Darkness and mystery

1  prayer

A Prayer of Unknowing by Thomas Merton

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that, if I do this, You will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust You always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for You are ever with me, and You will never leave me to face my perils alone. Amen.

– Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, page 79.

2.  Meditation 

 https://youtu.be/x32LraY4XqU?si=hGUDzFwl4rY46M0a

3. Song

https://youtu.be/ph-0y1h7yEM?si=s8_nzzB5hmwhH4bG

4.  Narrative 

Welcome Darkness and Mystery

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Welcome Darkness and Mystery
Wednesday, July 19, 2017

There are commonly two kinds of human beings: there are people who want certitude and there are people who want understanding; and these two often cannot understand one another.

Those who demand certitude out of life will insist on it even if it doesn’t fit the facts. Logic has nothing to do with it. Truth has nothing to do with it. “Don’t bother me with the truth—I’ve already come to my conclusion!” If you need certitude, you will surround yourself with your conclusions.

The very meaning of faith stands in stark contrast to this mind-set. I think Jesus (or the Father or Spirit) is actually dangerous if taken outside of the Trinity. Jesus held separate from the other members of the Trinity implies that faith is a static concept instead of a dynamic and flowing one.

We’ve turned faith into certitude when, in fact, this Trinitarian mystery is whispering quite the opposite: we have to live in exquisite, terrible humility before reality. In this space, God gives us a spirit of questing, a desire for understanding; it seems to me it’s only this ongoing search for understanding that will create compassionate and wise people.

If you think you have a right to certitude, then show me where the Gospel ever promised or offered you that. If God wanted us to have evidence, rational proof, and perfect clarity, the incarnation of Jesus would have been delayed till the invention of audio recorders and video cameras.

Rational certitude is exactly what the Scriptures do not offer us. They offer us something much better and an entirely different way of knowing: an intimate relationship, a dark journey, a path where we must discover for ourselves that grace, love, mercy, and forgiveness are absolutely necessary for survival in an uncertain world. You only need enough clarity and ground to know how to live without certitude! Yes, we really are saved by faith. People who live in this way never stop growing, are not easily defeated, and frankly, are fun to live with.

You can tell mature and authentic faith by people’s ability to deal with darkness, failure, and non-validation of the ego—and by their quiet but confident joy! Infantile religion insists on certainty every step of the way and thus is not very happy.

Gateway to Silence:
Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. —Proverbs 3:5

References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation(Whitaker House: 2016), 100-101; and
Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2009), 120.

5.  Meditation 

https://youtu.be/Ozu4xECuaz8?si=Bob8oHlzIz8q-nbu

6  sharing 

7.  Prayers and intentions 

GOD WILL LEAD US SAFELY INTO AN UNKNOWN FUTURE

Lord, You are sovereign over all the earth. Great are You, Lord! You hung the stars in place. You tell the ocean how far it can come. And You orchestrate our days even when we face an unknown future.

Our future is known by You — You hold our days under Your tender watch-care because of Your great love.

When fear creeps in and threatens to consume me, when despair and confusion raise their ugly heads, I will trust in You. You are my refuge and my strength.

You light my path one step at a time, and even though I want to see my destination clearly You say, Trust Me, My child. I have a future and a hope for you.

Thank You, Lord, for this reminder. Bring my thoughts captive to You as I cling to Your hand, taking one step at a time.

I am comforted when I remember that I don’t need to know what lies ahead in order to be secure. I only need to keep my eyes fixed on You, to guard my heart against the work of the enemy, and You will lead me on — You will even carry me 

8.  Song

https://youtube.com/shorts/-iQTSvMdrck?si=EBfHqdkiO4rUsdYu

paula's prayer meeting november 13, 2024

 in the arms of God

https://youtu.be/DOHCBZBbyjg?si=AWtJ-Lww1Lv5SO5A

BLESSED ARE YOU WHO

BEAR THE LIGHT

                            Jan Richardson

 

Blessed are you

who bear the light

in unbearable times,

who testify

to its endurance

amid the unendurable,

who bear witness

to its persistence

when everything seems

in shadow

and grief.

 

Blessed are you

in whom

the light lives,

in whom

the brightness blazes—

your heart

a chapel,

an altar where

in the deepest night

can be seen

the fire that

shines forth in you

in unaccountable faith,

in stubborn hope,

in love that illumines

every broken thing

it finds.

 

               Be still and know that I am God

                             Be still and know that I am

                                           Be still and know

                                                          Be still

                                                                        Be

 

We are in God.  We are of God

We are living

We are being moved

We are.

 

 

 

 

Enoughness and contentment

 1.  prayer

Dear God, I come before you today seeking your wisdom and guidance on how to find contentment in my life. I know that I have often struggled with wanting more and feeling discontent with my situation.  Help me to trust in your provision and to always be grateful for what I have been given.

2. meditation

https://youtu.be/C8FetUZN5RQ

3.  song

https://youtu.be/4bskcffAavg

4. narrative

Enoughness and Contentment
Tuesday, October 4, 2016
(Feast of St. Francis of Assisi)

We live in a society that places great importance upon external signs of success. We have to assure ourselves and others that we are valuable and important—because we inherently doubt that we are! Thus we are often preoccupied with “one-upping” others. I am afraid that most lose inside of such a “winner-takes-all” society. We have great difficulty finding our inherent value with such a world view. Few have deep conviction about their own soul or the Indwelling Holy Spirit.

People living under capitalism find it almost unnatural to know their own center. Dignity must always be “acquired” and earned. We live in an affluent society that’s always expecting more, wanting more, and believes it even deserves more. But the more we own, ironically enough, the less we enjoy. This is the paradox of materialism. The more we project our soul’s longing onto things, the more things disappoint us. Happiness is an inside job. When we expect to find happiness outside of ourselves, we are always disappointed. We then seek a “higher” or more stimulating experience and the spiral of addiction and consumption continues.

Francis of Assisi, whose feast we celebrate today, experienced radical participation in God’s very life. Such practical knowing of his value and identity allowed Francis to let go of status, privilege, and wealth. Francis knew he was part of God’s plan, connected to creation and other beings, inherently in communion and in love. Francis taught his followers to own nothing so they would not be owned by their possessions.

If you don’t live from within your own center of connection and communion, you’ll go spinning around things. The true goal of all religion is to lead you back to the place where everything is one, to the experience of radical unity with all of humanity, and hence to the experience of unity with God.

When you live in pure consciousness, letting the naked being of all reality touch your own naked being, you experience foundational participation. Out of that plentitude—a sense of satisfaction and inner enoughness, a worldview of abundance—you find it much easier to live simply. You realize you don’t “need” as much. You’ve found your satisfaction at an inner place, at a deeper level inside you. You’re able to draw from this abundance and share it freely with others. And you stop trying to decide who is worthy of it, because you now know that you are not “worthy” either. It is one hundred percent pure gift!

Gateway to Silence:
Live simply so that others may simply live.

References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 1991, 2003), 86-87, 89; and
The Great Chain of Being: Simplifying Our Lives (CAC: 2007), MP3 download.

5.  meditation

https://youtu.be/_zPhlxYANtg

6.  sharing

7.  prayer and intentions

Holy Spirit, 
open my heart
to understand how precious I am to you,
how loved I am by you.
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.
Teach me to respond in gratitude, to grow in gratitude.
Teach me to be generous, as you are generous with me,
and to collaborate with you in serving my sister and my brother
for your greater glory.

8.  song

https://youtu.be/xb48JHSiwBM

The cheerful tindera

 

One of my favorite shopping “spree” while I was in the Philippines this past July happened on my way to Mass in front of San Antonio church. I had a few pesos with me and I spent almost all of them on goodies being sold by this tindera or street vendor.

I bought one of each of the five sweet rice desserts\ concoctions she had. My favorite is the tamales. It was soft and sweet. I never had it before. It had hard boiled egg in the middle. 

The others were the two familiar variety of suman or sticky rice cakes with cylindrical shapes and wrapped in banana leaves. One was white and bland while the other was sweet and purplish in color. There was also an unwrapped patty smothered with sugar, shredded coconut and anise.  Another concoction is triangular-shaped and wrapped in banana leaves. This was not as sweet as the others. 

I was able to interview her and her story was very interesting. She made all the rice delicacies herself. To top it all she came all the way from Pampanga which was three hours from Malabon where she was peddling her desserts.  She traveled in the back of a motorcycle that her husband was driving. I was impressed with their patience and determination to earn a living. Her husband went to another church in our town to distribute the same delicacies to another seller in the public market. 

As you can see in the photo, she had a cheerful face with a wide smile. She seemed to love her job and her attitude was infectious. Buying from her was a good start to my Sunday morning 

 1. Prayer

Heavenly Father, so many voices clamor for my attention. It’s easy to be distracted. I want to be more sensitive to Your voice so I can sense Your will.

Help me tune in to the Spirit’s quiet voice. Make me more careful about the voices I allow to speak into my life. Fill my thoughts and light my path with Your truth.

Make me more aware of the subtle leadings of the Spirit that I might miss if I’m too preoccupied with the things of this world. Quiet my heart, Father, so I can hear Your words of love as I wait for direction. Amen.

2. Meditation 

https://youtu.be/LEyCySc4iLw

3.  Song

https://youtu.be/uXDxodTQZMA

4.  Narrative

LISTENING FOR THE DIVINE VOICE

Discerning God’s Will 

Wednesday, October 23, 2024

We ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord. 
—Colossians 1:9–10 

For Father Richard, contemplation cultivates an ability to discern right action:  

Our goal consists in doing the will of God, but first we have to remove our attachment to our own will so that we can recognize the difference between the two. Throughout history, many people who did horrible things were convinced that they were doing God’s will. That’s why we have to find an instrument to distinguish between God and us. Paul calls this gift the discernment of spirits. We have to learn when our own spirit is at work and when the Spirit of God is at work.  

The most convincing social activists in our country were and are people of prayer, like Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., Sister Simone Campbell, John Dear, and Jim Wallis. It’s important that we bring the contemplatives and the activists together in the Church and in the world, because neither group is credible without the other. Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days; only after that did he begin to preach the reign of God and to heal the sick. And along the way he kept reminding his disciples to withdraw and rest in quiet, peaceful places (see Mark 6:31).  

With this withdrawal and this emptiness, we are, so to speak, cultivating fertile soil where we can be receptive to the seed of God’s word. I don’t believe that Jesus dumps the harvest into our laps. Rather, he shows us a process of growth. He shows us a way we can learn to hear God, a path of self-surrender and forgiveness. He trusts that his followers, as they practice this way of prayer, will learn to hear the truth ever more clearly. The great truth will always lie beyond us. The great truth of God will never underpin a small world. This means that the Christian life must be a constant journey back and forth between the radical way inward and the radical way outward. [1]  

Dutch priest and author Henri Nouwen (1932–1996) views discernment as a gift that comes from our intimacy with God: 

I can see no other way for discernment than a life in the Spirit, a life of unceasing prayer and contemplation, a life of deep communion with the Spirit of God. Such a life will slowly develop in us an inner sensitivity, enabling us to distinguish between the law of the flesh [ego] and the law of the Spirit [soul]. We certainly will make constant errors and seldom have the purity of heart required to make the right decisions all the time. But when we continually try to live in the Spirit, we at least will be willing to confess our weakness and limitations in all humility, trusting in the one who is greater than our hearts. [2]  

References: 
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love, selected by Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018), 142–143.  

[2] Henri J. M. Nouwen with Michael J. Christensen and Rebecca J. Laird, Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2013), 170. 

5.  Meditation 

https://youtu.be/PBQjpvZ9Gy4

7

6.  Sharing 

7.  Prayer and intentions 

• Prayer for Discernment

  "God our Father, You have a plan for each one of us, You hold out to us a future full of hope. Give us the freedom of your Spirit, to seek you with all our hearts, and to choose your will above all else". 

   

  
  

  8.  Song

  
  

  https://youtu.be/iJE4yahElBQ

  
  

  
  

  
  

Opposing evil without becoming it

 1.  Prayer

A Prayer Against Neighbor Hate:

O Lord, you who command us to bless our enemies, protect us, we pray, from turning our neighbors into enemies, worthy only of hatred and deserving of nothing but insults and curses, and grant us instead the heart of Jesus, so that we might love our neighbor as you love them. We pray this in the name of the One who causes the sun to rise both on the evil and on the good. Amen.

A Prayer for Loving a Hurting Neighbor:

O Lord, you who do not look away from the pain of this world, open our eyes, we pray, to see the pain of our neighbor and, by grace, to become the healing presence and power of Jesus to them, so that our hearts might be kindled with your neighbor love this day. We pray this in the name of the Merciful One. Amen.

2.  Meditation

https://youtu.be/3beUrBoa-3M?si=-C8yl-YPhwd6rV-a

3.  Song

https://youtu.be/ujTCNLWUQhM?si=XNXFu0Z9RczB9ibH

4,  Narrative

Opposing Evil without Becoming It
Tuesday, March 30, 2021

The mystery of the cross teaches us how to stand against hate without becoming hate, how to oppose evil without becoming evil ourselves. We find ourselves stretching in both directions—toward God’s goodness and also toward recognition of our own complicity in evil. In that moment, we will feel crucified. We hang in between, without resolution, our very life a paradox held in hope by God (see Romans 8:23–25). 

Over the next three days, I share a few examples of women who have understood the mystery of the cross in a personal and embodied way. They have known great suffering; they have been victims of oppression and cruelty and yet they sought to respond consciously, not reactively. Today, I offer a journal entry from Etty Hillesum (1914–1943), a young Jewish woman who was killed at Auschwitz. In her diary, she recreates a conversation with her friend, writer Klaas Smelik, about the hatred and bullying she saw within her own community:

Klaas, all I really wanted to say is this: we have so much work to do on ourselves that we shouldn’t even be thinking of hating our so-called enemies. We are hurtful enough to one another as it is. And I don’t really know what I mean when I say that there are bullies and bad characters among our own people, for no one is really “bad” deep down. I should have liked to reach out to that [bully] with all his fears, I should have liked to trace the source of his panic, to drive him ever deeper into himself, that is the only thing we can do, Klaas, in times like these.

And you, Klaas, give a tired and despondent wave and say, “But what you propose to do takes such a long time, and we don’t really have all that much time, do we?” And I reply, “What you want is something people have been trying to get for the last two thousand years, and for many more thousand years before that, in fact, ever since [humankind] has existed on earth.” “And what do you think the result has been, if I may ask?” you say.

And I repeat with the same old passion, although I am gradually beginning to think that I am being tiresome, “It is the only thing we can do, Klaas, I see no alternative, each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others. And remember that every atom of hate we add to this world makes it still more inhospitable.”

And you, Klaas, dogged old class fighter that you have always been, dismayed and astonished at the same time, say, “But that—that is nothing but Christianity!”

And I, amused by your confusion, retort quite coolly, “Yes, Christianity, and why ever not?” [1]

Richard again: It is a truth of the world’s major religions that the goal of God’s work—God by any name, I might add—is always healing reconciliation and not retributive justice, resurrection and not death. 

References:
[1] Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941–1943; and, Letters from Westerbork, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (Henry Holt and Company: 1996), 211‒212.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2008), 203‒204.

5.  Meditation

https://youtu.be/xRcWlA1I9z0?si=tdzZOJ4CH4AFPsGY

6.  Sharing

7.  Prayers and Intentions

Holy Spirit, I invite You to work within me, bringing freedom from the chains of bitterness. Transform my heart, renew my mind, and lead me on a path of healing and reconciliation. I surrender my pain to You, trusting that Your grace is sufficient for all things. May Your peace, which surpasses all understanding, guard my heart and mind in Christ Jesus. In Jesus' name, I pray. Amen.

8.  Song

https://youtu.be/Hl1QOsDHR00?si=HIotPM7hNC0QeJ7