When I get an idea, I tend to tell myself like the nursery rhyme character holding up a plum, “Oh, what a good girl am I!” Then I check myself: Wait a minute. Those good ideas come from God. God put that good idea into my head. God put that good desire into my heart. As Richard Rohr says, “We are always and forever merely seconding the motion” (Naked Now, 2009). And so my prayer giving strength to my idea or desire is “I second the motion, God.” Then I need to use that idea and follow that desire, for it is from God.
When you get an idea, do you thank God, or do you let your ego pat you on the back?
What desires are in your heart? How are you following them?
In her book Dakota Kathleen Norris describes an antelope whose neck is “like a message in unbreakable code.” Autumn night skies also possess a message in unbreakable code. In pre-dawn I walk across the road toward the mailbox, my head tilted back, my feet knowing the way by memory. The stars seem closer, more brilliant. Those with telescopes have told me autumn is the best time to gaze above. The wonder is that light travels at 186,000 miles per second, and the same constellations I’m delighting in were seen by my ancestors. They gave mythological names to the skies as they de-coded the heavenly messages. Present-day scientists have named the elements, breaking much of the code. Yet the full code is unbreakable, keeping us in mysterious wonder. If I could rearrange the stars, I’d have them spell G-O-D.
Take the time to wonder. See the message in the unbreakable code called “life.”
A curved line on the edge of the lake attracted my attention. It was the neck of a heron. The bird stood stock-still, a dark line painted against the water. Its livelihood depended upon silence, but was its heart pounding in its ears with stirring hope for a tasty fish? 
Does my life depend upon silence? That is a definite yes. Silence puts room in my life. Naturally efficient, I don’t let minutes slip idly by. But I work in silence. Quiet undergirds what I do: prepare church music, clean the retreat center, make dinner, pull weeds. Silence makes room for the mystery behind activity. Silence coaxes meaning from the mundane and raises all to a fully-human level, which is as close to the divine as we can be.
Today add silence to your activity. Turn off the radio, cell phone, TV. If possible, turn off the inner chatter that fills our brains. Fully engage in what you are doing, and discover the mystery behind the work. Find meaning in the mundane. And become a little more fully human.
September 15 is traditionally the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows in the Catholic liturgical calendar. Sunday takes precedence this year, but I got to musing about Mary remembered under this title while praying for our three Sisters who take this feast of Mary as their name day.
The other day I met a woman at Giant in the veggie section of the grocery store. She had a darling haircut and I smiled at her and told her how lovely she looked. She smiled back and told me she had just gone through cancer. So we swapped “the big C” stories and laughed together. “I always wanted to look like Jamie Lee Curtis,” she said with a big smile. JOY … coming out of her sorrow.
After a huge storm the other night, we were blessed with a rainbow. I ran down to snap some photos and met my neighbor who was on her way to “Meet the Teacher” night at Conrad Weiser School. Seeing the rainbow, she called her son to see it. Together we admired. JOY … coming after a storm.
We were blessed to be amidst a retreat this week at the Jesuit Center. Some came with confusion. They left with greater clarity. Some came with hurt and loss. They left with greater surrender and hope. Graces shared aloud at Eucharist this morning were testament to God’s Spirit deeply at work. JOY … coming out of darkness.
Seems to me that Mary whom we name Mother of Sorrows can equally bear the title Mother of All Joy. Mother of God … Mother of the One who IS our greatest joy. She too must have mused on all the little things that brought her joy: her son’s first steps …. Was the first word “Mama” or “Papa?” What did his first effort at carpentry look like? What was it like to hear him laugh?
Sorrow and Joy … they dance together. In walking through our moments of pain, may we remember
that JOY comes in the morning!
My youngest sister and I are the same age, although she was born five years after me. You and I are the same age, too, even though I don’t know who’s reading this blog. We both began at the Big Bang, or the Grand Radiance, or whatever you wish to call the first instant of creation when everything that exists today had its origin. Cosmology has shown to us that everyone and everything has the same birthday. Every member of the human race has been a womb mate to everyone else. We’re all quite close to each other. Did you know that there’s one species of bee that evolved so that its specific vibration would stimulate the tomato flower to release its pollen? They co-evolved; one can’t exist without the other. If only we humans realized how closely we are united to the 12.5 million species on Planet Earth—only one sixth of which have been named with genus and species.
If creation seems awesome, then how infinitely more awesome creation’s purpose—to manifest divine goodness in the Incarnation.
When we hear that someone has cancer, the news is a call to faith. A neighbor has cancer, and three of us sisters visited him. With his children and grandchildren present, we talked about our founding sister, Sister Maria Aloysia. Then we prayed for a complete cure through her intercession. We also invited him to come to LialRenewalCenter to pray before the crucifix before which our founding sisters prayed. We will continue to pray with confidence, and our faith will continually be tested.
Did we make fools of ourselves? Are we imposing our Catholic belief on someone of another Christian denomination? What is faith? Is it acknowledging every moment as miracle? If so, does faith lead to taking miracles for granted? Or is it leaping into a realm beyond our imagining? If so, faith lands us in God.
I got up, unlocked LialRenewalCenter, prayed Morning Prayer and meditation, helped prepare three meals for 27 retreatants, prepared liturgies for St. Richard Church, played a card game with the sisters with whom I live after praying Evening Prayer with them, phoned and wrote e-mails, and went to bed. Although the particulars change, this sounds like everyone else’s day. Work, play, pray, rest. Rather prosaic, I’d say, until I remember that God has been with me through it all in what Elizabeth Johnson calls “unspeakable nearness.” God’s energy flowed through me as I sat at the computer. The beauty of creation smacked me in the face when I brushed entrances free of webs. The relatedness between the living God and me took form when I peeled the carrots. O most holy and prosaic life!
Sometimes best-sellers portray unusual, even unnerving pictures of God. Could Shay Bourne in Jodi Piccoult’s Change of Heart be Jesus? Is the Holy Spirit Saraya, Keeper of the gardens, in William Young’s The Shack? Does the main character in the Joshua books depict Jesus? Even the gospels give us four different portraits of Jesus, while professing that Jesus is the full revelation of God. Whether gospel or novel, words grope to reveal God.
We struggle with the question “Who is God?” Yet God wants to be known. God even made it easy for us by becoming human. But when we put everything we know about humanity together, we don’t come up with God. On the other hand, when we put everything we know about divinity together, we come up with the human Jesus Christ. The very first creed said it all: “Jesus is Lord.” Jesus is God’s self-communication. Jesus is God saying, “Here I am.”
Today (August 20) is the anniversary of my baptism. I have no idea whether my baptismal candle and garment are still around, but I do know that the grace of my baptism is still with me. What have I been doing all these years with my baptismal grace? What am I doing with this precious gift called Christian life? My life is God is a great gift requiring a great response. Am I up to the task of living my life of grace? 
A group of us used to pray in a friend’s home once a week for five years. Then some moved out of town, and it has been seven years since we all had met. As it happened, we all were able to get to St. Rita’s Hospital in Lima on the same Sunday afternoon. Our friend at whose home we met was lying in the bed following a knee replacement. We followed our familiar routine: talk a while, then sing religious songs, then pray spontaneously or read from Scripture. As usual, the praying and singing lasted an hour.
Upon leaving, we commented that this reunion of prayer-friends was truly a miracle. We were saying this as we passed the hospital chapel. As lovely as the chapel was, we had just left a more beautiful chapel back in the hospital room. For where eight friends meet in Christ’s name, there God is in their midst (Mt. 18:20).
Do you pray with your friends? Do you set aside a regular prayer time? Try it. The commitment is powerful, aiding each friend in ministry.