Wednesday, June 3, 2020

Prayer for racial justice


A prayer for racial justice and the Catholic Church

Social life is made by human beings. The society we live in is the outcome of human choices and decisions. This means that human beings can change things. What humans break, divide, and separate, we can — with God's help — also heal, unite, and restore.

What is now does not have to be. Therein lies the hope. And the challenge.

Come, Holy Spirit!

Fill the hearts of your faithful.

Enkindle within us the fire of your love.

Come, Holy Spirit!

Breathe into us a fiery passion for justice.

Especially for those who have the breath of life crushed from them.

Amen.

~by Bryan N. Massingale, Racial Justice and the Catholic Church (Orbis)

Saturday, May 30, 2020

Thoughts on solitude


Hear the Voice that Calls You the Beloved
Solitude is listening to the voice that calls you the Beloved. It is being alone with the One who says, “You are my Beloved, I want to be with you. Don’t go running around, don’t start to prove to everybody that you’re beloved. You are already beloved.” That is what God says to us. Solitude is the place where we go in order to hear the truth about ourselves. It asks us to let go of the other ways of proving, which are a lot more satisfying. The voice that calls us the beloved is not the voice that satisfies the senses. That’s what the whole mystical life is about; it is beyond feelings and beyond thoughts.

Henri Nouwen

Saturday, May 23, 2020

Thoughts on community


We Are Windows to God’s Love
The discipline of community makes us persons; that is, people who are sounding through to each other (the Latin personare means “sounding through”) a truth, a beauty, and a love that is greater, fuller, and richer than we ourselves can grasp. In true community we are windows constantly offering each other new views on the mystery of God’s presence in our lives. Thus the discipline of community is a true discipline of prayer. It makes us alert to the presence of the Spirit who cries out “Abba,” Father, among us and thus prays from the center of our common life. Community thus is obedience practiced together. The question is not simply “Where does God lead me as an individual person who tried to do his will?” More basic and more significant is the question “Where does God lead us as a people?”

Henri Nouwen