God’s Friends

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center, doing good, God, great love, light, Mother Teresa, saints, small things, St. Therese of Lisieux, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

Today people all over the world, especially in a small town in France called Lisieux, celebrate the feast of their most famous inhabitant of all, Therese Martin. She lived in Lisieux all her life, entered the Carmelite convent at age 15, never left, died at age 24 and was proclaimed a saint 28 years later, proving what Mother Teresa of Calcutta, one of the most recent saints named by the Roman Catholic Church believed: that it isn’t necessary to do great things but only to do small things with great love. Therese herself spoke that same language, noting that one might achieve holiness even in doing humble tasks like bending to pick up a pin if it is done with love. Who thinks that way? Obviously those suffused with God’s love who live ever conscious of God’s presence in all that they encounter in each moment of life – and beyond. Before she died, Therese was clear about eternal life. She said she planned to “spend my heaven doing good on earth.”

May we come to value each moment – the extraordinary and the mundane – in such a way that the length of our days will not be the measure of our love but rather the light with which our days are illuminated because God is at the center of it all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Harmonic Convergence

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bless, center, counsel, Galatians, heart, intention, love, psalm 16, soul, St. Paul, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, unifying

Today’s Scripture readings, if reflected upon, seem to fit in our present world of philosophical and psychological advisors who speak about the interaction and necessary integration of body, mind and spirit. The psalmist sets the stage by declaring: I bless the Lord who counsels me; even in the night my heart exhorts me…Therefore my heart is glad and my soul rejoices, my body, too, abides in confidence…(Ps. 16) Paul picks up the theme saying, “You were called for freedom, brothers and sisters. But do not use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh; rather serve one another through love. For the whole law is fulfilled in one statement, namely, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. if you go on biting and devouring one another, beware that you are not consumed by one another.” (GAL 5:13-18)

Perhaps I’m stretching a point in my interpretation but it seems to me that putting the intention and the effort of making love at the center point of all our actions and dealings with one another does create harmony that manifests not only in our relationships but especially as a unifying, health-producing becoming in the three centers of our own body, mind and spirit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Profound Repose

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act without motion, center, deepest activities, everywhere, fulfillment, Kathleen Deignan, loneliness, nowhere, profound repose, standing still, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, Thomas Merton, travelling, vision

“This is a country whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
You do not find it by traveling but by standing still.
Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin.
It is here that you discover act without motion,
labor that is profound repose,
vision in obscurity,
and, beyond all desire,
a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.”

~ Thomas Merton
(from Thomas Merton’s Book of Hours by Kathleen Deignan)

Walking the Walk

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center, dream, God, labyrinth, Luke, reflection, spiritual life, spiritual path, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, trust in God, walk the walk, walk together, walking

This morning as Luke (Ch. 12) continues to continues to talk about servants and their readiness to serve, I want to offer a footnote to my reflection of yesterday about walking through life aware of how the walk is going (See “Stay Awake” from yesterday’s blog post). During the day yesterday my mind kept coming back to the theme of the blog and to the experience I had the evening before of walking a labyrinth. We (the Sophia Center for Spirituality) began on Monday to offer a series called “Spiritual Sampler” on Monday nights and the first of these offerings was a labyrinth walk. A labyrinth, as some of you know, is not a maze where you can get hopelessly lost but rather a unicursal or one-branch path that leads to the center. For centuries, labyrinths have been symbolic of walking a spiritual path where, in the center, God may be found.

Until I was quite sure that the description of “unicursal” was true, I was hesitant to walk a labyrinth. Over the last several years, however, I have come to relish the opportunity for this quiet, slow, reflective time that is always meaningful and sometimes surprising. As I made my intention at the entrance to the labyrinth, all I asked was to be in God’s presence, walking consciously toward God. During the next half hour of silence I was conscious of putting one foot in front of the other on the path that twisted and turned, sometimes coming close to the center and sometimes moving farther away, but always with the hope of achieving that goal. I thought how clearly like life that was. On occasion I was aware of the four others walking with me and pushed away the occasional sense of disappointment that there weren’t more companions. That brought to mind the wondering of whether or not the whole project of establishing a spirituality center -just a year old this month – would be “successful” in the long run. As I continued to walk and attempted to let go of such useless thoughts for one who purports to trust God, I heard from inside, “This is your dream; now you need to walk the walk.” Soon after that I reached the center where the sense of relief and strength was palpable.

The walk back out was long and winding again, but I felt a new confidence in remembering what I have known for much of my ministerial life: that numbers have little to do with meaning in the spiritual life and that God is with me at every step of the path. Our short conversation at the completion of the exercise convinced me that our time had been truly blessed and that each day, each moment is precious as we walk together in God’s sight.