What are we waiting for

1.   Meditation

https://youtu.be/uxjh2V1zsrA?si=meA2ZqqRwPLjjaxl

2.  Song

https://youtu.be/gXbS-SDHiTs?si=sjjYUqdo-8GUKGEH

3.  NARRATIVE

Fourth Sunday of Advent

Father Richard Rohr describes how Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) shaped Christianity’s celebration of Christmas.

In the first 1200 years of Christianity, the most prominent feast was Easter, the celebration of Christ’s resurrection. Around 1200, Francis of Assisi entered the scene, and he felt we didn’t need to wait for God to love us through the cross and resurrection. He believed God loved us from the very beginning and showed this love by becoming incarnate in Jesus. He popularized what we take for granted today, the great Christian feast of Christmas. But Christmas only started being popular in the 13th century.

The main point I want to make is the switch in theological emphasis that took place. The Franciscans realized that if God had become flesh and taken on materiality, physicality, and humanity, then the problem of our unworthiness was solved from the very beginning! God “saved” us by becoming one of us!

Franciscans fasted a lot in those days, as many Christians did, and Francis went so wild over Christmas that he said, “On Christmas Day, I want even the walls to eat meat!” [1] He said that every tree should be decorated with lights to show that that is its true nature. That’s what Christians around the world still do eight hundred years later.

But remember, when we speak of Advent or waiting and preparing for Christmas, we’re not simply waiting for the little baby Jesus to be born. That already happened two thousand years ago. We’re forever welcoming the Universal Christ, the Cosmic Christ, the Christ that is forever being born in the human soul and into history.

Franciscan sister and theologian Ilia Delio invites us to consider Advent as a time to wake up to God’s incarnate presence:

The word Advent comes from the Latin adventus meaning arrival, “coming.” . . .

[But] if God has already come to us, what are we waiting for? If God has already become incarnate in Jesus what are we waiting for? And I think that’s a really interesting question. . . .

We’re called to awaken to what’s already in our midst. . . . I think Advent is a coming to a new consciousness of God, you know, already loving us into something new, into something more whole, that we’re not in a sense waiting for what’s not there; we’re in a sense to be attending to what’s already there.

But the other part I think is that we can think of Advent as God waiting for us to wake up! You know, as if we’re asleep in the manger, not Jesus! Jesus is alive in our midst. . . . What if we’re in the manger and God is already awakened in our midst and we’re so fallen asleep, we’re so unconsciously asleep that God is sort of looking for “someone [to] get up and help bring the gifts into the world?” . . .

Let’s awaken to what God is doing in us and what God is seeking to become in us.

References:
[1] Thomas of Celano, The Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul, chapter 151. See Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, vol. 2, The Founder, ed. Regis J. Armstong, J. Wayne Hellman, William J. Short (New City Press: 2000), 374.

Adapted from An Advent Reflection with Father Richard Rohr (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2017) video. https://vimeo.com/246331333

Ilia Delio, “Moving Onwards Forward: An Advent Message from Ilia Delio,” New Creation, November 15, 2018 (Center for Christogenesis: 2018), video.

4.  Prayer 

God of hope, who brought love into this world,
be the love that dwells between us.
God of hope, who brought peace into this world,
be the peace that dwells between us.
God of hope, who brought joy into this world,
be the joy that dwells between us.
God of hope, the rock we stand upon,
be the centre, the focus of our lives
always, and particularly this Advent time.

5.  Meditation

https://youtu.be/OoPuG9Dx8UQ?si=pla0BI4n6B_dF5xp

6.  Song

https://youtu.be/m1LAh--a8e4?si=KorAHr3I6IairCs1

https://youtu.be/p98pggeJRKo?si=tru8a6LEvDKJAlK9

Paula’s Prayer Meeting 12/13/2023

 ttps://youtu.be/SM8rLnfY0mM?si=jJ0Ez7fJ3XbqwYzP

  

 

Beyond the moon and stars, as deep as night,
So great our hunger, Lord, to see your light.
The sparrow finds her home beneath your wing,
So may we come to rest where angels sing.

Our eyes have longed to see your loving face,
To live within your courts for all our days.

Your roads have led us, Lord, 'cross desert sand.
We place our hopes and dreams within your hand.

Upon our darkness, Lord, a light has shone.
You came to dwell with us in flesh and bone.

With shining stars at night, and cloud by day,
you brought us here to see your love's display.

When life’s great journey ends, and day is done,
Then may our eyes behold your Holy One.
​​​​​​(Dan Shutte)

 

“The season of Advent means there is something on the horizon the likes of which we have never seen before.  It is not possible to keep it from coming, because it will.  That’s just how Advent works.  What is possible is to not see it, to miss it, to turn just as it brushes past you.  And you begin to grasp what it was you missed, like Moses in the cleft of the rock, watching God’s hindquarters fade in the distance.  So, Stay. Sit. Linger. Tarry. Ponder. Wait.  Behold.  Wonder.  There will be time enough For running.  For rushing.  For worrying.  For pushing.  For now, stay.  Wait.  Something is on the horizon.”​​​​​​​​​From Night Vision – Jan Richardson

Slow Cooker Sloppy Joe

 

Slow Cooker Sloppy Joe

2 lbs. lean ground beef (95% lean)

1 onion, chopped

1 potato peeled and diced

1/4 cup catsup

1 small can tomato sauce

squirt of hot sauce

1 tbsp soy sauce

1/2 bag frozen peas and carrots

Place all the ingredients in the slow cooker.  Cook at low setting for 8 hours or at high for 4 hours.  I cooked mine in an Aroma brand multi-cooker at slow cooker setting for 2 hours.

Note:

Since the beef was lean there was no need to worry of excess oil oozing out.  There was no need to add water either.  

Awe, wonder and love

 

1.  meditation

https://youtu.be/VifGjYnI5L8?si=a3zCgxKglB_yje7J

2.  song

https://youtu.be/Kzq8V7Iil3I?si=owpC1_lhnQ5qqxXC

3.  Narrative

Awe, Wonder, and Love
Thursday, August 13, 2020

A sense of wonder and awe is the foundation of religion. Too often we associate religion with belonging to a church or professing certain beliefs, but the religious instinct is so much broader than that. Sikh activist and human rights lawyer Valarie Kaur teaches us that awe and wonder can make us available to greater depths of compassion, union, and love. 

Wonder is our birthright. It comes easily in childhood—the feeling of watching dust motes dancing in sunlight, or climbing a tree to touch the sky, or falling asleep thinking about where the universe ends. If we are safe and nurtured enough to develop our capacity to wonder, we start to wonder about the people in our lives, too—their thoughts and experiences, their pain and joy, their wants and needs. We begin to sense that they are to themselves as vast and complex as we are to ourselves, their inner world as infinite as our own. In other words, we are seeing them as our equal. We are gaining information about how to love them. Wonder is the wellspring for love. . . .

The call to love beyond our own flesh and blood is ancient. It echoes down to us on the lips of indigenous leaders, spiritual teachers, and social reformers through the centuries. [The founder of Sikhism] Guru Nanak called us to see no stranger, Buddha to practice unending compassion, Abraham to open our tent to all, Jesus to love our neighbors, Muhammad to take in the orphan, [Hindu mystic saint] Mirabai to love without limit. They all expanded the circle of who counts as one of us, and therefore who is worthy of our care and concern. These teachings were rooted in the linguistic, cultural, and spiritual contexts of their time, but they spoke of a common vision of our interconnectedness and interdependence. . . .

What has been an ancient spiritual truth is now increasingly verified by science: We are all indivisibly part of one another. We share a common ancestry with everyone and everything alive on earth. The air we breathe contains atoms that have passed through the lungs of ancestors long dead. Our bodies are composed of the same elements created deep inside the furnaces of long-dead stars. We can look upon the face of anyone or anything around us and say—as a moral declaration and a spiritual, cosmological, and biological fact: You are a part of me I do not yet know. 

But you don’t have to be religious in order to open to wonder. You only have to reclaim a sliver of what you once knew as a child. If you remember how to wonder, then you already have what you need to learn how to love.

Reference:
Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love (One World: 2020), 10–11.

4.  Prayers

God of wonders,

you show us your beauty in all created things.

Help us to pay attention:

to the taste of the ocean on our lips,

the warmth of the sun on our hands,

the song of birds in the morning and evening, the fragrance of the earth after rain,

and to the star that guides us.

Creator God,

we stand in awe of all that you have made.

Fill our hearts with gratitude

for every good gift, great and small, that feeds and forms us,

inviting and enabling us

to become people who are fully alive in your amazing grace.

AMEN.

5.  Meditation

https://youtu.be/LHPRaz5TlQ4?si=r3J00AXvOr0SbV_0

6. Song 

https://youtu.be/BmZTz5H49zw?si=lBQLh9ZyeVLciUwP

Purple Beauties

Purple beauties.  My

tired soul leapt with joy. All will

be well, they whispered. 

Theological Virtue of Hope

 

1.  meditation

https://youtu.be/X8lhX44CPqU?si=9smt9kdpI0hZFJBe

2.  Song

https://youtu.be/9f2FXxDVO6w?si=ad3roly1hJ2b4rY6

3.  Narrative

The Theological Virtue of Hope

Sunday, December 5, 2021

The Theological Virtue of Hope
Sunday, December 5, 2021
Second Sunday of Advent

Mystical hope offers us an experience of trust that God’s presence, love, and mercy is in and all around us, regardless of circumstances or future outcome. Father Richard Rohr writes of such hope through our anticipation of Jesus’ coming during Advent:

“Come, Lord Jesus,” the Advent mantra, means that all of Christian history has to live out of a kind of deliberate emptiness, a kind of chosen non-fulfillment. Perfect fullness is always to come, and we do not need to demand it now. The theological virtue of hope keeps the field of life wide open and especially open to grace and to a future created by God rather than ourselves. This is exactly what it means to be “awake,” as the Gospel urges us! We can also use other a words for Advent: aware, alive, attentive, alert are all appropriate. Advent is, above all else, a call to full consciousness and also a forewarning about the high price of consciousness.

When we demand—or “hope for”—satisfaction from one another, when we demand any completion to history on our terms, when we demand that our anxiety or dissatisfaction be taken away, saying as it were, “Why weren’t you this for me? Why didn’t life do that for me?” we are refusing to say, “Come, Lord Jesus.” We are refusing to hold out for the full picture that is always still being given by God.

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann views hope as trust in what God has done and will do, in spite of evidence to the contrary: 

Hope in gospel faith is not just a vague feeling that things will work out, for it is evident that things will not just work out. Rather, hope is the conviction, against a great deal of data, that God is tenacious and persistent in overcoming the deathliness of the world, that God intends joy and peace. Christians find compelling evidence, in the story of Jesus, that Jesus, with great persistence and great vulnerability, everywhere he went, turned the enmity of society toward a new possibility, turned the sadness of the world toward joy, introduced a new regime where the dead are raised, the lost are found, and the displaced are brought home again. [1]

Richard continues: 

“Come, Lord Jesus” is a leap into the kind of freedom and surrender that is rightly called the virtue of hope. Hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without full closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our satisfaction is now at another level, and our Source is beyond ourselves. We are able to trust that Christ will come again, just as Christ has come into our past, into our private dilemmas, and into our suffering world. Our Christian past then becomes our Christian prologue, and “Come, Lord Jesus” is not a cry of desperation but an assured shout of cosmic hope.

References:
[1] Walter Brueggemann, A Gospel of Hope, compiled by Richard Floyd (Westminster John Knox Press: 2018), 104–105.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Preparing for Christmas: Daily Meditations for Advent(Franciscan Media: 2008), 1–3.

4.  Prayer

Dear God, please give me strength when I am weak, love when I feel forsaken, courage when I am afraid, wisdom when I feel foolish, comfort when I am alone, hope when I feel rejected, and peace when I am in turmoil. 

Amen.

5.  Meditation

https://youtu.be/Unbi1YfQfBU?si=u8i1smfAA8w-HSgu

6.  Song

https://youtu.be/E5ZZNvnMICE?si=c-i3BDMrbLMMo2JM

An Attitude of Gratitude

 1.  Meditation

https://youtu.be/FFnp_YQrDGE?si=bAZqel8FXAMQ68RG

2.  Song

https://youtu.be/UoHrBNTfzIs?si=wk-T6AF_5a_wgKEn

3.  Narrative

An Attitude of Gratitude

Sunday, November 20, 2022

Father Richard Rohr reminds us that when we receive everything as a gift, we can live gratefully, allowing the energies of life and love to flow through us to the benefit of the whole.

In Philippians 4:6–7, Paul sums up an entire theology of prayer practice in very concise form: “Pray with gratitude, and the peace of Christ, which is bigger than knowledge or understanding [that is, making distinctions—Richard], will guard both your mind and your heart in Christ Jesus.” Only a pre-existent attitude of gratitude, a deliberate choice of love over fear, a desire to be positive instead of negative, will allow us to live in the spacious place Paul describes as “the peace of Christ.”

It is important that we ask, seek, and knock to keep ourselves in right relationship with Life Itself. Life is a gift, totally given to us without cost, every day of it, and every part of it. A daily and chosen attitude of gratitude will keep our hands open to expect that life, allow that life, and receive that life at ever-deeper levels of satisfaction—but never to think we deserve it. Those who live with such open and humble hands receive life’s “gifts, full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over into their lap” (Luke 6:38). In my experience, if we are not radically grateful every day, resentment always takes over. Moreover, to ask for “our daily bread” is to recognize that it is already being given. Not to ask is to take our own efforts, needs, and goals—and our selves—far too seriously. Consider if that is not true in your own life.

All the truly great persons I have ever met are characterized by what I would call radical humility and gratitude. They are deeply convinced that they are drawing from another source; they are instruments. Their genius is not their own; it is borrowed. We are moons, not suns, except in our ability to pass on the light. Our life is not our own; yet, at some level, enlightened people know that their life has been given to them as a sacred trust. They live in gratitude and confidence, and they try to let the flow continue through them. They know that “love is repaid by love alone,” as both St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thérèse of Lisieux have said.

In the end, it is not our own doing, or grace would not be grace. It is God’s gift, not a reward for work well done. It is nothing for us to be boastful about. We are God’s work of art, created in Christ Jesus. All we can do is be what God’s Spirit makes us to be, and be thankful to God for the riches God has bestowed on us. Humility, gratitude, and loving service to others are probably the most appropriate responses we can make.

References:

Adapted from Richard Rohr, A Spring within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations(Albuquerque, NM: CAC Publishing, 2016), 281, 134;

Breathing under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2011, 2021), 61; and

Richard Rohr and Joseph Martos, The Great Themes of Scripture: New Testament (Cincinnati, OH: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1988), 96–97.

4.  Prayer

Open the eyes of my soul, to see the gifts you have put before me this day.Give me the grace to recognize each encounter with you.

5.  Meditation 

https://youtu.be/AATOBmQ93JQ?si=PKEm7Ye6aU5l_9_d

6.  Song

https://youtu.be/DIbXS-5gckY?si=-_Ck3EbuFeAII06t