Let nothing disturb you, Let nothing frighten you, All things are passing away: God never changes. Patience obtains all things. Whoever has God lacks nothing; God alone suffices. ~ St. Teresa of Avila
Art by Anton Raphael Mengs (1769) at Palacio Real de Madrid, Spain
God is the strangest of all lovers; His ways are past explaining. He sets His heart on a soul; He says to Himself, “Here will I rest My love.”
But He does not woo her with flowers or jewels or words that are set to music, no names endearing, no kindled praise His heart’s direction prove.
His jealousy is an infinite thing. He stalks the soul with sorrows; He tramples the bloom; He blots the sun that could make her vision dim.
He robs and breaks and destroys—there is nothing at last but her own shame, her own affliction, and then He comes and there is nothing in the vast world but Him and her love of Him.
Not till the great rebellions die and her will is safe in His hands forever does He open the door of light and His tenderness fall, and then for what is seen in the soul’s virgin places, for what is heard in the heart, there is no speech at all.
God is a strange lover; the story of His love is most surprising. There is no proud queen in her cloth of gold; over and over again there is only, deep in the soul, a poor disheveled woman weeping . . .
for us who have need of a picture and words: the Magdalen.
~ A poem by Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit (Jessica Powers), O.C.D.
The Entrance of the Lord into Jerusalem, art by Yelena Cherkasova
Cycle C: Luke 22: 14 – 23, 56
Today’s gospel is the Passion according to Saint Luke.
One of the priests executed during the Mexican Revolution was Miguel Pro. A famous photograph of his execution shows him with his arms outstretched in the form of a cross. The government took the photograph, mass produced it, and distributed it among the people as a means of both mocking the Church and showing people who was in charge. But within a year, the government banned the photo because it had become an icon of adoration among the Mexican people.
Where does real power reside? Pilate’s statement, “Do you not know that I have the power to release you, and the power to crucify you” is an illusion, for Jesus laid down his life of his own free will. At times, power seems to lie in the hands of the rulers of this world, but in due time, the truth emerges that it lies in the hands of God.
One of the truths embedded in the Passion of Jesus is that the reality of any given situation comes to light in God’s time. What looked like defeat on Good Friday was disclosed as the triumph of God’s love on Easter Sunday. The import of this truth for our lives is that no act of love is ever wasted. Every time we do the will of God, in spite of all appearances, we contribute to the redemption of the world. We may never see the positive impact of our good deeds; nevertheless, if they are acts of Love they are guaranteed by God.
“Love,” writes Evelyn Underhill, “after all, makes the whole difference between an execution and a martyrdom” (55). If the Crucifixion had not been an act of Divine Love, it would have been no more than a routine execution in a remote corner of the Roman Empire.
The same is true with us. Because we are members of the Body of Christ, whenever we unite our actions with Christ upon the Cross, they are redemptive. Love transforms the banal actions of daily life into divine deeds that plant the seeds of God’s transforming love in our world.
~ A Meditation by Marc Foley, O.C.D.
The Sign of the Cross ❤
The lovers of Christ lift out their hands to the great gift of suffering. For how could they seek to be warmed and clothed and delicately fed, to wallow in praise and to drink deep draughts of an underserved affection, have castle for home and a silken couch for bed, when He the worthy went forth, wounded and hated, and grudged of even a place to lay His head?
This is the badge of the friends of the Man of Sorrows: the mark of the cross, faint replica of His, become ubiquitous now; it spreads like a wild blossom on the mountains of time and in each of the crevices. Oh, seek that land where it grows in a rich abundance with its thorny stem and its scent like bitter wine, for wherever Christ walks He casts its seed and He scatters its purple petals. It is the flower of His marked elect, and the fruit it bears is divine.
Choose it, my heart. It is a beautiful sign.
~ A poem by Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit (Jessica Powers), O.C.D.
Michael is a prince of God and page of Mary. He stands beside the tall throne of his Queen. He is the warrior who made peace in heaven and keeps the earth serene.
Then why should I take fright when foes or demons assail me with their treacheries or wrath, when I have knowledge that the Queen’s archangel is keeper of my path?
O heart, believe. The great winged prince of heaven watches the Queen’s child with a warrior’s eye and lifts his flaming spear and comes like lightning at the first cry.
~ A poem by Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit (Jessica Powers), O.C.D.
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“I have great reverence for Saint Michael the Archangel; he had no example to follow in doing the will of God, and yet he fulfilled God’s will faithfully.”
~ St. Faustina Kowalska
“O glorious prince Saint Michael, chief and commander of the heavenly hosts, guardian of souls, vanquisher of rebel spirits, servant in the house of the Divine King and our admirable conductor, you who shine with excellence and superhuman virtue deliver us from all evil, who turn to you with confidence and enable us by your gracious protection to serve God more and more faithfully every day. Amen!”
God is not garden any more, to satiate the sense with the luxuriance of full exotic wilderness. Now multiple is magnified to less. God has become as desert now, a vast unknown Sahara voicing its desert cry. My soul has been arrested by the sound of a divine tremendous loneliness.
I write anathema on pool, on streams of racing water. I bid the shoot, the leaf, the bloom no longer to intrude. Beyond green growth I find this great good, a motionless immensity of oneness. And Him I praise Who lured me to this edge of uncreation where His secrets brood, Who seared the earth that I might hear in silence this infinite outcry of His solitude.
~ A poem by Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit (Jessica Powers), O.C.D.
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“Listen to God’s speech in his wondrous, terrible, gentle, loving, all-embracing silence.” Catherine Doherty
We are besieged with endless babbling, and we become too weary to listen; we need to set aside a time to encounter the Lord. He can be encountered in many places, but one way is to find him in the poustinia (the Russian word for “desert”).
A poustinia can be a room or a small cabin—simple, even stark, so that nothing takes away from meeting God there. It has plain walls, a crucifix without a corpus, a table, a chair, a Bible, paper and pen, a loaf of bread and a thermos of coffee or tea, or simply water. The bed will be hard, for anyone who wants to follow Christ into the desert needs to do some penance; prayer and penance are two arms one simultaneously lifts up to Christ.
The poustinia is a place of solitude and peace, exterior and also interior. Everything needs to “quiet down”: the wings of the intellect are folded so that speculation and intellectual evaluation are quiescent. The head enters the heart, and both are silent.
The Bible is the only book found in the poustinia. The Scriptures become a million love letters from God, to be savored and meditated upon, absorbed so that you almost become one with those eternal, fiery, yet gentle words. Reading Scripture is a conversation with God.
When you enter the poustinia, you take humanity with you. You lift everyone before God, with their pain, sorrows, joy. The poustinik walks immersed in the silence of God. Our life of service and love to our fellow men is simply the echo of this silence, this solitude.
Then your own heart becomes a poustinia. You are there when you are travelling the subway and hanging onto a strap with your arms full. You go to a dance and you are in a poustinia. You play cards, wash dishes, you talk to people. That does not interfere with your poustinia, because the poustinia is the secret place where the Lover meets his beloved. God meets man!
~ A Reflection by Catherine de Hueck Doherty
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Counsel for Silence
Go without ceremony of departure and shade no subtlest word with your farewell. Let the air speak the mystery of your absence, and the discerning have their minor feast on savory possible or probable. Seeing the body present, they will wonder where went the secret soul, by then secure out past your grief beside some torrent’s pure refreshment. Do not wait to copy down the name, much less the address, of who might need you. Here you are pilgrim with no ties of earth. Walk out alone and make the never-told your healing distance and your anchorhold. And let the ravens feed you.
~ A poem by Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit (Jessica Powers), O.C.D.
How can you define prayer, except by saying it is love? It is love expressed in speech, and love expressed in silence. To put it another way, prayer is the meeting of two loves: the love of God for man, and that of man for his God.
~ By Catherine de Hueck Doherty
“We ourselves have known and put our faith in God’s love towards ourselves. God is love and anyone who lives in love lives in God, and God in him.” ~ 1 John 4:16
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Prayer: A Progression
You came by night, harsh with the need of grace, into the dubious presence of your Maker. You combed a small and pre-elected acre for some bright word of Him, or any trace. Past the great judgment growths of thistle and thorn and past the thicket of self you bore your yearning till lo, you saw a pure white blossom burning in glimmer, then, light, then unimpeded more!
Now the flower God-is-Love gives ceaseless glow; now all your thoughts feast on its mystery, but when love mounts through knowledge and goes free, then will the sated thinker arise and go and brave the deserts of the soul to give the flower he found to the contemplative.
~ A poem by Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit (Jessica Powers) O.C.D.
