1.  Prayer

 Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee;

blessed are thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.

2.  Meditation

https://youtu.be/syx3a1_LeFo?si=UdUgdhXZujToXVO8

3.  Song

https://youtu.be/CihO7vA_ps4?si=d3xQEF9hYNchIe-c

4.  Narrative

INCARNATION

Mary’s Wholehearted Call

Friday, December 23, 2022

Public theologian Rachel Held Evans (1981–2019) found inspiration in Mary’s courageous “yes” to God:

Perhaps it is because I am neck-deep in a season of motherhood and caretaking that I am more aware than ever of the startling and profound reality that I am a Christian not because of anything I’ve done but because a teenage girl living in occupied Palestine at one of the most dangerous moments in history said yes—yes to God, yes to a wholehearted call she could not possibly understand, yes to vulnerability in the face of societal judgment . . . yes to a vision for herself and her little boy of a mission that would bring down rulers and lift up the humble, that would turn away the rich and fill the hungry with good things, that would scatter the proud and gather the lowly [see Luke 1:51–53], yes to a life that came with no guarantee of her safety or her son’s.

I know that Christians are Easter people. We are supposed to favor the story of the resurrection, which reminds us that death is never the end of God’s story. Yet I have never found that story even half as compelling as the story of the Incarnation.

Evans honors the unique role that Mary, and women everywhere, play in humanity’s physical incarnation:

It is nearly impossible to believe: God shrinking down to the size of a zygote, implanted in the soft lining of a woman’s womb. God growing fingers and toes. God kicking and hiccupping in utero. God inching down the birth canal and entering this world covered in blood, perhaps into the steady, waiting arms of a midwife. God crying out in hunger. God reaching for his mother’s breasts. God totally relaxed, eyes closed, his chubby little arms raised over his head in a posture of complete trust. God resting in his mother’s
lap. . . .

God trusted God’s very self, totally and completely and in full bodily form, to the care of a woman. God needed women for survival. Before Jesus fed us with the bread and the wine, the body and the blood, Jesus himself needed to be fed, by a woman. He needed a woman to say: “This is my body, given for you.”. . . 

To understand Mary’s humanity and her central role in Jesus’s story is to remind ourselves of the true miracle of the Incarnation—and that is the core Christian conviction that God is with us, plain old ordinary us. God is with us in our fears and in our pain, in our morning sickness and in our ear infections, in our refugee crises and in our endurance of Empire, in smelly barns and unimpressive backwater towns, in the labor pains of a new mother and in the cries of a tiny infant. In all these things, God is with us—and God is for us.

Reference:

Rachel Held Evans with Jeff Chu, Wholehearted Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2021), 3–5, 6.

Explore Further. . .

• Listen to Richard’s homily on Mary as our “Let it be!”
• Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
• Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

5.  Meditation

https://youtu.be/9LSJ4d5kubI?si=Ms0xcTcwdXXoF8bQ

6.  Sharing

7.  Prayer and intentions

Blessed, most pure Virgin, you chose to manifest yourself shining with life, sweetness and beauty, in the Grotto of Lourdes.
To the child, St. Bernadette, you revealed yourself, "I am the Immaculate Conception."
And now, Immaculate Virgin, Mother of Mercy, Healer of the Sick, Comforter of the Afflicted, you know my wants, my troubles, my sufferings. Look upon me with mercy.
By your appearance in the Grotto of Lourdes, it became a privileged sanctuary from which you dispense your favors.
Many have obtained the cure of their infirmities, both spiritual and physical. I come, therefore, with confidence in your maternal intercession.
Obtain for me, O loving Mother, this special request. Our Lady of Lourdes, Mother of Christ, pray for me.
Obtain from your Divine Son my special request if it be God's will.
Amen.

8.  Song

Let it be 

https://youtu.be/DFwBRHm_lNg?si=bM4HGx87W85mTw16

Paula's Prayer Meeting 5/8/2024

 Song

  You and I Lord

Song:  You and I Lord

                        Kathy Sherman

You and I Lord began our journey

so very long ago.  Together we’ve

endured throughout the years.  You have sweetened all my joys; you’ve brought comfort in my pain. We’ve come so far and yet we’ve just begun.                          

You and I Lord, we’ve seen darkness; there were times I was lost along the way.  I’ve been lonely, I’ve been frightened.  I had to learn to trust.  But you were there by my side. You never let me go.  You were the light in my night that brought the day.                                                                                           

Thank you for your faithfulness,

your strength and your love.  For

the gifts of special places and for

friends.  Thank you for drawing

me ever closer to you.  Be with

me on the road that lies ahead.

                                               

You and I Lord, we share life

together we have been and we

will be.  My life is yours, I am

open to the mysteries and the

wonders of your love.  You have

sweetened all my joys; you’ve

brought comfort in my pain.  

We’ve come so far and yet we’ve

just begun.

 

 

           

            God is gazing upon you with Great Love and yearns to be with you.

                                                          TO SEE AS GOD SEES

It is your destiny to see as God sees,

to know as God knows,

to feel as God

feels

 

How is this possible?  How?

Because divine love cannot defy its

very self.

 

Divine love will be eternally true to its own being,

and its being is giving all it can,

at the perfect moment.

 

And the greatest gift

God can give is God’s own experience.

 

Every object, every creature, every man, woman and child

has a soul and it is the destiny of all,

 

to see as God sees, to know as God knows, to feel as God feels,

to Be as God

Is.

                                               

 

 

           

Pushing heaven

1.  PRAYER

Psalm 23

A psalm of David.

1 The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.
2     He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
3     he refreshes my soul.
He guides me along the right paths
    for his name’s sake.
4 Even though I walk
    through the darkest valley,[a]
I will fear no evil,
    for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
    they comfort me.

5 You prepare a table before me
    in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
    my cup overflows.
6 Surely your goodness and love will follow me
    all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord
    forever.

2.  Meditation 

https://youtu.be/LLeqY9ingRY?si=W9fbFsIaG7cmiei5

3.  SONG

https://youtu.be/H9_0jiO5ZRM?si=XWXX_pEhNH_ePGXX

4. NARRATIVE

A Change in Consciousness
Sunday, September 6, 2015

Rather than making dogmatic statements about how to get to heaven, Jesus modeled and taught how to live on earth in a loving way, and he said that this was indeed heaven! But Christians have all too often pushed heaven into the future. We’ve made Jesus’ death and resurrection into a reward/punishment system for the next world, which creates tremendously self-absorbed and self-preoccupied people. It doesn’t transform anyone into compassionate, loving individuals. Instead it leads to a kind of morbid self-analysis in which people feel guilty, inferior, and inadequate or superior and self-righteous.

This dualistic approach has corrupted the true meaning of the Gospel. I would go so far as to say that by sending Christians on a path of well disguised but delayed self-interest, we prostituted the entire spiritual journey from the very start. You cannot easily get to love when you begin with threats and appeals to fear. The driving energy is completely wrong. Rather, you come to love by attraction. Change must begin with positive energy or the final result is never positive.

Maybe the Buddha didn’t talk about God because he didn’t want his teaching to be interpreted as a method of earning or losing God’s love. He emphasized awareness and experience more than winning a prize. Words, which are by nature dualistic, tend to get in the way of actual experience. Thomas Merton said, “Buddhist meditation, but above all that of Zen, seeks not to explain but to pay attention, to become aware, to be mindful, in other words to develop a certain kind of consciousness that is above and beyond deception by verbal formulas—or by emotional excitement.” [1]

Both the Buddha and Jesus were constantly telling people to be compassionate, to let go, to detach. The difference is that Buddhists were taught that they could not do any of these things with a dualistic consciousness. If you were raised Christian, on the other hand, you were given the impression that you could be a forgiving person with a dualistic mind. You can’t! In effect, Christians were given commandments about mercy, compassion, loving enemies, and forgiveness without being taught the nondual consciousness necessary for living most of those commandments.

Because the Church usually did not enable any actual change of consciousness, most people had to split. In effect, we became hypocrites (the word first meant “actors”); we had no other choice. We have to pretend that we love our enemies, because Jesus said we should. We have to pretend to be nonviolent, when in reality Americans are all part of a highly militaristic culture. But the real teaching of Jesus is ignored, is innocuous, and is boring to us, because frankly, with the dualistic mind, most of it is unlivable and impossible. You can give people all the pious Christian teaching you want, but without a transformation of consciousness, they don’t have the energy or the capacity to carry it out.

Thankfully, we are now in an age where we can be open to learning from other world religions like Buddhism, which have long been teaching the non-dual consciousness that Christianity stopped teaching in a systematic way for the last five hundred years. [2]

Gateway to Silence:
“The suchness of each moment is the infinite mercy of God.”  —Paul Knitter

References:
[1] Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New Directions: 1968), 38.
[2] Richard Rohr, Jesus and Buddha: Paths to Awakening (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2008), disc 4 (CD, DVD, MP3 download).

The Dualistic Mind
Sunday, January 29, 2017

If we are trying to rebuild Christianity from the bottom up, we need to try to understand Jesus, the one who began it all (even though he probably never intended to start a new religion). I am convinced that Jesus was the first nondual religious teacher of the West, and one reason we have failed to understand so much of his teaching, much less follow it, is because we tried to understand it with dualistic minds. In his life and ministry, Jesus modeled and exemplifiednonduality more than giving us any systematic teaching on it. Our inability to fully understand him and seriously follow him may be partly because we have not been taught how to see nondually ourselves. We thought highly of the “mind of Christ” but there was little practical knowledge of how to get there. This week I will try to shed some light on the meaning of dualistic and nondual thinking, because until you put on wide-lens nondual glasses you cannot see in any genuinely new way. You will just process any new ideas with your old operating system.

Dualistic thinking, or the “egoic operating system,” as my friend and colleague Cynthia Bourgeault calls it, is our way of reading reality from the position of our private and small self. “What’s in it for me?” “How will I look if I do this?” This is the ego’s preferred way of seeing reality. It is the ordinary “hardware” of almost all Western people, even those who think of themselves as Christians. The church has neglected its central work of teaching prayer and contemplation, allowing the language of institutional religion itself to remain dualistic and largely argumentative. We ended up confusing information with enlightenment, mind with soul, and thinking with experiencing—yet these are very different paths.

The dualistic mind is essentially binary, either/or thinking. It knows by comparison, opposition, and differentiation. It uses descriptive words like good/evil, pretty/ugly, smart/stupid, not realizing there may be a hundred degrees between the two ends of each spectrum. Dualistic thinking works well for the sake of simplification and conversation, but not for the sake of truth or the immense subtlety of actual personal experience. Most of us settle for quick and easy answers instead of any deep perception, which we leave to poets, philosophers, and prophets. Yet depth and breadth of perception should be the primary arena for all authentic religion. How else could we possibly search for God?

We do need the dualistic mind to function in practical life, however, and to do our work as a teacher, a nurse, a scientist, or an engineer. It’s helpful and fully necessary as far as it goes, but it just doesn’t go far enough. The dualistic mind cannot process things like infinity, mystery, God, grace, suffering, sexuality, death, or love; this is exactly why most people stumble over these very issues. The dualistic mind pulls everything down into some kind of tit-for-tat system of false choices and too-simple contraries, which is largely what “fast food religion” teaches, usually without even knowing it. Without the contemplative and converted mind—honest and humble perception—much religion is frankly dangerous.

Gateway to Silence:
We are oned in love.

References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, A Spring Within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations (CAC Publishing: 2016), 98-99;
Yes, And . . . : Daily Meditations (Franciscan Media: 2013), 406; and
The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2009), 34-35.

5.  Meditation 

https://youtu.be/emaQgCZGl1s?si=G6REcnn1Z0RGlJiG

6. SHARING

7.  PRAYER AND INTENTIONS

New International Version

9 “This, then, is how you should pray:

“‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
10 your kingdom come,
your will be done,
    on earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us today our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts,
    as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation,[a]
    but deliver us from the evil one.[b]’

 8.  SONG

https://youtu.be/EuL0lgVP_Ew?si=A4oacIB5w-KWG2aT

Sweet goodbyes

One could not predict at times how one would react to situations.  My reaction to certain life moments has surprised me.  One instance is moving on or saying goodbyes.  One such time is leaving a job I loved at IUP where I taught for 12 and half years.  I knew it was time and the right one came when I felt I had to attend a grand reunion with high school classmates in the Philippines and do it without hurry like I did in previous years.  My classmates were getting on in years with several of us passing in greater percentage than other batches.  I was swamped with doing last-minute things in the retirement process to feel anything,  But one memory came up lately when I had to say goodbye to a volunteer job I have grown to love also, namely teaching CCD or faith formation to young children at my parish. 

My memory went back to one beautiful day in December 2014.  I was walking through the tree-lined campus to turn in or get the results of an online quiz at the testing center.  I was soaking in the beauty of the campus in the warmer-than-usual December day amidst the bustle of the students walking for their change of classes. I had mixed feelings knowing I only had a few more days till I retired. I was very touched by the sadness on people’s faces at the center when they learned that I was retiring. After all the center was one place I frequented in the past few years when I switched to online quizzes.  It did surprise me that this walk was what I found the sweetest of this segment of my saying goodbye to IUP. 

Memories of December 2014 came back in March.  I just decided it was time to say goodbye to teaching CCD.  I have found a very capable person to take my place and he agreed willingly.  I was happy and relieved.  When I went home I was surprised I sobbed when it dawned on me I just have a few more weeks of CCD teaching. I did not expect it.  After all no more teaching evenings when I could barely stay awake.  I should be celebrating not sobbing.  Everything turned sweeter, not frustrating. I saw things more rosily and gratefully.  Students could read at last. Still rambunctious  They all became endearing in their own way. Brandon got all the answers surprisingly especially since he struggled with his shyness at the beginning of the school year. Brian was so innocent and deliberate in his answers that came slowly but with much depth. Philosophical Bianca who comes up always with the deepest insight said Jesus is present in our hearts when were talk about his presence everywhere. Ceci was so reliable and smart. Aiden Mr enthusiasm. Wanted to please. And then the others who I will get to know better at the end of the semester.  

Some moments are hard to forget and that is because of how they make you feel.  These two days are up there.  Sadness and sweetness blended. And the surprise they carried.