As I continue to “practice resurrection” in these 50 days of Easter I am guided by Sister Joan Chittister’s book The Monastic Mind: 50 simple practices for a contemplative and fulfilling life.   I am also discovering new significance for incarnation as most of the tenets affect the body, like breathing, like kneeling….like being in silence and all the bodily emotions that illicits. My body and I have a love/hate relationship. Yet as I age and as I creek and stiffen, I am more aware of what I am able to do and grateful for renewed focus. I find myself developing a new relationship with breathing, not just because of that blasted, blessed, CPAP machine but because of its singular calming contemplative value in silence. Silence for me has become the fertilizer for growth. As Chittister notes: “concentration on the empty counterclaims of life - its fruitless promises - and contemplation of the Word will, together, bring us to the stilled fullness of our selves.” Everything sacre...

  As Kingfishers Catch Fire BY  GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;  As tumbled over rim in roundy wells  Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's  Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;  Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:  Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;  Selves — goes itself;  myself  it speaks and spells,  Crying  Whát I dó is me: for that I came.   I say móre: the just man justices;  Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;  Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —  Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,  Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his  To the Father through the features of men's faces.  The 40 days of Lent turn almost like an imperceptible dawn into 50 days of Easter. We emerge from a wilderness, limp through Jerusalem like that donkey bearing Jesus, and fall at...

  When I think about tracks in new fallen snow, it rarely occurs to me that any are in the "wrong direction". Rather there is a creative purpose to all marks of emergence from the storm no matter how random or circular. Below is a post from another Easter and I am intrigued with a shift in my own perspective, perhaps due to rigorous practice or perhaps due to aging... The shift is subtle and incorporates what has gone before; it is itself reflective of tracks laid down with purpose even if the purpose was mere wandering.  Some of the tracks approach the empty tomb; some retreat. However, the thing about tracks is that is difficult to measure or discern the resting, remaining and staying, not to mention the learning. If one were to take an arial perpective of a wilderness journey it would not only reveal beautiful patterns and disjointed meanderings. It would also appear as though an exquisite thread was being woven through and around the path...

  There it is…that light in the darkness coming into us! I awoke this morning and though it is not Easter dawn, it is a sign of hope that indeed the tears of Good Friday are being transformed into a dawning love. I/we often move quickly from Good Friday to Easter Sunday! We aren’t quite sure what to “do”?! We aren’t quite sure “how” to wait for a Mystery. Martin Smith helps me when he says that when we get to Holy Saturday there are simply no words. “The church puts a finger to her lips…To be silent in awe is different, though, from being mute out of ignorance.” To paraphrase: our imaginations have been taken to their breaking-point in following Jesus to the utmost limit of his solidarity with us. So lest I be disingenuous and go on and on with words, let me take my breaking imagination to a “breaking in” of love and light which comes to a fullness in the resurrection. Let me watch, gaze and listen…to mystery. I will gaze at the dawn and its aftermath; I will gaze at the vastness o...

  This morning I am meditating on the word, “precious”. Perhaps a strange word with which to enter Holy Week and yet, it has often been a word which surfaced at the cross, as a mother waited with her son, as others began to realize the “preciousness” of their salvation, the preciousness of a moment in time. I began to list in my mind things precious to me in addition to Christ. My babies’ faces, my mother’s lambs and bunnies, every thought of my grandchildren. Synonyms like ‘dear’ and ‘cherished’ and even ‘sacred’ come to mind. All are wrapped somehow in visions of Love. There is a gentleness about precious. There is a tenderness.  And so I was caught up short by the title of a recent OnBeing podcast with the geographer (human geographer no less) Ruth Wilson Gilmore which was: Where life is precious, life is precious. She of course goes on to explain what she means but I was already off in my own meanderings… To me it speaks to the eternal, unchangeable nature of that which is...

  This morning I am meditating on the word, “precious”. Perhaps a strange word with which to enter Holy Week and yet, it has often been a word which surfaced at the cross, as a mother waited with her son, as others began to realize the “preciousness” of their salvation, the preciousness of a moment in time. I began to list in my mind things precious to me in addition to Christ. My babies’ faces, my mother’s lambs and bunnies, every thought of my grandchildren. Synonyms like ‘dear’ and ‘cherished’ and even ‘sacred’ come to mind. All are wrapped somehow in visions of Love. There is a gentleness about precious. There is a tenderness.   And so I was caught up short by the title of a recent OnBeing podcast with the geographer (human geographer no less) Ruth Wilson Gilmore which was: Where life is precious, life is precious. She of course goes on to explain what she means but I was already off in my own meanderings… To me it speaks to the eternal, unchangeable nature of that which i...