Sr Kathryn's Podcast - Touching the Sunrise: Recent Episodes
srkathryn
Meditations and conversations from my heart to help you live in the dawn of God's tender kindness flowing into your broken places.
Lord, you have searched me thoroughly. You know me....
This can be a scary thought. We want to be known, and seen, and loved, and respected. Not searched.
Later in the Psalm we learn how wonderful and loving is the one who knit us in our mother's womb. His "searching" eyes are there to see our slightest need for him. How wonderful he is in his care for us in all things....
This is a quiet meditation to bring to our inner space a sense of safety and trust.
Music by Petrushkasound from Pixabay
Jesus, looking at him, loved him (Mk). Of course these are the words in the Gospel that describe how Jesus received the rich young man. This quiet and reflective reading will lead you to touch gently both your vulnerability and the way the Lord loves you unconditionally, incredibility, and forever.
O God, you are my God...
For you I long...
For you my soul thirsts...
This psalm I prayed at my mother's side shortly before she passed into eternity. It is a psalm for any of us who are walking through a wilderness, where all is stripped away and we may feel lost and wondering and wandering...
Where God finds us.... Faithful. Love.
Take a breath. Rest. And join me in quiet prayer.
I hope you keep in touch. Visit http://www.touchingthesunrise.com
Music by Petrushkasound from Pixabay
What is important here is that we approach our thought world with compassion, curiosity, and creativity, a bit of humor, and a lot of prayer. It is like a cluster of screaming children clustered around our heart where God is dwelling. Think about a playground with kids out of control. It’s hard to get to the center, to the ground, to the inner room where God is dwelling when we are deflected by so many interests, fears, desires, and demands.
In this meditation we experience the rest of our inner world that only Jesus and his compassion can bring us.
What keeps you up at night? What is in your heart that you wish you could share with someone who cares? In this Holy Thursday meditation, Jesus gathers you tightly into his embrace as he looks in to your eyes and says: "When will you give all this to me?"
A conversation between Sr Emily Beata Marsh and Sr Kathryn James exploring the questions we ask in times that are uncertain, when we face struggles and challenges in our life, and when we wonder why those we love suffer.
Welcome to the last in the series: Being the Child God Made You where we're exploring how to be the child that Jesus asks us to be. Today we'll be talking about God made us to be satisfied only in God.
Excerpts:
God has made us for himself. He is providing for us, nourishing us, protecting us, warming us, delighting us... As long as we keep our hearts open, begging for him and his life, we will receive all he is giving us.
What gets in the way of this inbuilt hunger for God? For each of us there would be a different list. One of the habits in the following list might be on yours: hours of scrolling through social media feeds, trying to do what only God can do, trying to change people around you instead of changing yourself, numbing habits, grasping for empty fillers like higher salaries, success, possessions, status... When we are satisfied with what can never satisfy us....
One thing we can do to increase our hunger for God is to avoid these ultimately unsatisfactory fillers and meditate instead on these famous words of St. Augustine who said: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.
To connect to more resources for spiritual formation: www.touchingthesunrise.com
Welcome to the sixth in the series: Being the Child God Made You where we're exploring how to be the child that Jesus asks us to be. Today we'll be talking about how to accept our own neediness and also how to receive God's love, especially when we find it difficult.
Excerpts:
Recently on retreat I found myself asking Jesus: “Will you leave me, drop me, because I am not interesting enough?” Isn’t that the fear we all have. That somehow God won’t be so captivated with love for us that he’ll decide we are not worth being with for the long haul?
These were Jesus’ words I felt that he said in my heart:
“It is I who have planted my tent on your land, It is I who have desired to possess your soul... It is I who have chosen you. My choice is irrevocable. I choose to love your story—all of it. It is not a journey from bad to good. It is a life from seed to blossom. You have survived the blights and bugs, the storms, the bending and breaking, MY mending and molding. And now in MY garden, you are blossoming. It is ALL good.”
To connect to more resources for spiritual formation: www.touchingthesunrise.com
Welcome to the fifth in the series: Being the Child God Made You where we're exploring how to be the child that Jesus asks us to be. Today we'll be talking about Mary who teaches us how to receive the Spirit.
Excerpts:
Finally, the apostles had gathered around the Mother of Jesus after he had ascended into heaven, waiting with her for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Mary knew well the presence, almost the “feel”—spiritually speaking—of being inhabited, of being a Temple, of the Spirit of Jesus. She had profound spiritual sensitivity and was no stranger to the movement of the Spirit, through whom the Son of God took flesh within her. At the Annunciation she became the Mother of Jesus, the Mother of the Son of God, and at that moment, in some mysterious way, the Mother of us, all of us who are the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ. In the Cenacle, as the Spirit is poured out on all Jesus’ disciples praying there, Mary is manifested as a type of the Church who, as Mother herself, will give birth to children of God at the baptismal fonts of every country and every time through the grace poured out by the Spirit. This grace is a gift given on the initiative of God, purifying and elevating our nature without suppressing or changing it in its very being....
Mary, Mother of the Church, teach me how to be a mother to people who have fallen away from the Church. Inspire me how to enter into the troubled moments of others’ lives with a quiet invitation to accompany me to the Eucharist or adoration, there to meet your Son. Encourage me to say a gentle word of faith at a time when their heart is ready to receive it. Mary, Mother of the Church, pray for us....
To connect to more resources for spiritual formation: www.touchingthesunrise.com
Welcome to the fourth in the series: Being the Child God Made You where we're exploring how to be the child that Jesus asks us to be. Today we'll be talking about how we belong to the King of Kings and the Lord of the Universe. We truly are royalty!
Excerpts:
So amazing! Yet this reality, this truth that is hinted at on every page of God’s word, is so hard to remember about ourselves and about others. Jesus, the Son of God, loves us. Jesus chooses us. We belong to the King of Kings and the Lord of the Universe. In Isaiah there is more than a hint:
“You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord,
and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.
...You shall be called My Delight Is in Her” (Isaiah 62:3, 4)....
Baptism is what makes us royalty. I follow the royal family in Great Britain. There people are born into royalty. We, instead, through Baptism, having no claim on being a part of the Royal Family of God, have been made a “partaker of the divine nature,” member of Jesus Christ and a temple of the Holy Spirit....
To connect to more resources for spiritual formation: www.touchingthesunrise.com
Welcome to the third in the series: Being the Child God Made You where we're exploring how we fill God with joy.
Excerpts:
It is as if John the Evangelist, John who had laid his head on the heart of Christ at the last supper and listened to the love that beat in his Lord’s most sacred and divine Heart, was trying to find the words to convince us that we are God’s children. Certainly, we’ve heard that a billion times before: with baptism we become God’s children. Do we consider how BIG A DEAL this is? My niece and nephew often played fondly with children of their friends. But now that they have their own child, it is a different story altogether. This is THEIR CHILD....
Ask the Holy Spirit to help you slow down enough to catch the thoughts you say to yourself about what things mean and who you are. Notice which type of thoughts make you feel happy, rested, trusting. And which thoughts depress, sadden, and frustrate you.
Make a list of each. At the beginning of the day visualize two or three things you know will happen that day and watch yourself internalizing the thoughts of a CHILD OF GOD. At the end of the day you can look briefly back at these same situations and notice where the other type of thoughts snuck in. Relive the situation in your mind at that point internalizing the attitudes and beliefs of a CHILD OF GOD....
To connect to more resources for spiritual formation: www.touchingthesunrise.com
Welcome to the first in the series: Being the Child God Made You where we're exploring how to be the child that Jesus asks us to be. Today we'll be talking about how how difficult it is sometimes to believe that God made us good and beautiful.
Excerpts:
Can you say to yourself, “God made something beautiful and strong and good and tender and kind when he made me.” What do you feel deep within yourself when you say these words about yourself? Can you notice your thoughts, any emotions, even physical sensations?
In my early steps of my own journey to accept being loved by God, I noticed that I would physically resist believing this: my stomach would tense up, my mind would freeze, and my emotions become rock....
Finally say to your heart: “It’s okay. I see you responding in this way. I can understand that. I can sense what you are needing, even if I can’t give it to you right now. I want you to hear these words which are true: “The God who created you, loves you each and every day, in each and every moment of every day of your life. He can’t stop loving you, because he himself is love. Even if you can’t hear these words now, they are true. Someday you will be able to welcome them and entrust yourself to the One who made you with great trust. I promise.”...
To connect to more resources for spiritual formation: www.touchingthesunrise.com
Welcome to the first in the series: Being the Child God Made You where we're exploring how to be the child that Jesus asks us to be. Today we'll be talking about how to accept our own neediness and also how to receive God's love, especially when we find it difficult.
Excerpts:
I heard these words in my heart: “You are just as helpless, and lovely, and loved as this tiny baby. She isn’t doing a single thing to ingratiate herself to anyone, other than to just be. Yet she is so endearing as she expresses what she needs and her parents jump to be there at her side, providing what she can’t provide for herself.”...
It takes a huge act of courage to tell someone we need something. We might be refused. We might be rejected. We might be ridiculed for what we can’t do ourselves. This dynamic, familiar to us all, looks one way as kids and another way when we are in the height of our adult years, and still another when we are in our senior years. To admit we can’t do something that is essential to a job we hold is risky. To admit we can no longer accomplish what is required for basic daily living may feel humiliating. To surrender what we really want to happen for ourselves or for another could feel like failure. Only the courageous are willing to be as honest as a baby about what they are undergoing, feeling, and needing....
To connect to more resources for spiritual formation: www.touchingthesunrise.com
Celebrating the Magi who followed a star in their search for the newly born King is a great opportunity to reflect on the stars we follow, the searches we have made during our life, what we have found, where we are, and where we are going.
Highlights:
Questions about life’s meaninglessness, about the way in which our days pass like vapor, about how all that we do and accomplish seems to vanish without a trace as we age, these burden not just the heart of Qoheleth in today’s first reading, but at certain points in our lives these questions haunt us too. I once heard that the book of Ecclesiastes identifies the question to which the whole of Revelation is the answer. In this quickly changing world, all that our life has been seems to slip through our fingers, and our heart longs for life, true life, life that is a treasure that neither moth nor rust can destroy.
There is something cyclical in this description of continual, unending, “coming and going” of things. In this reading there is no sense of the enduring, of divine gift and guidance and mission, of an end which has been ordained for all things by God. Instead, the more things change, as the saying goes, the more things stay the same, endlessly repeating to seemingly no purpose.
Today many experience life in this way. Not being grounded in the fertile soil of God’s action and love, much of what constitutes activity in our world seems to have no real meaning. I believe that during the pandemic many began to feel this way. The tasks they had been doing in their jobs were now no longer satisfying to them, no longer seemed purposeful, no longer worth devoting their whole life to. They began to seek something more meaningful to do with their careers.
It is ultimately only God who truly defines us and the purpose of our lives, their unending purpose.
I hope you stay in touch. Sign up for my newsletter here: https://touchingthesunrise.com/newsletter/
Highlights:
In the Gospel passage that recounts the calling of the tax collector, Matthew Jesus shows us that he is where we are. Whether we are living a holy life, struggling with temptations inundating us like a hurricane, or lost in the mire of vice or sin, Jesus is always passing by.
Jesus is not passing by intent on avoiding us. He is passing by in order to see us, to show us that we are seen with the eyes of respect and love. Jesus sees us, as we most deeply are. He delights in us, for he has made all things good.
There are many reasons why I want to avoid your gaze, Jesus. I don’t feel worthy. I don’t know how to respond to you. I’m afraid. But here you are, passing by, seeing me as you saw Matthew.
I hope you stay in touch. Sign up for my newsletter here: https://touchingthesunrise.com/newsletter/
Highlights:
It’s not that the people couldn’t figure out that Jesus was the Messiah, that all the prophesies pointed to him, that he spoke with an authority that even the religious leaders didn’t have. Instead, Jesus called them “hypocrites.” We call someone a hypocrite who knows what is right or true but lives in denial of what they know to be right and true. Jesus was saying to them that just as they could interpret the signs of the earth and sky and forecast the weather, they did understand that he had come from God (so much so that the leaders determined very quickly they needed to kill him). They understood, but they were not willing to acknowledge and to accept he had been sent by God. To accept Jesus as the Messiah, to sit at his feet as Mary, to follow him closely as the Twelve, to be personally transformed by his parables and teachings and invitations to conversion like Zacchaeus would change them forever. This they could not accept.
I don’t believe Jesus spoke these words to the crowd with harshness or anger. The heart of the Master was too great, his love for them and for us is a love that led him eventually to the cross for our salvation. I hear in his words a determined effort to make them see what is right before their eyes. How many times Jesus has to shake us up, remind us of what we know, and then prod us forward to accept what he is revealing to us that we might allow our life to be changed.
I hope you stay in touch. Sign-up for my newsletter: https://touchingthesunrise.com/newsletter/
Highlights:
In order to live, we need to nourish ourselves, we need dignity and peace. The hearts of the people in this crowd were hoping against hope that things could change for them on a temporal level. They just didn’t realize that things had already changed. With the radical newness of the incarnation of the Son of God, everything had already become new. A greater hope of a more eternal promise was being fulfilled before their very eyes. Yet they could not recognize it. They were enamored still of the loaves of bread they had eaten. They were still looking for the food that perishes. Their imagination was too small.
When we have found him, when we have let ourselves be seen by him, when we have allowed ourselves to be saved by him, we will no longer be absorbed by what we can get for ourselves, but in how we can tell others about Jesus.
I hope you stay in touch. Sign up for my newsletter here: https://touchingthesunrise.com/newsletter/
A meditation guide for healing through the gift of forgiveness.
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We'll be addressing the million-and-one pin pricks that we receive and give to others every day. Though these aren’t dramatic or traumatic in themselves, when not attended to they can lead to drama and trauma and to the need for forgiveness in order to restore peace in a relationship.
When minor annoyances are not addressed over time, they can have serious effects on a relationship. The way someone who lives or works close to us chews, or piles things on their desk, or hums while they work, or leaves the newspaper on the table, or insists on giving their opinion rather categorically about just about everything, can make us feel misunderstood, not appreciated, unimportant. And we so often do things that make others feel the same way or worse.
Here are some practices you can develop that will keep those pet peeves from ruining your day and your relationships.
I hope you stay in touch. Sign up for my newsletter here: https://touchingthesunrise.com/newsletter/
Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting or even pardoning an offense. It means changing our response to the offense. Some ways to practice what I call “everyday forgiveness” are: forgive yourself, forgive the “stupid stuff” that happens every day, forgive the people and institutions that have hurt us, forgive the unmerited suffering that seems so unfair like an illness or failure. Instead of bitterness, choose to offer compassion and empathy to the person or institution or event that wronged you.
People who forgive tend to be more satisfied with their lives and to have less depression, anxiety, stress, anger, and hostility. People who hang onto grudges, however, are more likely to experience severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as other health conditions. That doesn’t mean that they can’t train themselves to act in healthier ways. We talk about a method of forgiveness that you might try.
I hope you stay in touch. Sign up for my newsletter here: https://touchingthesunrise.com/newsletter/
hen we’ve been hurt by others we may struggle with feelings of anger at being treated unjustly, fear of what will happen next, guilt over our part in what may have happened, and the seeming impossibility of reconciliation. And yet, as we stay up at night replaying what has happened, we may wonder at the cost of not reconciling:
The relationships broken. The difficulty of the situations we will be put in. Losing love, support, companionship, opportunity.
Have you been there? I know you have. And so have I. Many times.
In this series on forgiveness let’s find a way through the pain, learning how to navigate the swirl of inner chaos with the help of the saints, Scripture, and some spiritual activities that will make taking the leap into forgiving seem more desirable and possible.
I hope you stay in touch. Sign up for my newsletter here: https://touchingthesunrise.com/newsletter/
For us, forgiveness is a matter of becoming capable, of being given the power, to disrupt the cycle of continued wrath and suffering we experience as inevitable. Forgiveness is always going to be demanding, costly, and a freely chosen effort. Others cannot tell us when and how we must forgive. No one but we ourselves can require us to forgive.
Through the amazing story of how Corrie Ten Boom discovered that she herself still was learning how to forgive, you'll learn what forgiveness is not, and what forgiveness is.
As we wrestle with forgiving, you'll learn three things that will help us open to God’s grace.
I hope you stay in touch. Sign up for my newsletter here: https://touchingthesunrise.com/newsletter/
I certainly would never compare my life to that of St. Elizabeth of the Trinity. The memories I have of my childhood are of a little girl who always wanted to be a nun and who was—by my own standards at least—well-behaved. St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, however, had a will of steel and a temper that raged into violent outbursts even at the age of four. She was impossible to control. Family and friends recalled how she would lock herself in a room in a rage when she didn’t get what she wanted, kicking the door in her fury. Only when she had spent all her energies and was exhausted could her mother sit down with her and attempt to teach her gentleness and charity.
Though my childhood personality, at least as I remember it, was pretty calm, I have a distinct memory at twenty-one of raging against God. Just a month after suffering a stroke, and a year after my first profession of vows, I was silently before Jesus in the Eucharist one day in the chapel and from somewhere deep inside came words which surprised me, even shocked me. “I hate you,” I said to him. I had lost dreams and ambitions and physical abilities and, what seemed to me as a young adult, my future. And from somewhere within me, this anger and hatred at the one I felt was to blame came raging out. It took me by surprise, for, after all, I had been “well behaved” up to that point. Day after day, in a struggle that stretched to weeks and months and years, I submitted my heart to the transforming action of the Spirit at work in the Eucharist. Each day after receiving Jesus in Communion I prayed, “Help me, for I see now how poor I am, how in need I am of you, Jesus.”
In her diary, Elizabeth herself recorded how her first encounter with Jesus in the Eucharist was a moment of transformation. In fact, she said that it was decisive for the rest of her life. She began to take on from that moment the gentle self-control that would characterize her as an adult.
“In the depths of her soul, she heard his voice…. [The] Master took possession of her heart so completely that thenceforth her one desire was to give her life to Him” (The Spiritual Doctrine of Sister Elizabeth, pg 2)....
The most important truth to be convinced of is not that God loves you. As broken, wounded, wandering as we each may be, as desperately yearning to know that we matter and that we are worth someone’s attention, contrary to what we might think, we do not need most to know how much God loves us.
I almost cringe as I write these words. For almost 40 years this has been both my mantra and my misery, my hope against hope, the alphabet of my feelings of spiritual failure. I had not realized that I was seeking for something that was only half-true, a shabby imitation of the fierce and passionate, surprisingly disconcerting way of divine love.
In the first week of the spiritual exercises, St Ignatius draws the retreatant into love through the very narrow and demanding path of coming to grips with what is not loving in one’s life. The retreatant comes to Jesus in prayer, again and again, begging for the grace to acknowledge the mystery of iniquity which spins a web of deceit around them. Repeatedly I came before Jesus begging for the grace to become deeply aware of my personal sin history and my hidden disorders. I begged Jesus and Mary for interior knowledge of my sins, an awareness of the disorder of my actions, that I might hate them and allow God to bring order once again to my life.
The way of truth is the only foundation for the confidence of love. But ah! how hard is this truth!
Lord, remember not only men and women of good will, but also those of ill will. But do not remember all the suffering they inflicted on us. Remember the fruits we have borne thanks to this suffering: our comradeship, our humility, our courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart which has grown out of this; and when they come to judgment let all the fruits that we have borne be their forgiveness.”
~ Written on a piece of wrapping paper found near the body of a dead child in Ravensbruck, the second largest concentration camp for women in the German Reich, where 92,000 women and children died in the Holocaust.
How, O my God, could a woman in this death camp write these words?
How did she find the courage to keep her heart open? To care about the eternal salvation of those at whose hands she suffered and very likely died?
Friends, today we also are living through turbulent and violent times. As we watch the social fabric of our nation disintegrate with mass shootings and watch with horrified anger at what Russia is inflicting on the Ukrainian people and the world, we may find our hearts closing. It could be that our hearts are hardening in fear or anger without our even realizing it. Whatever we are feeling, it is okay. We might feel overwhelmed at the prospect of the future for our children and grandchildren. It is okay. We might feel lost in the midst of everything that is going on around us. It is all okay.
How difficult are you finding it to love and believe in the power of love in these days?
The news cycle overwhelms and incites the fires of anger and fear and hatred in our minds and hearts. It all can feel so righteous, so right. After all, there is a clear bad guy in these incidents, and our hearts immediately take the side of the innocent victims. Today only the bravest can keep lit in their hearts the flame of charity.
The grace we are asking of God: To have confidence in the way God accepts us even in our sin, to believe in his path for us that weaves its way through forgiveness and mercy, and to have the courage to turn to the One who alone can give us all we need instead of trying to fix ourselves.
Horizons of the Heart: Horizons of the Heart is a weekly retreat-in-life inspired by the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius, Donec Formetur by Blessed James Alberione, and my own notes from my thirty-day Ignatian retreat in 2022.
There is a mysterious passage in the book of Jeremiah:
“My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water” (2:13).
Jesus, the spring of Living Water, watches us as we so often dig our own cisterns, our own wells, from which we hope to draw water that will satisfy our thirst, make us happy, give us life, at least a tolerable life on this earth. In the Gospel of John, we meet the woman in Samaria who was just such a woman. To tell you the truth, so am I.
The grace we are asking of God: A deep confidence and a consistent trust in God’s care for us and his nearness to us in every moment, even in the events of our life that are our undoing.
Horizons of the Heart: Horizons of the Heart is a weekly retreat-in-life inspired by the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius, Donec Formetur by Blessed James Alberione, and my own notes from my thirty-day Ignatian retreat in 2022.
I love to pray Psalm 103, particularly with the translation of the New Jerusalem Bible:
Bless Yahweh, my soul, from the depths of my being, his holy name; bless Yahweh, my soul, never forget all his acts of kindness. ….Yahweh is tenderness and pity, slow to anger and rich in faithful love; his indignation does not last for ever, nor his resentment remain for all time; he does not treat us as our sins deserve, nor repay us as befits our offences. As the height of heaven above earth, so strong is his faithful love for those who fear him. …As tenderly as a father treats his children, so Yahweh treats those who fear him; he knows of what we are made, he remembers that we are dust” (vv. 1-2, 6-11, 13-14).
The day I meditated on this passage of Scripture at the beginning of my retreat, my soul was bleeding to know, truly know, that God cared for me, loved me, was near to me.
Did you ever ask yourself: What would it look like if God were caring for me? How can I know for sure?
Horizons of the Heart: Horizons of the Heart is a weekly retreat-in-life inspired by the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius, Donec Formetus by Blessed James Alberione, and my own notes from my thirty-day Ignatian retreat in 2022.
Beginnings are more important than endings. In fact, beginnings are already woven into every ending. The ending of the life the caterpillar has always known is already integrated into the process of the butterfly’s new beginning. The seeming ending of the Master’s life on Calvary was mysteriously taken up, and gently, in the Father’s hands, it became the stage for the mystery of resurrection beginnings that would be lived again and again and again in Jesus’ disciples' lives.
“Why would you look for the living One in a tomb?” said the angels in white, angels of the resurrection whose radiance washed away the black sorrow of the ending of the Lord’s life on Calvary (Luke 24:5 TPT). The women who had come to seek the Lord buried in the tomb, locked behind a giant stone, dead, whom they feared they would see no more, these women faced the darkness of the sepulcher now lit with almost blinding brilliance. “He is not here. He is risen.”
“There’s no reason to be afraid” (Mt. 28:5). Pause a moment and think of an ending in your life that was particularly sudden, seemingly absolute. Or an ending you are living through now: termination, loss, failure. Any ending. One as great as the breaking of a relationship or losing a pet, or moving, or retiring. Or one as beautiful as the wedding of a child or the turning of a new leaf in life. Any ending.
Don’t endings bring on feelings of fear?
“There’s no reason to be afraid,” said the angel to the women. I’m not so sure that the command to not be afraid actually shifted their fear into trust. Nevertheless, it is helpful to remember that amid all our dread, struggle, the anticipation of an uncertain future, the uncertainty about what is happening, there is something permanent that is the reason why we needn’t fear…needn’t fear deep down, needn’t believe the absolute worst, needn’t believe that the ending is, well, an absolute and final and irrevocable end.
“I know you’re here looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He isn’t here—he has risen victoriously, just as he said! Come inside the tomb and see the place where our Lord was lying” (Matthew 28:5-6 TPT).
he most difficult thing about being a follower of Jesus Christ is not climbing mountains of virtue or even walking through the valleys of incomprehensible sorrow. No. As difficult as these things may be, there is one thing more difficult still. Strangely, it is something even a child can do. Something we were created to do. Yet we, caught in the complex web of adulthood, we, more sophisticated Christians so far from the simple childlike faith that pleases so much the heart of God, we find this one thing, I dare say, almost impossible. We can talk about it, pray about it, preach about it, encourage others to do it. However, to totally and completely do this ourselves is the most difficult. Though it is the deepest desire of the most Sacred Heart of Jesus to see this in us, we’d rather do everything else but this.
The first thing to which we are invited—nay rather pushed to risk everything we have in order to do—is this: to trust.
To trust that God knows my name. That God cares about me. That Jesus is speaking the truth when he says, “I love a single soul as much as I love all souls together.” To trust that God reveals himself to me daily, even in each moment, in every situation without exception. That I am loved as I am. This love that flows to us from God’s heart is the most basic and secure fact of my life....
Friends, if you are struggling with being still in the arms of the God who walks with you through every event in your life, let these words of Psalm 46 and the example of Blessed Benedetta lead you into the arms of Love.
Music used by permission: https://www.fesliyanstudios.com/
You are an indispensable instrument of God’s plan and in perfectly surrendering to the divine flow of love, as mysterious and incomprehensible as it sometimes appears, you will find your happiness.
New Year's Resolutions often target weaknesses in order to increase strengths so we can be who we want to be. Mystery and divine providence often relies specifically on our weaknesses to be the places where the glory of God shines through as we play our part in the drama of the mysterious plan of salvation.
In the end, life is Mystery: not perplexing confusion, but the Wisdom that is larger than our strategies, the Future that is greater than our projects, the Love that will encompass all of our potential.
Mystery means God has a plan for you that is perfect in every way, a plan that can encompass and save even suffering and disappointment.
Mystery means God will use you just as you are for a plan that has existed since before the foundation of the world and will exist into the unending future of the eternal kingdom.
I've been missing for 6 months because I've been home caregiving for my parents. What a gift, what a wealth of healing and mercy it has been.
Today I share a story from a young mother whom I observed yesterday that was also a moment of healing and grace.
As we gather near Jesus this Christmas season, we all have moments of tears, wistful memories of what could have been, empty places in our hearts and at our tables…. We sometimes shed tears, and are unable to explain exactly what they mean or what it is we need. God, like a good mother, says to you, “It’s okay to cry.”
God wraps his arms around you, kneels down to look you right in the eye, and whispers, “It’s okay to feel the way you do.” In a season where we are told we should be happy and nostalgic and romantic and excitedly anticipating sleigh rides “over the mountains and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go….”, it’s more than okay if your heart also carries a weight that is tearing open the veil to eternity from whence comes “the Dawn from on High.”
Music from ashamaluevmusic "Heaven"
O Eucharistic heart of Jesus, In you I find hope and freedom, truth and belonging, forgiveness and healing, friendship and mercy and life!
In your Eucharistic heart, O Jesus Christ, I experience the greatest love. You make me worthy of love, you make me capable of loving others as you have loved me.
O Jesus, in the Eucharist you rescue me from despair by attaching me to yourself, the Source of all Life. Without you I can do nothing (John 15:5).
The stillness of humility...
Be still. Comforting words that we find in Psalm 46. “Be still and know that I am God.”
For me, these words conjure up quiet moments in a sacred space or beautiful place in nature. To do “be still” I could imagine calming myself down and enjoying a heart at peace, a world at peace, relationships at peace…
Which they are not.
Our world is anything but in peace. Being a fallen human being not every one of my relationships is at peace. And when I try to be quiet my heart struggles to find inner rest, and my mind takes off like wild stallions.
Be still. Our hearts are rocked at times with reactive emotions and deep storms of fear and resentment. Our minds filled with useless, cynical, and angry thoughts that like gnats destroy our peace. I can hold my Father’s hand and bow to what I cannot change, determined nonetheless to care compassionately and see others with God’s eyes, confident that I need not prove, finish, or amount to anything to be his beloved daughter.
In his unpublished manuscript The Wound of Existence, James Moran talks about the game we adults play, the game of “happy ever endings,” overcoming every challenge, “blasting” through every obstacle. We find our consolations in the crutches of ego, predictable order and reliable control, measurements, outcomes, neat and tidy boxes where we label everything to keep it safe.
We are all in this game that is stretched out on the surface of reality and only by remaining on the surface, contrary to every heart’s call to the deep, can we stay in the game.
But life’s purpose isn’t fulfilled by games of child’s play. It is that uncontrollable twist of our life’s story that brings shipwreck to the games, casts our hearts into the nothingness of a future that we cannot control, and ultimately puts us into the arms of God. These twists and turns of our life can be dramatic or simple, but they are there to free us from illusion and deepen our joy in life.....
There are times when we have to deal with big questions. And then there are times when big questions sear deeply into our identity, shake our consciousness, tear our hearts with guilt. They toss us about with fear, doubt, and loneliness. The big questions seem to be dealing with us. We might stay up at night wondering where we fit in God’s plan. Questions haunt us: Who am I? What is the purpose of my life? How will I go on from here?
When we’re haunted by these big questions, we are like the apostles after Calvary’s sorrow and the collapse of their hope, when rumors suddenly swirled around that some of them had seen Jesus alive. How they must have longed to see once again the face of their Beloved Master, and yet also perhaps felt their hearts shrink in the uncertainty of what his eyes would say to them.
The forty days of Easter before the Ascension are like an educative process. After the resurrection, Jesus doesn’t engage the apostles on the level of emotion. He becomes their guide through the complexities of their hearts and the events that left them fearing what God’s plan might be. To them, Jesus asserts the authority and gentle power of his presence: Do not be afraid. It is I.
The joy of Easter is the joy of the Gospel, the Good News that breaks open our lives with the possibility of mercy and hope.
That life could be more than we could ever have dreamed, that our days could be other than what we believe we’ve deserved.
Resurrection joy this year has been a time of real grace for me.
I like to imagine the apostles after the Resurrection. The Gospel stories leave us with a sense of breathless wonder and excited disbelief. Slowly, though, ever so slowly do our minds change and our hearts reshape their hopes. There must have been such gentleness about the gradual realization that Someone had changed everything about what they thought would be their future. Even Jesus thoughtfully came again and again in different places, in different ways, to help his incredulous followers take in sips the ultimate Reality of his Resurrection and continuous presence in and among them.
Slowly is the perfect word to describe this Easter for me. Slowly has my heart warmed to the fact that I am different than who I thought I was. Broken then, still broken now, but loved forever.
As we come near the end of the pandemic we realize this St Patrick's Day that it was around this day last year that lockdown's began here in the United States. This great saint can teach us much about hospitality and protection as we emerge from isolation.
Today I invited both Sr Julia Mary and Jeannette de Beauvoir for a conversation about Lent... Lent in a pandemic, doing penance when we feel like we've been doing penance all year, should we make resolutions for Lenten practice or is there something better, what are some secrets for a fruitful and grace-filled Lent. I hope you join us!
Here we are in our second pandemic Lent. Maybe we feel that we have been in Lent all through these twelve virus-riddled months. Maybe we’re dreading a season of greater penance when we’re longing to get loose from restrictions as they are somewhat lifted. Maybe we’re just numb and Lent isn’t registering at all. We’re just too tired to face it. Or perhaps the familiar rituals and practices of Lent offer comfort when we are so in need of something or Someone who understands and can do something. about what’s happening to us.
...
I stood beside the leper in Mark’s Gospel who dared to approach Jesus and tell him confidently: “If you will, you can cure me!” Lepers by regulation, as we saw above, were to remain outside the camp so as not to infect others. This leper, however, risked everything by approaching Jesus who no doubt was surrounded by a crowd of people. In the two lines of the Gospel story it seems like it was an ordinary run-of-the-mill request. Leper shows up and makes his request. To his request, Jesus responds, “I do will it, be cured.” End of story. Can you imagine, though, the drama as people realized a leper was standing “inside the community space” right next to them. The leper was a threat to their health and survival. And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched the leper. Jesus didn’t run. He didn’t tell him to leave because he was a danger to him. He didn’t even call attention to how he was breaking the regulations. Instead he heard only the request. He saw only the leper’s heart. He was moved only by his most compassionate love that brought him to earth to save and heal a wounded race.
These past two weeks I have spent from 3 to 5 hours most evenings or early mornings sitting beside a dear sister-friend who was making her last great ascent. That final walk. The ultimate journey. The loving return.
Each breath of hers was precious and on that last night before she died God helped me to realize that in the end, really, that is all we have…our breath…our current breath. We are not promised our next breath. We already have kissed the last breath goodbye. We cannot cling to it, as we cannot hold onto the past.
And even that breath is a gift. A gift of total gratuitously glorious love from a divine Lover who is supporting us in his arms even as we breath.
On that last ascent, it will not matter what we have created or achieved or known or acquired. The fact that I have written a book, or started a company, or sold an astounding number of widgets, or even loved will not be mine as a monument to me..
I will have only this breath that is a gift to me right now at this moment.
The years of midlife. Transitions. Endings. Wanderings. Grieving.
But also new beginnings. Surprises. Unexpected redirection. Unsuspected rewrites to your accepted narrative for the “you” that you’ve grown comfortable with.
This is the first in a series on the middle years in which we are looking at our midlife transitions, our ultimate yesses to our vocations in the light of the women and men who at midlife responded to God's gift and call. Today we're talking about Zechariah and Elizabeth, the parents of John the Baptist.
This year’s Christmas season is not laden with the expectations of extended family celebrations, festive Christmas meals, and open doors to visitors come to share the joy of the days of rest and peace that fill the Christmas season.
Pandemic loss and grief weigh upon these Christmas days and bring shadows to our hearts.
Maybe we feel empty. Like the world has stopped. Worry for the future seeps into the celebration of God-with-us who was born among us…. And…where is he for me? Now?
Your heart’s cry, whatever it may be, let it blend with the wail of the Infant King that midnight at his birth.
Sr Kathryn Hermes, FSP, author of Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach and Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments
As we journey into the new year I’ve been thinking a lot about St Joseph. He is a “star” in the Christmas narrative, leading Mary to Bethlehem for the census. He protected her on that blessed night when the Savior of the world was born in a stable in the midnight dark. Joseph stands out again as he saves the day, whisking Mary and Jesus off to Egypt and safely out of the clutches of Herod, who attempted to kill the baby.
Perhaps from the perspective of our eternal reward we’ll see how we too were the amazing actors in a moment of history—large or small—upon which the future of others rested.
But as Joseph trudged away from Nazareth I think he wasn’t imagining himself in any saintly celebrity status.
He was leaving his plans, his preparations for the Messiah’s birth, his workshop and place in Nazareth as the village carpenter. He was leaving behind his family, his support, his home, his synagogue. He left everything he had known, built, and shared for so many years of his life: the self he knew, the role he played in the community, his place in the larger family.
He walked into silence, mystery, glory…
This is probably a more difficult Advent than most, a time when we long for the joys of Christmas, even for our own emotional equilibrium. Today we talk about how God stoops to us in our weakness with an amazing love that changes everything.
This Sunday is the Feast of Christ the King. I've been thinking a lot about the Kingdom of Christ within me, how I surrender to the power of the King, how I turn my life over entirely to the reign of the Kingdom. As we close this year, it is a perfect liturgical Feast to prepare us for Advent and Christmas. Both an end and a beginning.
When we nourish ourselves on the Word of God we gradually are able to see an unexpected, unearned future: new life, a new heart, a new future, a new relationship with God. The word of the Lord became a part of Ezekiel’s being when the prophet was told at his calling, "Eat the Scroll," and it can become a part of our being as well. When we regularly digest God’s word, options become available to us that we couldn’t anticipate.
In the Gospels Jesus often asks seemingly useless questions. He asks a blind man, “Do you want to see?” He asks a leper, “What do you want me to do for you?” He asks a man who had been sick for thirty-eight years and is sitting by the side of the sheep pool, “Do you want to be made well?” What answer was Jesus expecting?
If we are suffering with anxiety or depression, or just trying to to survive these last months of 2020, the attempt to just survive can contract our personal universe to a “safe” size. Our thinking patterns can become caught in overcontrolled ruts. We lose flexibility in favor of the fight/flight/freeze mechanism that leads to hypervigilance and shutdown.
Jesus invites us to see in new ways.
Today I share a dream that I had so long ago, but which has directed my life ever since. It points in the direction of loss and worship. Right now we are experiencing so much uncertainty and fear and isolation. May this biblical invitation to worship be a blessing for you.
These days of pandemic and lockdown are creating a new pandemic of mental health issues. In this podcast I address some ways in which Jesus helps us free us from the stick, heavy, and negative thinking that is part of the difficult days we are living. We'll talk about why it's hard to get rid of these thoughts, what Jesus knows that we forget and how he helps us get free from these sticky thoughts, ways to intentionally focus on the freeing power of truth, and more.
Jeannette and I talk today about an experience at prayer and selection of my journal:
Iam acting: within what breaks, I am vast Abyss within the falling, I am depthless Depth in the emptying, I am the Silence
Stop Shed your mind’s unconscious gossip and still your Heart Touch your forehead to the earth …My carpet a floral carpet Crimson Red on which you bumble and tumble
in My Glory.
___
“Who could have thought my shrivel’d heart Could have recover’d greennesse? George Herbert, The Flower
I’m almost 57. Fifty seven years of people, situations, issues, reaction, desires, disappointment, dreams, loves….
This year on my birthday, I’m making the resolution to “not look back.”
To not look back at disappointment.
To not look back at rejection.
To not look back at loss.
Of course, looking back is important to do at times. I actually began to rediscover parts of my life during the imposed solitude of the pandemic that I hadn’t taken the time to integrate precisely because I hadn’t looked back. I needed to take the time to “connect the psychological-emotional-spiritual dots” between what I had experienced and lived through and what I was still carrying today in my heart and mind.
Making the connections is important. By making connections we can surrender to God what he has helped us recognize. We can let it go. We can understand it more deeply, even recognize where we may have been mistaken in our perception of what happened....
The seismic shifts that are underway in every aspect of our culture these days are nothing compared to the seismic shifts God is calling me to personally, perhaps calling all of us too if there is to be any resolution that will promote the human advancement of us all.
We can no longer face anything the same way we did five months ago. It seems like such a breath of time, and yet a centuries-wide chasm has been broken open by the processes and changes that are fracturing and reshaping the world as we have known it.
We collectively stare into a widening canyon of uncertainty as life spins into unexpected directions. Uncertainty: where will all this end? What will happen to me? Will I be able to keep what I have? Am I somehow also responsible for this? Am I all that God has put me on this earth to be and to do?
Yet a window of possibility is emerging… The possibility that we might feel with courage… That we might decide with love… That we might listen with neutrality… That we might be willing to lose something that another might have, to die that another might live…
Hi there. I’m Sr Kathryn Hermes and thank you for joining me as we explore the Love that is the heart of the world and the work of the Heart that helps us become this Love and to discover it in the world so that all the world becomes to us like the miraculous burning bush. We have been invisibly stamped with the signature, the seal of the God who bends over us with such tenderness.
2020 has been a year so far that has called me to c-o-n-v-e-r-s-i-o-n. COVID-19 which has swept across the world, months of isolation, loss of so much ministry that had been built up by so many of my sisters, the breaking open of the tragic wound of racism and the violence that has filled our streets....
Nothing is as we expected.
Everything has been a surprise.
This moment alone is the entry into the still-point of presence
God’s presence
Royalty free music from https://www.fesliyanstudios.com
the present
the heart-presence where wisdom lies.
Hi there. I’m Sr Kathryn Hermes and thank you for joining me as we explore the Love that is the heart of the world and the work of the Heart that helps us become this Love and to discover it in the world so that all the world becomes to us like the miraculous burning bush. We have been invisibly stamped with the signature, the seal of the God who bends over us with such tenderness.
In these days I have felt helplessness, disbelief, horror that one human being could do to another what we all witnessed in the last 9 minutes of Mr George Floyd’s life. Dismay that one person could do this to his brother, yes to his brother and mine, for we all, as sons and daughters of one Creator are brothers and sisters to each other, members of one another. How can we allow this to happen to our brothers and our sisters who have struggled for centuries under the intolerable burden of racism. I go back to that Gaze, the Gaze of Jesus that moment when he said to keep the quiet eye of my heart focused on him.
Quotes from the podcast:
Sometimes I just want to bury my face in my hands as a kneel before Jesus. Quiet. Rest. Serenity. Wisdom. Love. I need it all to bring a shattered heart back into one. Particularly in times of civil unrest, periodically shielding my heart from the opinions and actions of others gives me a chance to breathe. To breathe in the Spirit. To gaze at the world with the eyes of Christ.
It is the Gaze by which Jesus makes me his sister, his friend, his beloved. We communicate our hearts and our heart’s love or hate through our eyes. In the Gaze of Jesus I see the eyes of every single person in this country who at this time is trying to grapple with this. When I raise my eyes of Jesus in the Eucharist, I see their faces incorporated in his risen Body.
Somewhere deep inside me there is that flowing river of love that can hold in itself every brother and sister no matter how broken...
Look into yourself and see God within you.
Fasten your eyes on your heart and God, rising out of your heart, will shine on your soul.
Royalty free music from https://www.fesliyanstudios.com
ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER…
God has amazing ways of knocking on people's hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey. You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com.
Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST.
Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way.
Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace.
Become a part of the HeartWork Community, A blend of spiritual guidance, mentorship, and counseling, the HeartWork community is a place where you learn to explore, love, open and nourish your heart, your deep heart where God is dwelling within you.
We are continuing a series of six Podcasts looking at Light and Darkness - Courage and Faith - Healing and Hope through a Marian Lens. Each episode features an event in Mary's life and a particular image we have chosen to prayerfully reflect on together. This Podcast Series accompanies the launching of the Third Edition of my book: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach. In today's episode we explore how Jesus is in the darkness with us and ideas for praying in the darkness. We learn in our Marian lens into the moment when Jesus was taken down from the cross.
This is today's image:
Image Credit: Ugolino di Nerio [Public domain] 1280-1330 Image is in the public domain.
Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach (Third Edition) available at www.paulinestore.org
ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER…
God has amazing ways of knocking on people's hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey. You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com.
Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST.
Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way.
Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace.
Become a part of the HeartWork Community, A blend of spiritual guidance, mentorship, and counseling, the HeartWork community is a place where you learn to explore, love, open and nourish your heart, your deep heart where God is dwelling within you.
The anxiety that has bubbled just below the surface capsizing my frightened heart through all the experiences I’ve had during the lockdown has brought me in touch with anxiety issues that are nothing new. They have been woven through my life and have affected me spiritually and emotionally. This may be happening to you. Perhaps you are touching more keenly the wounds of PTSD, OCD, scrupulosity, midlife losses as sands are shifting. Emotional struggles. Grief. Depression. Fear.
I’m reminded of what I was once told by a wise mentor: What is important is not the situation itself, but how we are with these situations that are calling us to doubt, question, and fear ourselves and sometimes life itself.
The realities that we live through can bring on headaches, sleeplessness, dissociation, emotional distress. Sometimes these can last for weeks, months, years. At times we are aware of how all this is wearing on us physically, psychologically, and spiritually. At other times it remains a secret even from ourselves.
Mindful practices, awareness exercises, contemplative presence can help us come home to who we are, as we are, in whatever space we are in....
We are continuing a series of six Podcasts looking at Light and Darkness - Courage and Faith - Healing and Hope through a Marian Lens. Each episode features an event in Mary's life and a particular image we have chosen to prayerfully reflect on together. This Podcast Series accompanies the launching of the Third Edition of my book: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach. In today's episode we explore how to make joy even in our darker moments and the valleys of life as well as how to build joy with others. We are leaning into the Marian lens of the wedding at Cana.
This is today's image:
Image Credit: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo [Public domain] 1617-1682 The Marriage Feast of Cana Image is in the public domain.
Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach (Third Edition) available at www.paulinestore.org
ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER…
God has amazing ways of knocking on people's hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey. You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com.
Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST.
Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way.
Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace.
Become a part of the HeartWork Community, A blend of spiritual guidance, mentorship, and counseling, the HeartWork community is a place where you learn to explore, love, open and nourish your heart, your deep heart where God is dwelling within you.
We are continuing a series of six Podcasts looking at Light and Darkness - Courage and Faith - Healing and Hope through a Marian Lens. Each episode features an event in Mary's life and a particular image we have chosen to prayerfully reflect on together. This Podcast Series accompanies the launching of the Third Edition of my book: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach. In today's episode we explore the first things you'll want to do to survive depression, what the journey is like, and how the Church and your faith can assist and support your search for healing. We are leaning into our Marian gaze by reflecting on the Nativity.
This is today's image:
Image Credit: Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale [Public domain] 1872 – 1945 - The_Nativity Image is in the public domain.
Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach (Third Edition) available at www.paulinestore.org
ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER…
God has amazing ways of knocking on people's hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey. You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com.
Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST.
Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way.
Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace.
Become a part of the HeartWork Community, A blend of spiritual guidance, mentorship, and counseling, the HeartWork community is a place where you learn to explore, love, open and nourish your heart, your deep heart where God is dwelling within you.
I'm so happy to bring to you an Easter reflection from Sr Marie Paul Curley. She's such a great writer and has so much experience living through difficult times. Happy Easter! Sr Kathryn
“Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark, and saw the stone removed from the tomb” (John 20:1). Our experience of Lent this year has been intensified by the distress and restrictions caused by the worldwide pandemic, resulting in a situation many of us would not have imagined six months ago. At the same time, since mid- Lent we have been distanced from Mass and the immersive liturgies for Holy Week. How do we celebrate Easter when our world has turned upside down and we know that the global dark days are not over? ...
Friends, this is a reflection for Holy Thursday, the unique celebration of the Last Supper we are living, huddled in our homes in fear, in stillness....
May your hearts be at peace.
Sr Kathryn
We are continuing a series of six Podcasts looking at Light and Darkness - Courage and Faith - Healing and Hope through a Marian Lens. Each episode features an event in Mary's life and a particular image we have chosen to prayerfully reflect on together. This Podcast Series accompanies the launching of the Third Edition of my book: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach. In today's episode we explore tips and suggestions for being a friend or family member who is close to someone suffering with depression. We talk about different ways of companioning those who are suffering. We are leaning into our Marian gaze by reflecting on the Visitation.
This is today's image:
Image Credit: Fra Angelico (circa 1395-1455) The Visitation Image is in the public domain.
Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach (Third Edition) available at www.paulinestore.org
ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER…
God has amazing ways of knocking on people's hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey. You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com.
Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST.
Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way.
Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace.
Become a part of the HeartWork Community, A blend of spiritual guidance, mentorship, and counseling, the HeartWork community is a place where you learn to explore, love, open and nourish your heart, your deep heart where God is dwelling within you.
Nothing (read not even the coronavirus pandemic) will separate me from the love of Christ.
The words of Paul. A hymn. An affirmation. A credo. Nothing at all, neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:38-39.
Right now, under the barrage of overwhelming media coverage of the pandemic, you probably feel that nothing could separate you from COVID-19. Not government pronouncements, hand sanitizer and disinfectant, stockpiles of toilet paper rolls, not even prayer could free us from the inexorable march through the world of this pandemic. Mounting fear leads to panic. We do things that in life under normal circumstances we are sure we wouldn’t do.
Julian of Norwich offers another way of understanding Paul’s sentiment. Julian of Norwich, known for her Revelations of Divine Love, was an English anchorite and mystic. Her 16 “showings” are related to the passion of Jesus Christ. She lived in the fourteenth century.
Julian was no stranger to suffering, which she saw as a channel through which God could draw us closer to himself. The line most popularly quoted from her writings is this: “All shall be well, all shall be well, every manner of thing shall be well.” Julian could believe that all would be well, because divine providence brings good even from sin, even from evil, even from disaster. Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ!
As we learn to stay home, we can learn to "stay home" deeply within our hearts.
So as you shelter in place, stay home, or perhaps put your own life at risk on the front lines of essential services and medical care, let these words of God bring your heart peace. “Be still, and know that I am God, exalted over nations, exalted over earth!” (Psalm 46) This pandemic is not more powerful than God who holds us all in the palm of his hand. Having “outward stillness” imposed on us through “lockdowns” gives us the opportunity to search for the tiny flickering lights of inner stillness, the relieved sighing of our exhausted hearts that we are not alone, that the darkness has never and will never overcome the divine plan at work in the world’s history. As the Abbot General of the Cistercians said in his recent letter, “A time of trial can make people harsher or more sensitive, more indifferent or more compassionate. Fundamentally, all depends on the love with which we live them out, and this above all is what Christ comes to grant us and to awaken in us with his presence. Any trial whatever comes and goes, but if we live it with love, the wound that the trial cuts into our lives will be able to remain open, like that on the Body of the Risen One, like an ever surging spring of compassion.”
We are continuing a series of six Podcasts looking at Light and Darkness - Courage and Faith - Healing and Hope through a Marian Lens. Each episode features an event in Mary's life and a particular image we have chosen to prayerfully reflect on together. This Podcast Series accompanies the launching of the Third Edition of my book: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach. In today's episode we explore how our distorted thought patterns can make us more vulnerable to depression and together do an exercise to tack our spiraling automatic thoughts. We lean into our Marian lens by reflecting on the Annunciation.
This is today's image:
Image Credit: Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1898 Philadelphia Museum of Art. Image is in the public domain. Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach (Third Edition) available at www.paulinestore.org
ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER…
God has amazing ways of knocking on people's hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey. You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com.
Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST.
Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way.
Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace.
Become a part of the HeartWork Community, A blend of spiritual guidance, mentorship, and counseling, the HeartWork community is a place where you learn to explore, love, open and nourish your heart, your deep heart where God is dwelling within you.
We are starting a series of six Podcasts looking at Light and Darkness - Courage and Faith - Healing and Hope through a Marian Lens. Each episode features an event in Mary's life and a particular image we have chosen to prayerfully reflect on together. This Podcast Series accompanies the launching of the Third Edition of my book: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach. Today's episode is an introduction to depression and an introduction to our Marian Devotional gaze.
This is Today's Image
Image Credit: Ugolino di Nerio [Public domain] 1280-1330
Image is in the public domain. Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach (Third Edition) available at www.paulinestore.org.
ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER…
God has amazing ways of knocking on people's hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey. You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com.
Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST.
Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way.
Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace.
Become a part of the HeartWork Community, A blend of spiritual guidance, mentorship, and counseling, the HeartWork community is a place where you learn to explore, love, open and nourish your heart, your deep heart where God is dwelling within you.
My heart melts a bit whenever I remember what God has done for me. I forget. I wander. I wonder. I'm uncertain. I decide to go elsewhere.... But in the end he always brings me back. He always recreates me...recreates us. It is his delight to do so.
Sometimes the pain doesn't go away. That inner heart pain. We see it in the eyes of others who carry regrets and disappointments and sorrow. Today is a guided meditation for healing memories with a practical process anyone can use to grow in serenity and peace.
Today is our final reflection on ways to live the new year in a new way, to seek the new you in the present, every present moment of the coming year. We'll talk about a practice I began to address the negative thoughts that I find myself thinking.... And did I discover how many negative thoughts I had! Jeannette and I talk about how quickly things start to change when a simple practice gets put into place that catches our mind whenever it is engaged (or kidnapped may be better) by a negative thought.
ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER…
God has amazing ways of knocking on people's hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey. You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com.
Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST.
Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way.
Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace.
Become a part of the HeartWork Community, A blend of spiritual guidance, mentorship, and counseling, the HeartWork community is a place where you learn to explore, love, open and nourish your heart, your deep heart where God is dwelling within you.
When we think of New Year's resolutions, we are often really thinking about closure and control, about getting to a goal that helps me become something I want to be. Poets, authors, and saints offer different perspectives on life that invite openness, vulnerability and love. Jeannette and I talk about contributions from Rainer Maria Rilke, St Augustine, Adrienne Rich, Erich Fromme, Anne Truitt, St Elizabeth Ann Seton, and others.
ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER…
God has amazing ways of knocking on people's hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey. You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com.
Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST.
Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way.
Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace.
Become a part of the HeartWork Community, A blend of spiritual guidance, mentorship, and counseling, the HeartWork community is a place where you learn to explore, love, open and nourish your heart, your deep heart where God is dwelling within you.
This year, instead of resolutions, I began the year with practices. In today's conversation with Jeannette, I share a practice I recently began: doing everything as if it were potentially the final time I would have the privilege of doing it. In our conversation we talk about what I learned after just a few days of doing this and why I think it is more effective than New Year's resolutions.
January is the time when we think about resolutions for the new year, for a new me. By this time the regular spate of articles debating the worth of making resolutions has just about ended. What I want to offer you are four conversations about setting a solid foundation to a new year, a foundation that focuses on practices for the present rather than resolutions for the ideal future image we have of ourselves. We discuss why resolutions sometimes don’t work, and I share my four criteria for effective resolutions.
During this month we will be sharing in the podcast some effective practices I’ve started and how they have made a difference almost immediately in my live. And we’ll explore new perspectives from poets, authors and saints that will help us retain the newness of the New Year.
Enjoy this conversation between Jeannette and I. Welcome to the New Year 2020. May it be filled with much grace.
Okay, I admit that the title for this article is a little startling. We are celebrating Christmas, right? Check your calendars. It is still December. Look outside. The liturgy is talking about Christ’s birth and the stores are boasting Christmas specials.
But I couldn’t resist not sharing with you an insight into the glory of Christmas that I discovered in a very old book The Mass Through the Year by Aemiliana Lohr.
Sharing this is important to me because after reading the reflection, I am finding myself saddened that our Christmas celebrations never stretch us beyond “remembering” and “re-enacting” the first Christmas or drawing some comforting or, less often, a challenging application from the Christmas narrative for our own lives. Many present-moment Christmases disappoint as we recall the memories of Christmases of happier years or sorrow through Christmases that now are marred by anniversaries of losses we still regret.
We are not the shepherds who were startled from sleep by choruses of angelic delight eagerly awaking a slumbering world to the unexpected and truly wondrous news that the mighty Savior lay waiting for them in a manger. No. We have read the Gospels. We know Jesus’ story. We’ve heard his parables over and over again. Each Lent and Easter we’ve commemorated his death and resurrection, and in Baptism we’ve died with him and have risen with him….
The Church can’t see the child in swaddling clothes laid in a manger without remembering the memorial of his other birth from the tomb.
The solemnity of the birth of the King Christ was in view of the day on which his power and rule would be solidified as he rose from the dead and ascended to his place beside his Father in heaven. ...
It was just a small photo my dad texted me the other day. Around the tiny pine cone tree that stood proudly on their kitchen table he and mom had strung an equally tiny string of white lights. For what is a Christmas tree without lights?
What is Christmas without the star blazing in the night, announcing the glory of the news of the Messiah’s birth?
As we drove home after dark Sunday with strains of music from the Christmas concert performed by our choir still in my heart, I felt an almost child-like wonder at the lights that stood as solitary sentinels in the darkened windows of the homes in our neighborhood. House after house was trimmed in light. In just a few days we will decorate our own convent with nativity scenes and a tree, with symbols of the Christmas story…and with light.
I still remember near our convent in Metairie Al Copeland’s house on Folse Drive that attracted carloads of visitors from near and far in December to see the thousands of lights that filled every inch of their yard. The owners moved out in October while their property was prepared by a professional Christmas decorator with a unique theme for this December extravaganza of light which brings out the wonder in both kids and adults alike.
Light.
We turn on the lights after dark. Lights are more visible in the night. It dispels the night. Stars are only visible in the night sky. So even as Christmas is celebrated with lights, on a deeper level it is so because there is darkness.
St Augustine wrote:
Wake up, O human being! For it was for you that God was made man. Rise up and realize it was all for you. Eternal death would have awaited you had He not been born in time. Never would you be freed from your sinful flesh had He not taken to Himself the likeness of sinful flesh. Everlasting would be your misery had He not performed this act of mercy. You would not have come to life again had He not come to die your death. You would have perished had He not come....
Christmas. The most wonderful time of the year. When tidings of great joy were told to the shepherds about the birth of the Son of God, the Prince of Peace. But what if we can't hear those tidings of great joy this year, in this world, in our world? What if we are carrying around a sorrow that makes us wonder if it is possible to even believe that Jesus' birth made any difference? Do we live in a future that is mystery or enigma? In this podcast I reflect upon how to see the mystery of Christmas when one's heart is sad.
I think about the Christmas season's tug of war over the rights of the public visibility of Christmas language and display, as well as people who feel their rights to express their faith openly are being taken away. I wonder if we Christians are missing the point altogether.
As Christians who reverence the Other who accepted and forgave us, experiencing the other as a good and not a threat should be the hallmark of our common living. It is true we now live in a society where we cannot assume that others share the same foundational beliefs about the good of humanity as we.
Nevertheless, it has always been the human experience that many different voices need to converge in a dialogue in which we consider the "Other" one with ourselves, a dialogue in which we are all together trying to come closer to truth. Christmas teaches us that truth, more than each group vying for power in an argument, is more correctly seen as a relationship.
ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER… God has amazing ways of knocking on people's hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey. You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com. - Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST. - Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way. - Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace. - Become a part of the HeartWork Community, a place where you can ask the hard questions and find a path to a life that is free, fulfilling and fruitful.
In our conversation today we explore the new energy that allows us to step back, reflect and create a vision of the rest of our life. Using St Teresa's Four Ways of Watering a Garden we explore how prayer deepens during our middle years helping us to see our life with new eyes.
There is so much about our faith that centers on generosity, especially the abundance of love we receive from God unconditionally. We know fundamentally we are blessed. But even so, it takes some effort to cultivate our attention to finding—and keeping—a continued awareness of the presence of God in daily life. This awareness makes us more open to seeking God’s hope and his guidance for us in all things, from great and small wonders to the realities of the poor and vulnerable.
Using James Fowler's stages of faith, we explore in our conversation practical ways to grow in generosity of spirit in our middle years.
Belief, hope, and the spirit of generosity come together to make people more effective. It’s not hard to figure out that the more people believe in what they’re doing, the more they have hope for the future. The more hope they have that tomorrow will be better than today, the more likely they are to be generous of spirit in all they do. The more generous they are, the more everyone around them is likely to believe in the greatness of the community. The more they believe, the better their lives will be.
ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER… God has amazing ways of knocking on people's hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey.
You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com. Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST. Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise.
I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way. Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace. Become a part of the HeartWork Community, a place where you can ask the hard questions and find a path to a life that is free, fulfilling and fruitful.
Today is our third conversation about midlife learnings. In our conversation today Jeannette and I explore how the Holy Spirit knows that dream God had when he created us, that God still has for us, and that God will faithfully bring about in us. The Spirit knows how to pray best for this because the Spirit is always in harmony with God's desires and ultimate will. We talk about how we can embrace these middle years so that we can stop looking back and keep walking forward into God's beautiful dream for our lives.
ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER… God has amazing ways of knocking on people's hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey. You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com. Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST. Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way. Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace. Become a part of the HeartWork Community, a place where you can ask the hard questions and find a path to a life that is free, fulfilling and fruitful.
Today we're having our second conversation on my "midlife learnings." Be attentive to pockets of possibility. Jeannette de Beauvoir and I explore Daniel Levinson's stages of adult development and how we can lean into possibility, lean into transformation.
All of our life we’re made so that we lean into possibilies. We have the ability to catch that moment, that spark, that pocket and have it guide us forward.
ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER… God has amazing ways of knocking on people's hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey. You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com. Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST. Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way. Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace. Become a part of the HeartWork Community, a place where you can ask the hard questions and find a path to a life that is free, fulfilling and fruitful.
Today we're starting a series of five podcasts on my "midlife learnings." The first one we take up today is about getting lost. These middle years can leave us feeling lost at times as we transition from who we have been to who we are to become.... Jeannette de Beauvoir and I take up this conversation of why it is important to get lost sometimes. "Being lost is challenging. Dante wrote about his traveler finding himself 'in dark woods, the right way lost' when he descended into the Inferno, and that’s what it can feel like, being in dark woods. You don’t know which way to take to get out. You don’t know what tomorrow will look like. You wish you had what you lost, even if it wasn’t good for you. You might even feel like God has abandoned you. But that’s when he’s closest. That’s when he’s saying, 'Take my hand. Trust me. I love you. I’ll show you the way out.' "
ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER… God has amazing ways of knocking on people's hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey. You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com. Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST. Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way. Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace. Become a part of the HeartWork Community, a place where you can ask the hard questions and find a path to a life that is free, fulfilling and fruitful.
The spiritual life, prayer, spiritual development, the journey to holiness—whatever terms you use to identify your journey in Christ to the Father—begins not with a method, a practice, a prayer. It begins with a Face, a Voice, that at a certain moment relates to you with stronger, more urgent, more insistent tones. Many years ago I would resolve that I needed to pray extra, or adopt a certain practice, or do special things in order to grow in holiness. What I really needed to do, and eventually learned, is that it's the Voice of the Lord that initiates any movement along the way.
Many times that movement is mysterious. Sometimes it feels like we aren’t moving at all, or are moving backwards. As long as we, like Gabrielle Bossis, keep speaking to Jesus about what is in our heart, the questions we have, the fears, the struggles to be or do what we think the Lord wants of us, we will begin to hear the Voice within us, assuring us that he is leading the way, we simply need to respond.
ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER… God has amazing ways of knocking on people's hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey. You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com. Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST. Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way. Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace. Become a part of the HeartWork Community, a place where you can ask the hard questions and find a path to a life that is free, fulfilling and fruitful.
So I thought I’d start off with a biggie for a lot of people: the ghosts of the past. You know, the things we’ve done that we’re not proud of, the uncertainty about God really having forgiven us, the regrets we carry in our hearts for things that now cannot be undone, those nagging fears we keep pushing out of sight.
In other words we keep looking at the rearview mirror instead of through the windshield, straight ahead as we travel on our journey through life to our ultimate goal: heaven.
But it’s hard not to. Right? Those ghosts of the past have consequences that we may still feel and which impact our life. Sometimes they may feel like they have the ultimate power over us of eternal life or death. It’s those regrets particularly that we really don’t want to have to look at.
What I want to raise to your awareness here is this: We’ve listened to these thoughts in our heads maybe a whole life long. We forget they are just thoughts we’re used to thinking, we’re comfortable with. However, we’ve also heard the words of Scripture proclaimed, powerful words….
It’s time to take these thoughts in our head directly to Jesus.
ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER… God has amazing ways of knocking on people's hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey. You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com. Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST. Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way. Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace. Become a part of the HeartWork Community, a place where you can ask the hard questions and find a path to a life that is free, fulfilling and fruitful.
The bestselling spiritual testament He and I reveals the words of Jesus to Gabrielle Bossis, a single woman, nurse, and, in her later years, playwright, who lived in France in the early twentieth century. Bossis documented her “simple talks” with Jesus in her journals, intimate conversations with Jesus that were real and personal. After her death these journals were made public.
The first time I flipped through the pages of the bestselling spiritual testament He and I, I was flabbergasted. He and I is the journal of Gabrielle Bossis, a French laywoman who lived in the first half of the twentieth century. In this book, Gabrielle documents her “simple talks” with Jesus, intimate conversations with Jesus that were real and personal. The great historian Daniel Rops wrote in his preface to the original French edition: “…here we breath the sweet fragrance of Christ.”
ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER… God has amazing ways of knocking on people's hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey. You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com.
Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST
Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way.
Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace.
Become a part of the HeartWork Community, a place where you can ask the hard questions and find a path to a life that is free, fulfilling and fruitful.
A reflection on the Parable of the Prodigal Son.
Three characters dominate the parable of the Prodigal Son, sometimes called the Parable of the Loving Father. And we—you and I—at different points of our life, are all three.
Perhaps in our younger years, and definitely in our unrepentant phases of life, we can identify with the younger son…the humiliated sorrow and long journey home begging for mercy and forgiveness. And the experience of absolute love from another or from our heavenly Father, unconditional compassion and forgiveness.
But there are other times when we find ourselves, much to our sorrow, in the shoes of the elder son. To me, to be in this angry, narrow-minded, self-serving son’s shadow, even if only in the obsessing thoughts that pester me like flies, is worse.
John Ortberg states so accurately: “One of the hardest things in the world is to stop being the prodigal son without turning into the elder brother.”
ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER… God has amazing ways of knocking on people's hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey. You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com.
Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST.
Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way.
Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace.
Become a part of the HeartWork Community, a place where you can ask the hard questions and find a path to a life that is free, fulfilling and fruitful.
We humans have a negativity bias, meaning the bad things that we see, hear, and experience far outweigh the positive and pleasurable experiences. My angry reaction to a perceived slight will stick with me longer than my meditation on being the delight of the Lord. The negative and nasty things we remember make it just about impossible to see beyond to what is most true about ourselves and others, the goodness that is most truly who we are. If we know that this is true about the human mind and heart, it is only an intentional focusing of our thoughts and leaps of the heart on what is most true that will yield happiness and holiness in our lives.
ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER… God has amazing ways of knocking on people's hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey. You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com. Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST. Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way. Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace. Become a part of the HeartWork Community, a place where you can ask the hard questions and find a path to a life that is free, fulfilling and fruitful.
So many people today are wandering. They watch a movie here, hear a comment there, ask a question somewhere else, trying to put it all together. Indeed, today a tremendous amount of information about almost everything is floating around. We have moved quickly from a culture rooted in a Judeo-Christian foundation to a rootless, “democratic” hodgepodge that each person feels a right to navigate alone.
Wandering can be a stage of life: a time of doubting or searching for a deeper understanding of what one has believed “unconsciously” for so long. Wandering can also be a way of life: an eclectic combining of curious and fascinating images and myths, resulting in the creation of one’s own belief system.
The Israelites were struck with this wanderlust. The Book of the prophet Hosea likens the Israelites’ wandering from the worship of the Lord to the false worship of the gods of their neighbors in terms of a broken relationship that caused great suffering to the Lord.
In today's podcast we explore religion as God revealing himself. Through this revelation of God, we truly come to know ourselves. We find our way home.
ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER…
God has amazing ways of knocking on people's hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey. You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com.
Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST.
Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way.
Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace.
Become a part of the HeartWork Community, a place where you can ask the hard questions and find a path to a life that is free, fulfilling and fruitful.
One day I received a letter from a gentleman in Illinois. “I thought that someone might be able to use this story,” he wrote, “and so I sent it to you.” Thus began one of those connections God establishes to multiply his grace and mercy.
In his letter, Patrick described a difficult time in his life. “Jesus, I love you. Jesus, I love you.” It was the only prayer Patrick could say. He had forgotten all the other prayers he had learned as a boy. This one short plea to God, however, had become his lifeboat in a sea of disappointments and misery. It was a simple prayer, simple and desperate.
The seven months in which Patrick uttered this prayer almost with every breath were not easy ones. They were marked by divorce, loss of a beautiful home, business failure, and loneliness. Patrick couldn’t understand why his life had turned so sour. He continued to say, “Jesus, I love you. Jesus, I love you,” though it seemed such a contradiction. Where was this God who could change things? Why hadn’t God intervened? Was Patrick being punished—and, if so, what terrible thing had he done to deserve all this? The questions kept coming as fast as Patrick could say his prayer. They were not questions of anger; they were questions of wanting to understand, wanting to communicate with the only One who could help him.
In this podcast we follow Patrick's story, and the words of Jesus to him and to all of us.
ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER…
God has amazing ways of knocking on people's hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey. You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com.
Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST.
Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way.
Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace.
Become a part of the HeartWork Community, a place where you can ask the hard questions and find a path to a life that is free, fulfilling and fruitful.
When situation in life are dark, frightening, uncertain, it is likely that we will feel apprehensive, fearful, maybe paralyzed. These three women in today's podcast, show us the power of risking to believe that God is always bringing about life in our situations in life. They risked believing not in human possibilities, but in divine ones. And so can we.
ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER…
God has amazing ways of knocking on people's hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey. You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com.
Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST.
Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way.
Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace.
Become a part of the HeartWork Community, a place where you can ask the hard questions and find a path to a life that is free, fulfilling and fruitful.
This experience of personal discovery and deep prayer explores the prisons within that hold us captive. In prayer we desire to be progressively transformed into who we really are before the face of God who truly IS. This may or may not change our outer situation, but as we remain in God’s presence, our inner being shines with that radiance. And through varying circumstances, everyone (including ourselves) can see God loving into existence our most authentic self, the person he created us to be.
Using the image of a prison, explore imprisoning situations you have lived through or are currently living in. These situations could have been created by someone’s attitudes toward you; a situation of injustice or abuse; events in your childhood; your own fears or shyness; a financial or physical tragedy; a betrayal, etc. What have you’re your imprisoning situations?
Reflecting on these imprisoning situations, you may become aware of certain “life lessons” that were impressed upon you over the years. These “life lessons” may have seemed helpful for a time, but may be obstacles to growth and maturity at this point in your life.
These injunctions became signposts to survival. We came to believe that, in order to be accepted or loved, we needed to:
- disappear,
- not think,
- conform,
- remain a child, or
- protect ourselves from love.
Thus, we began to shut off the truest part of who we are.
Now is the time when God invites you to be free of all that.
ENJOYED THIS PODCAST? HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO GO DEEPER…
God has amazing ways of knocking on people's hearts, awakening desires, arousing questions, provoking an unexpected spiritual fire. If you have enjoyed this article, and are ready to embark on a sustained spiritual journey, here are 4 ways you can join me on the journey. You can learn more about them at touchingthesunrise.com.
Join my private Facebook Group and walk the road of healing with a great group of people. I offer a half-hour live spiritual conference here Tuesday evenings at 7pm EST.
Sign-up for my letter Touching the Sunrise. I write a letter a couple times a month from my heart to yours to support you along the way.
Explore my books: Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach; Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments; Just a Minute Meditations Deeper Trust and Inner Peace.
Become a part of the HeartWork Community, a place where you can ask the hard questions and find a path to a life that is free, fulfilling and fruitful.
It belongs to the gift of wisdom to contemplate the divine. Through a special instinct and movement of the Spirit we penetrate the very life of the Trinity. Those who experience the power of the gift of wisdom understand the words of the psalmist, “Taste and see how good the Lord is” (Ps 34: 9). The word taste means that there is a certain delight that is more than just feeling or excitement. There is an impulse that is truly divine that gives our hearts an ineffable joy that seems to be from heaven itself. Indeed, the gift of wisdom is surpassed only by the beatific vision which will be ours in eternity.
Souls that are under the Holy Spirit’s gift of wisdom love God because he is infinitely good and lovable. They love God for his own sake, not for any human motive of self-interest. Because they see God within them, they see God also in all things, in the smallest detail of their life, and in a special way in their neighbor. It is the gift of wisdom that allows us to see Christ in the poor, in those who suffer, in the heart even of the “enemy.” They are happy to deprive themselves, putting the interests of others before them.
When the Spirit actively operates within us with the gift of wisdom, we do not judge things from a purely natural and human point of view. When things don’t develop the way people want them to, it is not surprising that they accuse others for deliberately or inadvertently being the cause of their problems. Truly spiritual people, wise people, evaluate things, even unfortunate or contrary events, from God’s point of view and in a supernatural light, with a spirit of equanimity.
In Scripture “to fear God” is to be in awe of his power and knowledge. To fear God requires a daring heart!
Only a heart that fears God can be joyful. Fear is a word that we typically interpret as referring to a state of emotional distress in the face of some danger to our personal safety. The term “fear of the Lord” appears over 100 times in the Old Testament. For example: And now, Israel, what does the Lord, your God ask of you but to fear the Lord, your God, and follow his ways exactly, to love and serve the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul (Deuteronomy 10:12). However, in the New Testament, the term is only mentioned two times and has been transformed into a sense of awe that is joyful rather than horrified. It is the gift of fear that gives us an unmistakable and irrefutable sense of God’s closeness and his ultimate victory over all evil in the world.
The gift of fear of the Lord gives us a greater sense of the greatness of God that should spark in our hearts a sense of amazement and awe that could bring us down to our knees. If we abandon astonishment we are left with a mediocre piousness.
To St. Bonaventure fear of the Lord was "the most beautiful tree planted in the heart of a holy man which God waters continuously" [II.6]. This “most beautiful tree” bears the precious fruit of love and reverence for God. Fear of the Lord for St. Bonaventure was the sort of trembling before experiences of God’s majesty that we hear perfectly encapsulated in the hymn:
Let all mortal flesh keep silence, And with fear and trembling stand; Ponder nothing earthly minded, For with blessing in His hand, Christ our God to earth descendeth Our full homage to demand.
The fear that St. Bonaventure had in mind is sort of a continuum that spans a certain range—depending upon one's perfection in the life of grace—from "servile fear" to "filial fear" to a fear cast out by love which has taken over one’s whole heart (cf. 1 John 4:17-18).
We often think of fortitude as the gift that makes us brave and strong in our witness to Jesus. The martyrs have been filled with the gift of fortitude. But many of us will not die as martyrs. Our living of the Christian life, nonetheless, requires the strength of the Holy Spirit to persevere in the midst of life's ordinary challenges and struggles. After the age of the martyrs with the Decree of Constantine in the fourth century, the followers of Jesus asked themselves how they would live their total fidelity to the Lord. Thus began the pilgrimage to the desert as our desert fathers and mothers left behind the comforts of ordinary life to struggle against themselves and to grow in love for the Lord in the harsh desert sands. Today few of us have the luxury of solitude. It would perhaps be easier to hide away in a mountain retreat all alone, undisturbed by the needs and personalities of other people. Instead we remain in communities, families, relationships in both workplaces and in friendships. Relationships take a great deal of fortitude to return love when another may hurt us, show patience when others may be aggravatingly slow, be interested in the one who is boring, care for the one who is aging and alone. All of this takes great fortitude to live on a daily basis...it takes a love that is above the strength we can gather on our own. That is where we need to cry out for the gift and power of the Holy Spirit.
Pope Francis spoke of the Holy Spirit's gift of counsel in these words: “As with all of the other gifts of the Spirit counsel too constitutes a treasure for the whole Christian community. The Lord does not only speak to us in the intimacy of the heart; yes, he speaks to us, but not only there; he also speaks to us through the voice and witness of the brethren. It is truly a great gift to be able to meet men and women of faith who, especially in the most complicated and important stages of our lives, help us to bring light to our heart and to recognize the Lord’s will!” (General Audience, 2014). Today we explore more deeply the way the Holy Spirit not only leads us but also helps us lead others in the ways of the Lord.
We are continuing this week a journey with the Holy Spirit through a contemplation of his seven gifts.
Today we are meditating on the gift of knowledge. I sat down for a conversation with Jeannette de Beauvoir and talked about what the gift of knowledge is, how it helps us grow in greater union with God, how it blesses our life, and how to prepare for this gift of the Holy Spirit.
The gift of knowledge is a supernatural habit by which we, under the action of the Holy Spirit, judge rightly concerning created things as related to eternal life and Christian perfection. It is not a question of philosophical or psychological knowledge, which gives a certain knowledge of things we can deduce by natural reason. It isn’t even a question of theological knowledge. It is, according to Jordan Aumann in Spiritual Theology, a question of a supernatural knowledge or “divine instinct” that comes from a special illumination of the Holy Spirit. Under the influence of this superior impulse and higher light we are able to judge rightly concerning created things in relation to their supernatural end.An Invitation: to become a part of my HeartWork community!
Welcome to the HeartWork Community.
A blend of spiritual guidance, mentorship, and counselling, the HeartWork community is a place where you can ask the hard questions and find a path to a life that is free, fulfilling and fruitful.
Sometimes we can’t touch the sunrise within us because we are numb from the effort to keep pushing through the wounding of present or past situations and events in our life. But at a certain point, we can’t ignore our heart’s desire for more.
What is HeartWork Here at the HeartWork Community we learn a simple and practical process of watchfulness “at the door of your heart” in the spirit of the Eastern Fathers, who teach that the process for healing the heart is through a patient and sacred watchfulness which gives rise to the deep experience of wonder that bubbles up from the heart.
For the past twenty years I've written about moving through our brokenness into the light of God. My best-selling title based on my own experience, Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach, has been translated into 12 languages and is in its third edition. My newest book, Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments, has just been released. For years I’ve offered HeartWork personally on an individual basis to whoever wants to pursue the hard questions in their own life and grow in an integrated spiritual-human formation. As much as that has helped people over the years, I realize that many more people could benefit from HeartWork if there were various ways a person could access the program. I so believe that HeartWork can help people that I want to make it available to as many as possible. That's why I created the HeartWork community at http://pauline.org/heartwork.
I hope I'll see you around.
Sign up for my letter (not a newsletter) and investigate my facebook group at: http://touchingthesunrise.com
We are continuing this week a journey with the Holy Spirit through a contemplation of his seven gifts.
Today we are meditating on the gift of understanding. I sat down for a conversation with Jeannette de Beauvoir and talked about what the gift of understanding is, how it helps us grow in greater union with God, how it blesses our life, and how to prepare for this gift of the Holy Spirit.
The gift of understanding is infused in the soul with sanctifying grace, by which the intellect, under the illuminating action of the Holy Spirit, grasps revealed truths with penetrating and profound intuition.
The “plus” of the gift of understanding is a simple intuition of truth, a type of infused contemplation. Our intellect is incapable of seizing the infinite, even though it lives of faith. The gift of understanding surpasses our human way of comprehension and enlightens us in a divine way. By the gift of understanding we “experience” what is true, we grasp the divine mysteries with the understanding of the Spirit himself in a way that produces a profound effect in the soul. It is a swift, deep penetration which makes us understand the inner meaning of the revealed truth.
An Invitation: to become a part of my HeartWork community!
Welcome to the HeartWork Community.
A blend of spiritual guidance, mentorship, and counselling, the HeartWork community is a place where you can ask the hard questions and find a path to a life that is free, fulfilling and fruitful.
Sometimes we can’t touch the sunrise within us because we are numb from the effort to keep pushing through the wounding of present or past situations and events in our life. But at a certain point, we can’t ignore our heart’s desire for more.
What is HeartWork Here at the HeartWork Community we learn a simple and practical process of watchfulness “at the door of your heart” in the spirit of the Eastern Fathers, who teach that the process for healing the heart is through a patient and sacred watchfulness which gives rise to the deep experience of wonder that bubbles up from the heart.
For the past twenty years I've written about moving through our brokenness into the light of God. My best-selling title based on my own experience, Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach, has been translated into 12 languages and is in its third edition. My newest book, Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments, has just been released. For years I’ve offered HeartWork personally on an individual basis to whoever wants to pursue the hard questions in their own life and grow in an integrated spiritual-human formation. As much as that has helped people over the years, I realize that many more people could benefit from HeartWork if there were various ways a person could access the program. I so believe that HeartWork can help people that I want to make it available to as many as possible. That's why I created the HeartWork community at http://pauline.org/heartwork.
I hope I'll see you around.
Sign up for my letter (not a newsletter) and investigate my facebook group at: http://touchingthesunrise.com
We are starting this week a journey with the Holy Spirit through a contemplation of his seven gifts.
Today we are meditating on the gift of piety. I sat down for a conversation with Jeannette de Beauvoir and talked about what the gift of piety is, how it helps us grow in greater union with God, how it blesses our life, and how to prepare for this gift of the Holy Spirit.
It is the gift of piety that surprises us with an affection for God as our beloved Father and an absolute child-like love. As we go through the situations of our life that could make us tremble, we walk instead with a filial confidence in the heavenly Father from whom all things come. Jordan Aumann states: “Intimately penetrated with the sentiment of its adoptive divine filiation, the soul abandons itself calmly and confidently to the heavenly Father. it is not preoccupied with any care, and nothing is capable of disturbing its unalterable peace, even for an instant. The souls asks nothing and rejects nothing. It is not concerned about health or sickness, a long life or a short life, consolations or aridity, persecution or praise, activity or idleness. It is completely submissive to the will of God and seeks only to glorify God with all its powers.... These souls run to God as a child runs to its Father.”
An Invitation: to become a part of my HeartWork community!
Welcome to the HeartWork Community.
A blend of spiritual guidance, mentorship, and counselling, the HeartWork community is a place where you can ask the hard questions and find a path to a life that is free, fulfilling and fruitful.
Sometimes we can’t touch the sunrise within us because we are numb from the effort to keep pushing through the wounding of present or past situations and events in our life. But at a certain point, we can’t ignore our heart’s desire for more.
What is HeartWork Here at the HeartWork Community we learn a simple and practical process of watchfulness “at the door of your heart” in the spirit of the Eastern Fathers, who teach that the process for healing the heart is through a patient and sacred watchfulness which gives rise to the deep experience of wonder that bubbles up from the heart.
For the past twenty years I've written about moving through our brokenness into the light of God. My best-selling title based on my own experience, Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach, has been translated into 12 languages and is in its third edition. My newest book, Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments, has just been released. For years I’ve offered HeartWork personally on an individual basis to whoever wants to pursue the hard questions in their own life and grow in an integrated spiritual-human formation. As much as that has helped people over the years, I realize that many more people could benefit from HeartWork if there were various ways a person could access the program. I so believe that HeartWork can help people that I want to make it available to as many as possible. That's why I created the HeartWork community at http://pauline.org/heartwork.
I hope I'll see you around.
Sign up for my letter (not a newsletter) and investigate my facebook group at: http://touchingthesunrise.com
It is a joy to share with you this week an interview with Sr Jackie Jean-Marie Gitonga who made her perpetual profession in her home town in Kenya. She shares with us the cultural high points and the profoundly personal reflections of professing her vows as a Daughter of St Paul for all her life.
An Invitation: to become a part of my HeartWork community!
Welcome to the HeartWork Community.
A blend of spiritual guidance, mentorship, and counselling, the HeartWork community is a place where you can ask the hard questions and find a path to a life that is free, fulfilling and fruitful.
Sometimes we can’t touch the sunrise within us because we are numb from the effort to keep pushing through the wounding of present or past situations and events in our life. But at a certain point, we can’t ignore our heart’s desire for more.
What is HeartWork Here at the HeartWork Community we learn a simple and practical process of watchfulness “at the door of your heart” in the spirit of the Eastern Fathers, who teach that the process for healing the heart is through a patient and sacred watchfulness which gives rise to the deep experience of wonder that bubbles up from the heart.
For the past twenty years I've written about moving through our brokenness into the light of God. My best-selling title based on my own experience, Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach, has been translated into 12 languages and is in its third edition. My newest book, Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments, has just been released. For years I’ve offered HeartWork personally on an individual basis to whoever wants to pursue the hard questions in their own life and grow in an integrated spiritual-human formation. As much as that has helped people over the years, I realize that many more people could benefit from HeartWork if there were various ways a person could access the program. I so believe that HeartWork can help people that I want to make it available to as many as possible. That's why I created the HeartWork community at http://pauline.org/heartwork.
I hope I'll see you around.
Sign up for my letter (not a newsletter) and investigate my facebook group at: http://touchingthesunrise.com
It is always a joy to welcome a new sister into the community. Recently we had the joy of welcoming Sr Amanda Marie into the Daughters of St Paul. She made her profession at the end of June, 2019. We sat down with each other for a conversation in which she shares what it meant to her and some thoughtful advice for the rest of us.
An Invitation: to become a part of my HeartWork community!
Welcome to the HeartWork Community.
A blend of spiritual guidance, mentorship, and counselling, the HeartWork community is a place where you can ask the hard questions and find a path to a life that is free, fulfilling and fruitful.
Sometimes we can’t touch the sunrise within us because we are numb from the effort to keep pushing through the wounding of present or past situations and events in our life. But at a certain point, we can’t ignore our heart’s desire for more.
What is HeartWork Here at the HeartWork Community we learn a simple and practical process of watchfulness “at the door of your heart” in the spirit of the Eastern Fathers, who teach that the process for healing the heart is through a patient and sacred watchfulness which gives rise to the deep experience of wonder that bubbles up from the heart.
For the past twenty years I've written about moving through our brokenness into the light of God. My best-selling title based on my own experience, Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach, has been translated into 12 languages and is in its third edition. My newest book, Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments, has just been released. For years I’ve offered HeartWork personally on an individual basis to whoever wants to pursue the hard questions in their own life and grow in an integrated spiritual-human formation. As much as that has helped people over the years, I realize that many more people could benefit from HeartWork if there were various ways a person could access the program. I so believe that HeartWork can help people that I want to make it available to as many as possible. That's why I created the HeartWork community at http://pauline.org/heartwork.
I hope I'll see you around.
Sign up for my letter (not a newsletter) and investigate my facebook group at: http://touchingthesunrise.com
“I need a Heart...who will be my support forever” (Saint Thérèse).
The Salve Regina is right when it calls this world a “vale of tears.” From Mary Magdalene to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the saints have sought in the Sacred Heart of Jesus their solace along this painful path we call life. If you are looking for a friend who will be refuge and strength in your every need, these two great saints point you to the most Sacred Heart of the Master.
___
The Touching the Sunrise HeartWork Community is a place where you can ask your hard questions and walk with ever-growing strength to your heavenly homeland. We are all pilgrims on the way, but we don’t need to walk alone.
The old adage is “you are the friends you keep.” We are an intentional group of pilgrims on the way to our eternal homeland, where our citizenship already is in heaven. In the HeartWork community we live in this "vale of tears" with a bit of heaven in our hearts.
So if you have a hard question, I invite you to share it at Pauline.org/hardquestions. I’ll be posting answers to these questions every other week. Sometimes a shift in the way we’re thinking comes about with just a word or idea that’s Spirit-inspired just for you. Sometimes someone else’s question sparks an insight of your own. It is all good. The Spirit knows the best way to reach each one of us.
As always you can find more support along the way at touchingthesunrise.com.
You can find my Group on Facebook, sign up for my by-weekly letter Touching the Sunrise, or participate in the HeartWork community… So I hope I see you around!
May the Spirit who has been poured out upon you, flood your spirit with a new and radiant Dawn. God bless
I have beautiful memories of devotion to the Sacred Heart when I was a child. Today in my fifties, however, after half-a-lifetime or more of relationships, problems, dreams, the joy of giving life and love to others, disillusionments, sorrows, my devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is very different. This program offers ways in which someone in their fifties lives their love for Jesus and their devotion to his most Sacred Heart.
“This year, with the grace of God, I want to grow in holiness. I want to become a great saint and I want to do this quickly! By myself I can do nothing, but with God I can do all things.”
Spiritual Notes 01.01.1927
Mother Thecla's secrets for the spiritual journey include: Have great desires, be aware of your need for the Lord, yearn for the will of God, remember heaven, open your heart to the world, take Mary as your guide, believe that God embraces your nothingness.
Mother Thecla is the Co-Foundress of the Daughters of St Paul. Mother Thecla Merlo was a contemplative in action; a simple soul who knew her place before God and with her fellow sisters
Her life was one of continuous adhesion to the will of God We know, however, peak moments which showed the spiritual evolution that was taking place.
If you're wondering if you could get some help along the spiritual path but aren't really interested in committing to one-on-one spiritual accompaniment, you should check out my Patreon membership.
If you want to explore more, from as little as $2 per month my valued Patreon friends develop their relationship with God through:
- over 50+ audio and video programs and guides on spirituality and prayer,
- my very popular Journalling Sheets created for each month
- monthly HeartWork Exercise Guides
- weekly new podcasts
Maybe you never heard of Patreon before? Worried about whether you could find yourself around?
Patreon helps fund writers and artists by letting supporters become patrons. The artist sets goals: what they will do with the pledged money. And the patrons pledge a monthly amount--in our case: $2, $4, $8 or $22. You choose your contribution. In return, you get rewards - and lots of them!
I hope to see you around!
Look around you. Do you see Spirit-filled Christians? Do you see Catholics on fire for the Gospel? Men and women totally surrendered to God and living lives marked by the beatitudes: Blessed the poor in spirit, the meek, the pure of heart?
The event of Pentecost as it is recounted in the Acts of the Apostles gives us a clear indication of why we don’t see the Spirit transforming the earth.
The descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles was part of a long process of transformation for these twelve disciples of Jesus. The Master took these men from their professions as fishermen or tax collector, for example, and began a three-year process of helping them see that they could do nothing of themselves. Nothing. Peter’s betrayal of Jesus within just hours of his boast that he would die for him is a clear example of this. Peter learned, he had to learn, as we all have to learn, apart from Jesus we are nothing. We can do nothing. Without the Spirit of Jesus, no one of us can say Jesus is Lord.
This cuts against the grain. Today we all want to prove who we are, strut our stuff, even in the spiritual life. We humans think we can do at least part of it on our own and God can help us out with the rest....
If you're wondering if you could get some help along the spiritual path but aren't really interested in committing to one-on-one spiritual accompaniment, you should check out my Patreon membership.
If you want to explore more, from as little as $2 per month my valued Patreon friends develop their relationship with God through:
- over 50+ audio and video programs and guides on spirituality and prayer,
- my very popular Journalling Sheets created for each month
- monthly HeartWork Exercise Guides
- weekly new podcasts
Maybe you never heard of Patreon before? Worried about whether you could find yourself around?
Patreon helps fund writers and artists by letting supporters become patrons. The artist sets goals: what they will do with the pledged money. And the patrons pledge a monthly amount--in our case: $2, $4, $8 or $22. You choose your contribution. In return, you get rewards - and lots of them!
I hope to see you around!
I love you. You know that. I’m sorry. You know you’re my dearest daughter.
The words were soothing, forgiving, as I rested a moment in my father’s hug. It had been a long week and a lot of work as we prepared their house to go on the market and my parents to move.
I love you. You know that.
All my failures rushed over me. I hadn’t been able that week to plaster over my own broken humanness with a schedule of prayer and community and work. Instead I saw me. In the raw. Tired. Unable to rise above the frustrations of the moment. The worry. The fatigue. The sleeplessness....
If you're wondering if you could get some help along the spiritual path but aren't really interested in committing to one-on-one spiritual accompaniment, you should check out my Patreon membership.
If you want to explore more, from as little as $2 per month my valued Patreon friends develop their relationship with God through:
- over 50+ audio and video programs and guides on spirituality and prayer,
- my very popular Journalling Sheets created for each month
- monthly HeartWork Exercise Guides
- weekly new podcasts
The suffering in your life can yield great treasures. It is possible to find gifts in the ashes, treasures in the flames. But don’t worry about that now. Jesus himself will show you where the gold lies. You only need to hold on to him, to lean in your weakness on his power, to trust in your poverty on his bountiful love. Lay your head down on his heart and rest as a little child sleeps in his or her parent’s arms.
If you're wondering if you could get some help along the spiritual path but aren't really interested in committing to one-on-one spiritual accompaniment, you should check out my Patreon membership.
If you want to explore more, from as little as $2 per month my valued Patreon friends develop their relationship with God through:
- over 50+ audio and video programs and guides on spirituality and prayer,
- my very popular Journalling Sheets created for each month
- monthly HeartWork Exercise Guides
- weekly new podcasts
Maybe you never heard of Patreon before? Worried about whether you could find yourself around?
Patreon helps fund writers and artists by letting supporters become patrons. The artist sets goals: what they will do with the pledged money. And the patrons pledge a monthly amount--in our case: $2, $4, $8 or $22. You choose your contribution. In return, you get rewards - and lots of them!
I hope to see you around!
“When we first take our Christian discipleship seriously and commit ourselves to accountability with other Christians who are doing the same, we find out that we have a lot of rough edges. Our personality is harsh, or we’re sharp in the way we relate to others, or we’re a bit out of shape in our prayer. But it is the process of following Christ that helps us to go deeper and deeper into ourselves so that we empty ourselves: prayer, the sacraments, commitment to a group, or spiritual direction. We empty ourselves completely so that Jesus can take up residence more fully within us. Jesus changes our sharp edges and makes us gentle. It’s a practical thing. It’s working with God in a real way. It requires sincerity, and once we love the truth above everything, God sets us free. That’s communion.”
God dances for joy at our birth, taking us in strong yet gentle arms as we enter into the world. As we encounter situations that are painful and deforming, God cries with us. He does not leave us alone in our pain, even when situations make us begin to close in on ourselves or induce us to hide from others, from ourselves, and from God. We are surrounded by the power and love of God, even in those moments when we feel God can’t be trusted. We resist that love and set out on our own, fighting our way through life—or perhaps we feel that we’re pitted against life, against ourselves, against God. Healing begins when we learn to trust God with our live.
If you're wondering if you could get some help along the spiritual path but aren't really interested in committing to one-on-one spiritual accompaniment, you should check out my Patreon membership.
If you want to explore more, from as little as $2 per month my valued Patreon friends develop their relationship with God through:
- over 50+ audio and video programs and guides on spirituality and prayer,
- my very popular Journalling Sheets created for each month
- monthly HeartWork Exercise Guides
- weekly new podcasts
Maybe you never heard of Patreon before? Worried about whether you could find yourself around?
Patreon helps fund writers and artists by letting supporters become patrons. The artist sets goals: what they will do with the pledged money. And the patrons pledge a monthly amount--in our case: $2, $4, $8 or $22. You choose your contribution. In return, you get rewards - and lots of them!
I hope to see you around!
Often, when life’s events break our hearts, we are ashamed of our anger and pain. We apologize for angry words and stifle cries of pain, pushing our hurts out of sight. We try to make peace with ourselves without acknowledging our anger and our tears—somehow these seem unacceptable to us. But they aren’t unacceptable to God.
From the very beginning of the Sacred Scriptures, we find God responding to the cries of his people.And he responds to the cries of our heart today.
If you're wondering if you could get some help along the spiritual path but aren't really interested in committing to one-on-one spiritual accompaniment, you should check out my Patreon membership.
If you want to explore more, from as little as $2 per month my valued Patreon friends develop their relationship with God through:
- over 50+ audio and video programs and guides on spirituality and prayer,
- my very popular Journalling Sheets created for each month
- monthly HeartWork Exercise Guides
- weekly new podcasts
Maybe you never heard of Patreon before? Worried about whether you could find yourself around?
Patreon helps fund writers and artists by letting supporters become patrons. The artist sets goals: what they will do with the pledged money. And the patrons pledge a monthly amount--in our case: $2, $4, $8 or $22. You choose your contribution. In return, you get rewards - and lots of them!
I hope to see you around!
Easter lasts 50 days. That means almost seven weeks of Resurrection light, glory and healing. Enter into the healing experience of the disciples leaving for Emmaus on the morning of the resurrection and find Easter healing for your own soul.
As I was living the sacred days of the Paschal Triduum this year, I have been thinking of how overwhelmed people are feeling these days. It seems as if we have been brought to the edge: as a country, as a Church, and even the burning of Notre Dame has been as a kick in the gut.
Though we prefer to meditate on Jesus as the kind and gentle Shepherd, the merciful Savior, the consoling Master, Jesus actually brought his disciples into a state of “overwhelm” a number of times. Consider the storm on the lake. Jesus told the apostles to go to the other side of the lake. A sudden storm threatened to capsize the boat. Spotting Jesus walking on the water they cried out in fear. Peter, ever the courageous one, demanded to walk across the water to him. Looking down at the waves that swirled at his feet, he began to sink, crying out, “Lord, save me.” Or consider when Jesus was preaching into the evening and the apostles urged him to let the people go into the village to find something to eat. “No. You give them something to eat.” And then he offered them no instructions. “How are we going to do that?” was the immediate response of the befuddled twelve. There are any number of times when Jesus brought his apostles into “overwhelm” mode.
But Holy Thursday was a dramatic shift. With the shouts of joy and praise still in the disciples’ ears and hearts, the mood turned somber as the darkness fell. To the men who still wondered who was first, who was better, and if they were going to get something from an expected victory of Jesus over the Romans, their Lord and Master was now about to teach them truly what his life as Emmanuel was really about....
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I love meditations that bring healing, transformation, and peace. May this In-the-Skin Meditation with Mary at the foot of the Cross will bless your Holy Week.
As we approach Holy Week we can't forget that all we celebrate and live in these days is about the newness Christ won for us, a newness we share in when we keep our eyes fixed on him.
Only the courageous can choose compassion. Only the brave can witness within themselves their ego’s demands, consistently breaking open the deeper places of love. I believe in the courage that drives one person to stand up for another, even as I see the fear that makes me tremble, so small of heart. I touch the anguish of the world, knowing it is no different from the love I insist on holding back from the person nearest me.
We can overcome the evils of the world only with the courageous choice by which we, as Jesus, would give our life for our brother beside us, in small decisions that choose compassion over cruelty.
It is in our heart space that we receive after deep contemplative listening. That we unfold within the wisdom from God who makes diamonds of our dust. We have been created to hear the voice of God and His word. In a loud and noisy room, we all know we hear little. And if we are doing the talking in that loud and noisy room, we are so full of ourselves we receive nothing. Instead of unfolding, we clamp down in a hardened empty shell of self-importance.
So how do we return to our heart space so that we can live in the turbulence of our age with our heart attuned to the deepest place within us where wisdom is born, where God makes himself visible through us, and where we welcome both our own true voice and God’s Word, so that we can be God’s Voice the world so longs to hear.
The night can be a scary time. As kids we might have been afraid of monsters under our bed or of sleeping in our own room. Even now as adults the “dark night”—whether it slips into our life as depression, breaks our heart with unexpected ruptures of relationships and futures, or quietly takes from us what we had most cherished—still holds hands with its sister anxiety. Just as individuals live through darkness, cultures and periods of history also can be overshadowed by fear and chaos and death. Now is one of those times.
The saints lived through times such as these. The courage of the saints might seem “out of reach” to us, but the Church as a good Mother gives us stepping stones each Lent so we can regain our balance and our strength, knowing truly that this world—even as it is—is still in Christ, and without Christ the world has no meaning.
Do you ever wonder how to hear God's voice? It is a voice that is so beautiful, leading us to holiness, truth, and peace. Learn how to sort out the various voices we hear around us and within us in order to be guided at last by the voice of the One who loves us forever.
Lent is a time when we traditionally take our "spiritual temperature" to refocus our lives on discipleship and holiness. But in these days there are many other reasons why we might want to take our spiritual temperature. There are symptoms we may struggle with because of the scandal in the Church or problems in our country: symptoms like anger, a general malaise, uncertainty about the future, fear. Join Jeannette and I as we talk about ways we can find true inner peace in these difficult times.
Hello, my name is Sr Kathryn Hermes and I’m inviting you to my free Private Facebook Group. This group is for those who feel the call toward being a part of a community with others who want a more heart-centered and spiritual life, but would like support on the way. The goal is to walk together on a contemplative and healing path to refind the joy that is the gift of God to us.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/srkathrynhermes/
Life has a way of gradually leading us deeper and deeper to the point of life—the “height” of the mountain—love. All other reasons for living need to fall away.
The unstoppable circumstances-beyond-our-control are perfectly fit to addressing our deepest sin, our greatest fear, our strongest selfish ambition. The only way to deal with them is to realize we can’t and to simply allow them to do their work in us, a scalpel held in the hands of the Divine Surgeon.
Hello, my name is Sr Kathryn Hermes and I’m inviting you to my free Private Facebook Group. This group is for those who feel the call toward being a part of a community with others who want a more heart-centered and spiritual life, but would like support on the way. The goal is to walk together on a contemplative and healing path to refind the joy that is the gift of God to us.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/srkathrynhermes/
Ever-happening transition and the need to keep up with the changing expectations around us, as well as the not-so-peaceful world we live in can create tempests in our spirit. I call it verbal pollution when I feel harmed by the disrespectful words and attitudes and reactions of people in both the social conversation and in my own personal space. Sometimes I myself don't respect and truly love others into profoundly gifted relational bonds through unending kindness myself. So here are four habits that might help to calm the storms that rage within no matter what their source. Let me know if you find them helpful.
I have many inner struggles around the work I do. Some of the things I have been asked to do in mission required long hours. Sometimes I have gotten angry about the amount of work expected of me; other times I know I could give more but am holding back. On the one hand, I feel like I need to always be available; on the other hand, I can use work as an escape. I look at others working more, working less, and in both cases I feel guilty. I want what I do to flow from who I am, and the integration — when it happens — feels wonderful! How complicated is the human heart!
Reflecting on my own experience, over the past months I have identified three guides that help me in unraveling the motivations of my heart; to connect my "doing" with my "being" so that my work flows not from workaholism but from something deeper.
Sr Germana and I have known each other for many years, and I'm really grateful for her sharing her expertise as a spiritual guide and counselor with us.
We all face surprises, pressures and difficult situations. The good news is that by making a few small changes to the way we work through them, we can shift from angry assumptions to intentional love.
In this podcast I offer a three-step tool I use when I'm angry or frustrated may be helpful.
This is our last conversation, Jeannette and I, on the book Reclaim Regret... I'm sharing some of my experiences and dreams which were part of my healing and I pray will be part of yours. It has been a blessing to share these conversations with you.
"See how they love one another!" From the origin of Christianity, people were so attracted by the joy they saw in the followers of Jesus that they eventually felt they no longer could tenably hold to their viewpoints and prior beliefs. This joy and this love then spills over into legal and social action, ministries of justice, and service to the most vulnerable.
Pope Benedict XVI stated in his book Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures: "Our greatest need in the present historical moment is people who make God credible in this world by means of the enlightened faith they live. ... We need men who keep their eyes fixed on God, learning from him what true humanity means ... so their hearts can open the hearts of others"
So here are some suggestions for this Christmas and holiday season.
The end of the liturgical year, the anything-but-quiet waiting weeks of Advent filled with the tug between the contemplative and commercial, the awesome birth of Christ in hearts anew on Christmas night, the first day of the brand new year and the World Day of Peace. . . . There has always been something almost magical about the turn of the year. Children with their excited hope for what Christmas morn will bring and cloistered nuns with their contemplative immersion in the mystery of all Christmas is — and everyone in between — are swept up by something fresh and exciting and innocent in these weeks.
I've been thinking about how much we need this gift particularly at this time, this year. Our hearts have been so beaten and tainted by the mainstreaming of aggressive and violent language. It has infiltrated our hearts and minds through social and news media on our computers and television screens. Then like an unwanted blot of dark ink it has soaked into our conversations and relationships and thoughts and desires and dreams....
How can I keep a deep spiritual sensitivity of mind and heart so that I live as a citizen of heaven while yet on this Earth? (Philippians 3:20) The ancient practice of cleansing our thoughts holds a key. This is how I've started practicing this watchfulness in these end-of-year weeks.
Big questions. Is God reliable? Is life reliable? It makes me think of when I was 21 and had a stroke. How can God be trusted when something goes wrong in life: an illness, a failure, a betrayal. How do we recover from these situations? Does God really love us?
God created the human heart to be like a large box vast enough to hold God himself. When we hate ourselves for what we’ve done or who we think we are, our hearts become smaller and smaller until our spirits have no more room to breathe. Sometimes we don’t think we can bring our shame into the open before God. Perhaps you believe that God won’t forgive you. You hide from God just as you hide from others when you are afraid to reveal your true self. At the root of this unhealthy behavior is the reality that you have rejected yourself. Do you love yourself in all your vulnerability and imperfection? When we refuse to allow ourselves to be held by God in the midst of our struggles, we deprive ourselves of God’s tenderness toward us.
To see who we really are is to see ourselves as God sees us. We need to expose ourselves to the messages, the Voice, the Words of God to know ourselves and others in truth.
When I lead people through the journey you have been experiencing in this book, I often find that at a certain moment—a sacred moment—something wells up deep within a soul: repentance. Your regrets may be a mixture of things you have done, sins you have committed and things that have happened to you. But all of us have done things we look back on with regret. In this journey of life, we experience regret around things we could have done differently, ways we have hurt others, words or actions we can never take back, and relationships that have ended. As you explore your regrets, do not feel surprised if you begin to feel the bubbling waters of a cleansing sorrow that are as different from burning shame as day is from night. This sorrow is pure gift, but we can ask God for this spiritual sensitivity.
Repentance is a step into the mystery of our salvation. It does not always feel good but it ultimately leads us to wholeness and healing. Our human nature is frail and we know from experience that we are dust, weak, and prone to sinful passions and desires, even when we know better. But God himself took up our struggle as his own. Christ came, as Healer and Savior, to heal the sickness of our human nature. When Christ was conceived in Mary’s womb, he received from her his human nature. God became incarnate. In Christ the Word, his human nature was united to the divine nature in the unity of the second Person of the Trinity. Because he is divine, Jesus exalts our human nature and transforms it. Jesus became man, journeyed to Calvary, and rose from the dead so that we might become partakers of his divinity through faith and baptism (see 2 Peter 1:4). By dying on the cross, Jesus took our sins upon himself and by his resurrection he clothes us anew in the garments of his glory.