Tag: Jessica Powers poetry

Find the Silence

My Carmel

 

poustinik2
Photo source unknown

 

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

 

❤

 

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.

 

 

 

 

Meeting

My Carmel

 

praying3

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Little Acts of Love

My Carmel
jesus and the children2
Art source unknown

 

Let’s make a resolution to be gentle with one another, to speak words that build one another’s confidence and trust, to see only what is godly in one another, and to guard our thoughts against accusations that can tear the bleeding body of Jesus Christ. We are restorers of life, first within our own hearts, then this year we each decrease, and that the presence of the humble and majestic Christ grows in each of us through the power of the sanctifying Holy Spirit.

Let us pray for one another and keep the door of our hearts open to receive more and more life. Let no one be afraid, for God is melting, through the power of the Incarnation, the fear that is in all of us.

Nothing can overcome you. Let God dwell in you, move in you. Let him consume you. He alone is trustworthy. He is the only one who will never hurt or disappoint you. Embrace every minute of every day with childlike trust, and pray for faith and more faith.

Life is short. Our most important focus from now until we see God face to face is to be consumed by love in order to love. All things in the world fade, but love is eternal.

~ A Meditation by Catherine De Hueck Doherty

❤

At Sunset

Night after night these sunsets spread their thrill,
confound me in my dreaming for an hour.
I lift my mind in wonder to the power
of color glorified by light until
I know the miracle each western hill
sees when the scattered clouds come into flower—
petals of shining roses and a shower
of flushed gold falls, and my wild heart is still.

Now for a time the soul is visible,
luminous wings lift out on either side
and I am faint who house this beautiful 
gold bird; my clouds of thought are glorified.
Color and light possess me. I am one
with stars and moonlight and the dying sun.

~ A poem by Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit (Jessica Powers), O.C.D.

 

sunset today
Today’s Sunset ~ photo taken by me (no filters)

 

photo sunset 2
Another awesome photo I took of the sunset ❤ The wonders of God!

 

photo sunset 3
“Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”
― C.S. Lewis  (photo taken by me)

 

 

In Too Much Light

My Carmel

 

I recognize in You, O little Jesus, the King of heaven and earth; grant that I may adore You with the faith and love of the Magi.
~ Divine Intimacy

 

three kings with mary and baby jesus
The Magi  (Unknown artist)

 

The Magi had one only star to follow,
a single sanctuary lamp hung low,
gold ornament in the astonished air.
I am confounded in this latter day;
I find stars everywhere.

Rumor locates the presence of a night
out past the loss of perishable sun
where, round midnight, I shall come to see
that all the stars are one.

I long for this night of the onement of the stars
when days of scattered shining are my lot
and my confusion. Yet faith even here
burns her throat dry, cries: on this very spot
of mornings, see, there is not any place
when the sought Word is not.

Under and over, in and out, this morn
flawlessly, purely, wakes the newly born.
Behold, all places which have light in them
truly are Bethlehem.

~ A poem by Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit (Jessica Powers), O.C.D.

 

Wishing you all a very blessed feast of The Epiphany of Our Lord!
❤

 

 

 

The Place of Splendor

My Carmel

garden and child

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Little one, wait.
Let me assure you this is not the way
to gain the terminal of outer day.

Its single gate
lies in your soul, and you must rise and go
by inward passage from what earth you know.

The steps lead down
through valley after valley, far and far
past the five countries where the pleasures are,

and past all known
maps of the mind and every colored chart
and past the final outcry of the heart.

No soul can view
its own geography; love does not live
in places open and informative.

Yet, being true,
it grants to each its Raphael across
the mist and night through unknown lands of loss.

Walk till you hear
light told in music that was never heard,
and softness spoken that was not a word.

The soul grows clear
when senses fuse: sight, touch and sound are one
with savor and scent, and all to splendor run.

The smothered roar
of the eternities, their vast unrest
and infinite peace are deep in your own breast.

That light-swept shore
will shame the data of grief upon your scroll.
Child, have none told you? God is in your soul.

~ A poem by Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit (Jessica Powers), O.C.D.

The Hidden Christ

My Carmel
Navidad
The Nativity at my Parish (photo taken by me)

 

I went into the Christmas cave;
there was no Child upon the straw.
The ox and ass were all I saw.

I sought His stable where He gave
His goodness in the guise of bread.
Emptiness came to me instead.

Filled with my Father’s words, I cried
“Where have You hid Yourself?” and all
the living answered to my call.

I found Him (and the world is wide)
dear in His warm ubiquity.
Where heart beat, there was Christ for me.

I went back to the Christmas cave,
glad with the gain of everywhere.
And lo! the blessed Child was there.

Then at His feasting board He gave
embrace. He multiplied His good
and fed in me the multitude.

~ A poem by Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit (Jessica Powers), O.C.D.

❤

Christmas art by vladimir fokanov
Baby Jesus, art by Vladimir Fokanov

 

 

Come Is the Love Song

My Carmel

 

Bethlehem
Bethlehem, art by Dorothea Schmidt

 

Come is the love song of our race and Come
our basic word of individual wooing.
It lifts audacious arms of lowliness
to majesty’s most amiable undoing,
to Godhood fleshed and cradled and made least.
It whispers through closed doors a hurry, hurry
to Tierce and fiery feast.

The liturgy of Advent plucks its bud
from the green shrub of love’s compendium:
O Wisdom, Adonai, Root of Jesse
and sign by which the mouths of kings are dumb,
O Key, O Orient, King and Cornerstone,
O our Emmanuel, come.

And Paschaltide prepares an upper room
where burns the fuller bloom.
Come is the small sweet-smelling crib we carve
from fir and bear across December frost.
It is the shaft of the flame-hungry Church
in  Paschal spring, or the heart’s javelin tossed
privately at the clouds to pierce them through
and drown one in the flood of some amazing
personal Pentecost.

~ A poem by Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit (Jessica Powers), O.C.D.

 

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Wishing all of you a very blessed Christmas Eve!