Thoughts on the paradox of life

The great paradox of life is that those who lose their lives will gain them. This paradox becomes visible in very ordinary situations. If we cling to our friends, we may lose them, but when we are nonpossessive in our relationships, we will make many friends. When fame is what we seek and desire, it often vanishes as soon as we acquire it, but when we have no need to be known, we might be remembered long after our deaths. When we want to be in the center, we easily end up on the margins, but when we are free enough to be wherever we must be, we find ourselves often in the center.  Giving away our lives for others is the greatest of all human arts. This will gain us our lives.

Henri Nouwen

 

Thoughts on talents

God uses our talents to test our unselfishness. You have to decide in life for whom or what you’re going to live. You’re either going to live a self-centered, miserly life or you’re going to live for something greater than yourself — the Kingdom of God.
Faithful people don’t live for themselves. They realize that the talents God gave them are not for their own benefit; they’re to make the world a better place.
When God made you, he gave you all kinds of gifts, talents, and abilities. We call it your SHAPE: your Spiritual gifts, Heart, Abilities, Personality, and Experiences. These five things make you you. And God made you you. There’s nobody like you in the whole world, and he wants you to be you for his glory.
God shaped you to serve him, and there’s only one way to do that: by serving other people.
Faithful people realize that their talents are not for their benefit. You may have a talent for art and say that you do it “just because you love to do it.” That’s nice, but that’s not a good enough motive. God didn’t give you artistic ability just so you can love to do it. He gave it to you so you can use your art in some way to help other people.
Some people have an ability to fix things. Some people are good at math. Some people are good at closing deals. Some people are good at music. Some people are good at organizing. And some people are good at trimming and gardening.
God made us all different so that everything in the world gets done. If we all liked to do the same thing, there would be a whole lot left undone.
You are the steward of your talents, and God is watching to see if you use what he gave you effectively on Earth. If you use those talents effectively on Earth, he’s going to give you more responsibility in Heaven.
Have you ever thought about why didn’t God just create us and take us to Heaven? Why does he put us here on a broken planet for 70 or 80 years? He put you here because life is a test and a trust and a temporary assignment. He’s watching to see if you are faithful to use what he gave you here on Earth to bless other people.
The Bible says in 1 Peter 4:10, “God has given each of you a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts. Use them well to serve one another” (NLT). God gave you talents, and he wants you to be faithful with them.

Rick Warren

More thoughts on writing

Writing is not just jotting down ideas. Often we say: "I don't know what to write. I have no thoughts worth writing down." But much good writing emerges from the process of writing itself. As we simply sit down in front of a sheet of paper and start to express in words what is on our minds or in our hearts, new ideas emerge, ideas that can surprise us and lead us to inner places we hardly knew were there.

One of the most satisfying aspects of writing is that it can open in us deep wells of hidden treasures that are beautiful for us as well as for others to see.

 

Henri Nouwen

 

Thoughts on writing

Writing can be a true spiritual discipline. Writing can help us to concentrate, to get in touch with the deeper stirrings of our hearts, to clarify our minds, to process confusing emotions, to reflect on our experiences, to give artistic expression to what we are living, and to store significant events in our memories. Writing can also be good for others who might read what we write.

Quite often a difficult, painful, or frustrating day can be "redeemed" by writing about it. By writing we can claim what we have lived and thus integrate it more fully into our journeys. Then writing can become lifesaving for us and sometimes for others too.

Henri Nouwen

 

Thoughts on willpower

You need more power than just willpower in your life. You need God’s power in your life.
The “fruit of the Spirit” are the qualities that God puts in your life when the Holy Spirit lives through you: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
How does God produce that fruit in your life? Not by your willpower. You don’t go out and say, “I’m going to be a more patient person!” That doesn’t work.
You try to say, “I’m going to be more patient. I’m going to be more loving.” It’s like tying some oranges on a eucalyptus tree and calling it an orange tree. It doesn’t work that way. Fruit can only come from the inside — the Holy Spirit living through you.
How does the Holy Spirit work in your life? The answer is gradually: “And the Lord — who is the Spirit — makes us more and more like him as we are changed into his glorious image” (2 Corinthians 3:18 NLT, emphasis added).
When God wants to make a mushroom, he takes six hours. When God wants to make an oak tree, he takes 60 years. The question is: Do you want your life to be a mushroom or an oak tree?
You didn’t collect your hurts, habits, and hang-ups overnight. It took you a long time to get as messed up as you are! Someone approached me once and said, “Pastor Rick, I need you to solve my marriage problem.” I said, “How long have you been married?” Fifteen years. “How long have you had this problem?” Ten years.
And you want a five-second answer? It isn’t going to happen! You’ve got to peel that onion one layer at a time.
The Holy Spirit works within us to make us gradually more and more like him. Your character is the sum total of your habits. Your responsibility is to develop new habits that help you to change.

Rick Warren

Thoughts on desires

Desire is often talked about as something we ought to overcome. Still, being is desiring: our bodies, our minds, our hearts, and our souls are full of desires. Some are unruly, turbulent, and very distracting; some make us think deep thoughts and see great visions; some teach us how to love; and some keep us searching for God. Our desire for God is the desire that should guide all other desires. Otherwise our bodies, minds, hearts, and souls become one another's enemies and our inner lives become chaotic, leading us to despair and self-destruction.

Spiritual disciplines are not ways to eradicate all our desires but ways to order them so that they can serve one another and together serve God.

 

Henri Nouwen

Thoughts on eternal life

Jn 6:52-59

The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying,
"How can this man give us his Flesh to eat?"
Jesus said to them,
"Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless you eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink his Blood,
you do not have life within you.
Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood
has eternal life,
and I will raise him on the last day.
For my Flesh is true food,
and my Blood is true drink.
Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood
remains in me and I in him.
Just as the living Father sent me
and I have life because of the Father,
so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.
This is the bread that came down from heaven.
Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died,
whoever eats this bread will live forever."
These things he said while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.

Thoughts on sheep

By Father Greg Friedman, OFM

One of my seminary classmates has always reacted when the story of the Good Shepherd was read:

Jn 10:11-18

Jesus said:
"I am the good shepherd.
A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.
A hired man, who is not a shepherd
and whose sheep are not his own,
sees a wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away,
and the wolf catches and scatters them.
This is because he works for pay and has no concern for the sheep.
I am the good shepherd,
and I know mine and mine know me,
just as the Father knows me and I know the Father;
and I will lay down my life for the sheep.
I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold.
These also I must lead, and they will hear my voice,
and there will be one flock, one shepherd.
This is why the Father loves me,
because I lay down my life in order to take it up again.
No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own.
I have power to lay it down, and power to take it up again.
This command I have received from my Father."

“I don’t like being compared to sheep!” he said. “They’re dumb, and smelly, too!”

I grew up in the city, so my experience with sheep is limited. But I do know that shepherding was an important part of the life for the people of biblical times. It’s the relationship between shepherd and sheep that makes Jesus’ comparison work.

The shepherds of Jesus’ time herded their flocks through wilderness, ready to defend them from attack by wild animals. In a crowded sheepfold at night, shepherds of several flocks herded together could identify their own sheep—and vice versa!  Jesus’ listeners would have understood the economic interdependence of shepherd and sheep—a truly good shepherd would value each and every individual in his flock.

The relationship Jesus offers us is one characterized by the dignity and worth he sees in each of us.  He knows each of us by name, with an intimacy he shares with us from the Father, whom Jesus knows with the intimacy of a Divine Son. And the bottom line: Jesus gives his life for us, his flock.

My classmate and I still chuckle about his reaction to being “herded together” in this biblical image. But we both agree: We want to be counted among the Lord’s flock!

Listen to the audio here.

Thoughts on silence

In silence

By Thomas Merton

Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
to speak your

name.
Listen
to the living walls.

Who are you?
Who
are you? Whose
silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
are you (as these stones
are quiet). Do not
think of what you are
still less of
what you may one day be.

Rather
be what you are (but who?)
be the unthinkable one
you do not know.

O be still, while
you are still alive,
and all things live around you

speaking (I do not hear)
to your own being,
speaking by the unknown
that is in you and in themselves.

"I will try, like them
to be my own silence:
and this is difficult. The whole
world is secretly on fire. The stones
burn, even the stones they burn me.
How can a man be still or
listen to all things burning?
How can he dare to sit with them
when all their silence is on fire?"

Thoughts on freedom

True freedom is the freedom of the children of God. To reach that freedom requires a lifelong discipline since so much in our world militates against it. The political, economic, social, and even religious powers surrounding us all want to keep us in bondage so that we will obey their commands and be dependent on their rewards.

But the spiritual truth that leads to freedom is the truth that we belong not to the world but to God, whose beloved children we are. By living lives in which we keep returning to that truth in word and deed, we will gradually grow into our true freedom.

 

Henri Nouwen

More thoughts on authority

Mostly we think of people with great authority as higher up, far away, hard to reach. But spiritual authority comes from compassion and emerges from deep inner solidarity with those who are "subject" to authority. The one who is fully like us, who deeply understands our joys and pains or hopes and desires, and who is willing and able to walk with us, that is the one to whom we gladly give authority and whose "subjects" we are willing to be.

It is the compassionate authority that empowers, encourages, calls forth hidden gifts, and enables great things to happen. True spiritual authorities are located in the point of an upside-down triangle, supporting and holding into the light everyone they offer their leadership to.

 

Henri Nouwen

Thoughts on authority

Authority and obedience can never be divided, with some people having all the authority while others only have to obey. This separation causes authoritarian behaviour on the one side and doormat behaviour on the other. It perverts authority as well as obedience. A person with great authority who has nobody to be obedient to is in great spiritual danger. A very obedient person who has no authority over anyone is equally in danger.

Jesus spoke with great authority, but his whole life was complete obedience to his Father, and Jesus, who said to his Father, "Let it be as you, not I, would have it" (Matthew 26:39), has been given all authority in heaven and on earth (see Matthew 28:18). Let us ask ourselves: Do we live our authority in obedience and do we live our obedience with authority?

 

Henri Nouwen

More thoughts on kindness

Today, whether meeting with your banker over lunch or your child’s teacher over coffee, whether ordering a latte from a barista or buying a new home from a real estate agent, whether passing through TSA on your way out of town or passing a stranger on your way home, remember this:

Everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle, so be kind to everyone you meet.  

Sometimes the only encouragement they might receive during their battle is the spark of your acknowledging smile, your kind words of encouragement, your listening presence of compassion, and the hope extended that they’re going to be okay.

And sometimes, that’s enough.

This is your day. Live Inspired.

John O'Leary
www.johnolearyinspires.com

Thoughts on Divine Mercy

Sunday of Divine Mercy

John 20:19-31

Friends, our magnificent Gospel today declares that there is no greater manifestation of the divine mercy than the forgiveness of sins. We are in the upper room with the disciples, those who had denied, betrayed, and abandoned their master. Jesus came and stood in their midst. When they saw him, their fear must have intensified; undoubtedly, he was back for revenge. Instead, he spoke the simple word "Shalom," peace. He showed them his hands and his side, lest they forget what the world (and they) did to him, but he does not follow up with blame or retribution—only a word of mercy. And then the extraordinary commission: "Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained." Jesus’ mercy is communicated to his disciples, who in turn are sent to communicate it to the world. This is the foundation for the sacrament of penance, which has existed in the Church from that moment to the present day as the privileged vehicle of the divine mercy.   Bishop Robert Barron

More thoughts on failure

3 Ways to Fail. Which is Yours? Failure, we hear, is relative; but the truth is that it never feels that way. Failure feels absolute. It feels permanent. And it can sap our energy faster than almost anything else. But it doesn’t have to. By Jeannette de Beauvoir

Just ask Steven Spielberg, who applied multiple times to film school, and was rejected every time. Just ask Sir Isaac Newton, who was pulled out of school to run the family farm—badly. Just ask Vera Wang, whose dream was to make the 1968 American Olympic skating team. Or ask Fulton Sheen, who had thousands of people worldwide love him, listen to him, read his books. In the midst of a brilliant career and unheard-of fame as a media evangelist, he was suddenly withdrawn from the limelight and made bishop of a small diocese in upstate New York in a move that was the result of complex issues and certainly not what he himself wanted. Whatever the reason, Sheen went obediently. Into oblivion. Into failure, we might say. But he dealt with his failure in three ways, all of which can teach us something: He knew he was in the right, but didn’t use his media platform to continue the feud. He quietly accepted as God’s will what many saw as injustice, and went where he was sent to see what good he could do there. Humility. He turned to other ways of reaching people, and wrote his greatest book, The Life of Christ, during this time. Listening. He gave away most of the millions of dollars he’d earned throughout his career and lived simply. Generosity. We recently lived through Holy Week and Peter’s terrible failure of faith. When Jesus said he’d been praying for Peter, Peter replied, “Lord, I am ready to go to prison and to die with you.” Jesus said, “I tell you, Peter, before the cock crows this day, you will deny three times that you know me.” We don’t know exactly how Peter responded to Jesus, or what he felt when Jesus’ prediction came to pass. He probably spent a lot of sleepless nights berating himself. He could have spent the rest of his life depressed and angry at himself, because—well, after all, how much worse can it get? Denying Christ? Generations of martyrs have died terrible deaths so they wouldn’t do what Peter did that night. But Jesus knew what Peter would do. And, even though he knew, it was to Peter that he entrusted his Church. He could have chosen one of the other Apostles, one who wouldn’t deny him, one who would stand fast. He chose Peter. He chose the one who lived through the greatest failure of all, and said to him, you are the rock. You are the one who will guide my Church. You are the one I choose. Jesus knew it wouldn’t be easy for Peter to work through his failure, to accept it and go on in spite of it.  Jesus knows that we all fail,  all the time,  and that’s what he’s asking of us, too:  to fail, and to go on.  To fail, and to still accept his will.  To fail, and to turn those failures into something else. Like Peter, like us, Fulton Sheen must have had his share of sleepless nights, distressed over his failures. He hadn’t been able to keep his media ministry together. He wasn’t a particularly able administrator. Sometimes failure is God’s way of keeping us humble. Of keeping us on the right path, or bringing us gently over to another. Of opening up our eyes and ears to something that God wants of us. And our job is to get over the failures, let go of our egos, and hear what God has in store for us next. Fulton Sheen didn’t give up. Peter didn’t give up. And neither should we. by Jeannette de Beauvoir

A morning prayer

At the beginning of the day

J. Veltri, S.J.

O God,
I find myself at the beginning of another day.
I do not know what it will bring.
Please help me to be ready for whatever it may be.

If I am to stand up, help me to stand bravely.
If I am to sit still, help me to sit quietly.
If I am to lie low, help me to do it patiently.
If I am to do nothing, let me do it gallantly.

I pray just for today, for these twenty-four hours,
for the ability to cooperate with others according to the way Jesus taught us to live.
"Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven."
May these words that he taught us become more than words.

Please free my thinking and feelings and the thinking and feelings of others,
from all forms of self-will, self-centeredness, dishonesty, and deception.
Along with my brothers and sisters,
I need this freedom to make my choices today according to your desires.
Send your Spirit to inspire me in time of doubt and indecision so that, together, we can walk along your path.

Amen.

Thoughts on receiving

When someone gives us a watch but we never wear it, the watch is not really received. When someone offers us an idea but we do not respond to it, that idea is not truly received. When someone introduces us to a friend but we ignore him or her, that friend does not feel well received.

Receiving is an art. It means allowing the other to become part of our lives. It means daring to become dependent on the other. It asks for the inner freedom to say: "Without you I wouldn't be who I am." Receiving with the heart is therefore a gesture of humility and love. So many people have been deeply hurt because their gifts were not well received. Let us be good receivers.

Henri Nouwen

Thoughts on the Easter Effect

The Easter Effect and How It Changed the World: The first Christians were baffled by what they called ‘the Resurrection.’ Their struggle to understand it brought about astonishing success for their faith, By George Weigel

In the year 312, just before his victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge won him the undisputed leadership of the Roman Empire, Constantine the Great had a heavenly vision of Christian symbols. That augury led him, a year later, to end all legal sanctions on the public profession of Christianity.

Or so a pious tradition has it.

But there’s a more mundane explanation for Constantine’s decision: He was a politician who had shrewdly decided to join the winning side. By the early 4th century, Christians likely counted for between a quarter and a half of the population of the Roman Empire, and their exponential growth seemed likely to continue.

How did this happen? How did a ragtag band of nobodies from the far edges of the Mediterranean world become such a dominant force in just two and a half centuries?
 
There is no accounting for the rise of Christianity without weighing the revolutionary effect on those nobodies of what they called “the Resurrection”: their encounter with the one whom they embraced as the Risen Lord, whom they first knew as the itinerant Jewish rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, and who died an agonizing and shameful death on a Roman cross outside Jerusalem. As N.T. Wright, one of the Anglosphere’s pre-eminent biblical scholars, makes clear, that first generation answered the question of why they were Christians with a straightforward answer: because Jesus was raised from the dead.

And one of the most striking things about the New Testament accounts of Easter, and what followed in the days immediately after Easter, is that the Gospel writers and editors carefully preserved the memory of the first Christians’ bafflement, skepticism and even fright about what had happened to their former teacher and what was happening to them.

This remarkable and deliberate recording of the first Christians’ incomprehension of what they insisted was the irreducible bottom line of their faith teaches us two things. First, it tells us that the early Christians were confident enough about what they called the Resurrection that (to borrow from Prof. Wright) they were prepared to say something like, “I know this sounds ridiculous, but it’s what happened.” And the second thing it tells us is that it took time for the first Christians to figure out what the events of Easter meant—not only for Jesus but for themselves. As they worked that out, their thinking about a lot of things changed profoundly, as Prof. Wright and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI help us to understand in their biblical commentaries.

The way they thought about time and history changed.

The way they thought about “resurrection” changed.

The way they thought about their responsibilities changed.

The way they thought about worship and its temporal rhythms changed.

However important the role of sociological factors in explaining why Christianity carried the day, there also was that curious and inexplicable joy that marked the early Christians, even as they were being marched off to execution. Was that joy simply delusion? Denial?

Perhaps it was the Easter Effect: the joy of people who had become convinced that they were witnesses to something inexplicable but nonetheless true. Something that gave a superabundance of meaning to life and that erased the fear of death. Something that had to be shared. Something with which to change the world.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-easter-effect-and-how-it-changed-the-world-1522418701?


Mr. Weigel is distinguished senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies, The Wall Street Journal, March 31, 2018, Pg. C1

Thoughts on the Resurrection

Easter Sunday: The Resurrection of the Lord

John 20:1-9

Friends, our Easter Gospel contains St. John’s magnificent account of the Resurrection. Three key lessons follow from the disquieting fact of the Resurrection. First, this world is not all there is. The Resurrection of Jesus from the dead shows as definitively as possible that God is up to something greater than we had imagined. We don’t have to live as though death were our master and as though nihilism were the only coherent point of view. We can, in fact, begin to see this world as a place of gestation toward something higher, more permanent, more splendid. Second, the tyrants know that their time is up. Remember that the cross was Rome’s way of asserting its authority. But when Jesus was raised from the dead through the power of the Holy Spirit, the first Christians knew that Caesar’s days were, in point of fact, numbered. The faculty lounge interpretation of the Resurrection as a subjective event or a mere symbol is exactly what the tyrants of the world want, for it poses no real threat to them. Third, the path of salvation has been opened to everyone. Jesus went all the way down, journeying into pain, despair, alienation, even godforsakenness. He went as far as you can go away from the Father. Why? In order to reach all those who had wandered from God. In light of the Resurrection, the first Christians came to know that, even as we run as fast as we can away from the Father, we are running into the arms of the Son. Let us not domesticate these still-stunning lessons of the Resurrection. Rather, let us allow them to unnerve us, change us, and set us on fire.   Bishop Robert Barron