped up and moved off the road, the power lines were up, the meter box on the house (which had been torn off during the incident) was re-attached, and power was restored, including to the school.

This is what I know:

– I know that the roots must have not been buried deeply enough to give the tree the foundation it needed, so when the rains came they softened the ground and up came the tree, roots and all.

– I know that all the traffic had to be re-routed and the tree that no one had ever noticed before became a barrier to the journey people needed to make.

– I know that the lack of roots not only disturbed the flow of traffic and made people late for work but also stopped the flow of power to those who were counting on it to get them through the tasks of daily life today: washing up, brewing coffee, shaving, blow-drying hair, putting in the laundry, making toast, checking emails.

– I know that people who took electricity and roads for granted, didn’t take them for granted this morning.

– And I know that some men must have gone to work today only to discover that their socks didn’t match, because they dressed in the dark.

– I know I am very grateful to God for not letting the tree fall on the house, and for not allowing the downed power lines set the house on fire.

– I know that people worked hard to get things cleared and restored so that other people could continue with their day.

– And I know it made me think seriously about my life.

This is what I don’t know:

– I don’t know how deep my roots are.

– I don’t know what kind of storms can soften my ground and cause my foundation to weaken and fail.

– I don’t always know exactly how firm my foundation is to begin with.

– I don’t know what kinds of things suspend the flow of traffic in my soul and reroute the Grace that God sends me.

– I don’t know what I really need to help me carry out the tasks of daily life: fidelity to the Rule, attention to the people whose lives touch mine, fulfillment of responsibilities to those under my care.

– And I don’t know what sorts of things destroy my attachment to my Source.

– I don’t really know the depth of Divine Providence in my life.

Or the importance of silent prayer.

Or my own need for communion with Jesus to get me safely through the day.

Or that little things that I never notice can make me lose the way.

– I don’t know why I take so much for granted in my spiritual life, or why I don’t  know how much I need to be attuned to those things that take out my power.

– I don’t even know what happens when I try to dress my soul in the dark.

So I wonder what you know about your soul.

And what you might not know.

Perhaps, like me, a little storm now and then might help you draw closer to the things that matter, the One who really matters.

Perhaps a dark hour might bring great light to your soul.

That is my prayer for you: not that you will experience a dark hour, but that the darkness that invariably comes to you, unbidden, unexpected, will be the means of renewing your attachment to Our Lord, deepening your roots, and making you more fully aware of how much you are loved by the One in Whom you are grounded.

May He be your Everything today and tomorrow. And all days.

And may all your storms today be little.

 

News, Reflection, Saints

The Price of Being Loved

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The Head of St. John the Baptist

The price of being loved by the Almighty is high, as also is the price of growing in His love. The more precious the commodity, the higher the price; the most precious possession in the world is the love of God. You don’t get this, I don’t say for nothing or cheaply; you pay, and you pay dearly.

Can we be more specific? What does God expect of us who claim that we love Him as recompense for His prior goodness to us and as the wages, so to speak, to merit an increase of His bounty on our behalf? He finally expects these two things:

  • That we are willing to give up whatever pleasant things He may want us to surrender.
  • That we are willing to take whatever painful things He may want to send us.

Between these two, surrender and suffering, or as I prefer, sacrifice and the cross, lies the whole price range of divine love…. The love of God is paid for as Christ paid for the love of His Father with the hard currency of willing sacrifice and the holy cross.

When I was younger, and I thought, smarter, I didn’t talk quite this way. But experience is a good, though costly, teacher.

—Rev. John A. Hardon, S.J.

Reflection

“With zeal have I been zealous for the Lord, God of hosts.”

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Today, on the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, we reflect on this title of Our Lady as the patroness of the Carmelite order, under which she appeared to St. Simon Stock and presented to him the brown scapular. The Carmelites, who began as a community of hermits on Mount Carmel, Israel, in the 1200s and who point back to Elijah (hermit and prophet) as the first to be fired with the zeal of Mount Carmel, have spread throughout the world and continue to live the charism of seeking a direct and intimate experience of God.

But this kind of intimate union is purely a gift from God, which raises the question, how do we go about seeking it? How do we attain it? The answer is that we simply ready ourselves for it, so that if God seeks to give it, we are there with open hands. St. Teresa of Avila explained our hearts as a garden, which we weed and seek to water, so that if God wishes, He may come into it and take His delight. Carmelites characteristically have a deep-seated desire to be touched by God in this way, and so they accept many purgations and challenges of growing in virtue, that their hearts might become a beautiful and inviting dwelling place for the God Who placed this desire within them.

This union with God is the end goal of all of our lives, although most of us will experience it only in heaven. But St. Teresa tells us that many of us are called to experience it to varying degrees here on earth too. Our Lady of Mount Carmel, pray for us, that we might also desire interior intimacy with God and be willing to do what it takes to be receptive to it!

News, Reflection

God is a Gentleman

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 “God is a gentleman. He will not shout us down.”   Fr. Herbert Schneider, OFM

Then the LORD said, “Go outside and stand on the mountain before the LORD; the LORD will be passing by.”  A strong and heavy wind was  rending the mountains and crushing rocks before the LORD–but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake–but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake there was fire–but the LORD was not in the fire. After the fire there was a tiny whispering sound.  When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak and went and stood at the entrance of the cave.

1 Kings 19:11-13

Reflection

The Age of Martyrs

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Today we celebrate the feast of St. Stephen. Not only was he one of the first deacons in the Church (cf. Acts 6:1-6), but he’s also the first recorded post-Resurrection martyr for Christ.

Sometimes martyrdom may some far removed from our own comfortable existence. To counter such a mindset, we offer the following reflection from Servant of God John A. Hardon, the founder of the Institute on Religious Life, who tells us why the present age is truly the “age of the martyrs.” This is taken from a conference he gave on the Precious Blood of Christ.

We believe that by His death on the cross, Christ merited all the graces we need to reach heaven. He won all the graces necessary for our salvation. He gained all the graces that the human race needs to reach its eternal destiny.

But we also believe that what Christ did by dying for us on the cross requires that we die on our cross by cooperating with the graces that Jesus won for our redemption. He could not have been more clear. He told us, “If you wish to be my disciples, take up your cross and follow me.” We must cooperate with Christ’s grace if we wish to join Him in eternity. He was crucified by shedding His blood. We must be crucified by shedding our blood in witness to our love.

All of this is elementary Christian teaching. The Precious Blood of Christ does indeed provide us with the light and strength we need to reach heaven. But we have to do our part, otherwise Christ’s passion and death on Calvary would have been in vain.

The focus of our conference is on the Precious Blood of Christ in the age of martyrs. What are we saying? We are saying that the present century is the age of martyrs par excellence. Ours is THE (all three letters capitalized) age of martyrs.

No words of mine can do justice to this statement: We are inclined to think that martyrs are those ancient men and women in the first centuries of the Church whom we commemorate by name in the first Eucharistic Prayer, when we say, “We honor the apostles and martyrs,” and then name after the apostles, “Linus, Cletus, Clement, Sixtus, Carnelius, Cyprian, Lawrence, Chrysogonus, John and Paul, Cosmas and Damian.”

Unless we take stock of ourselves, martyrs are not commonly associated with the later history of the Church, and certainly not with our own times. What a miscalculation!

A conservative estimate places the total number of martyrs who died for Christ up to the liberation edict of Constantine in 313 A.D. at around 100,000. We call that period of massive persecution the age of martyrs. Yet, the number of Christians who have died for their faith since 1900 is several million. In the Sudan alone, during the 1950s, over two million Catholics were starved to death by the Muslims because they refused to deny that Mary is the Mother of God since her Son is the Ibn Allah, the Son of God. There have been more Christian martyrs since the turn of the present century than in all of the preceding centuries from Calvary to 1900 put together.

It is no wonder that the Second Vatican Council in its Constitution on the Church went out of its way to identify martyrdom as one of the marks of holiness in our day. The passage deserves to be quoted in full: Continue reading The Age of Martyrs →