A Daily Lent

Living Close to Your Center Tuesday of the Second Week of Lent - March 10, 2020 When the inner life of the spirit is loosened within a person, there most always follows a burst of creativity. This creativity coincides with the emergence of our soul, which has its own vocabulary made up of images and symbols. Your soul, after all, doesn’t show up in words and eloquence . . . but in pictures, images, symbols. (This is why most of us are more in touch with our soul when we are in a place of natural beauty . . . a forest, in the mountains, on a seashore, and so on. In these places, words fall flat . . . our soul naturally connects to the more nuanced created world surrounding us.) The spiritual life makes you more expansive, more open to vastness and that which is Beyond. It does not cause you to be narrower, more protective, or more frightened of the unknown. This openness and expansiveness is the life of your soul. In today’s reading, Elizabeth O’Connor says that authentic crea...

A Larger, Freer, More Truthful Way Saturday after Ash Wednesday – February 29, 2020 When Beatrice Bruteau describes a contemplative as someone who lets go of the old ways that seem “natural” to us in favor of that which is larger, freer, and more truthful, something in me says, “Yes!” and something else in me says, “I can’t!” She’s right. It’s not “natural” to us that we should love others without qualification. But this is part of the transformative process, the slow and messy shift in the interior life to which the contemplative is invited. Our vocation is to live in union with God, and this is the way God loves. This is how Bruteau says it: We have now identified the basic life principle of the communion of the saints. That is what is meant by abiding in Jesus’ love. Live in the kind of love-world he has created, the love-context in which he lives. Do it the way he does it. “Love one another as I have loved you,” leaving out any regard for “deserving” or “lovability,” eith...

Monday of the Third Week of Lent Daily Reading : Luke 4:24 – 30 Focus Passage : "Truly I tell you," he continued, "prophets are not accepted in their hometowns. I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah's time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian." All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. (Lk. 4:24 – 28) The passage actually begins ahead of these verses. The people of Jesus’ hometown were amazed at the gracious words of Jesus when he read from the prophet Isaiah. He connected his life and ministry to the long-awaited Messiah of Isaiah’s prophecy. Knowing his lineage as Joseph’s son (v. 22, “ Isn’t this Joseph’s s...