Wasting Time With God

As I was eating lunch today I was reading an article. I looked up and saw the beautiful blue sky and the trees that now have leaves and I realized if I hadn’t looked up I wouldn’t have even noticed the beauty that God granted us this day! So, I stopped reading and put my lunch down and I just looked. I remembered something I learned about prayer as a novice. Our novice directress used to talk about wasting time with God. I like that phrase because it seems so countercultural. Who in our society would think that wasting time is a good thing?

 

Wasting time serves no purpose except to simply be present. That’s what I want to remember today – to be present to God and all of God’s creation. I would say our society needs to learn to waste more time with God!

St. Catherine of Siena

I cannot let today go by without saying something about this wonderful Dominican saint, St. Catherine of Siena. She was born in Siena, Italy in 1347 and died on April 29, 1380. She was the 24th of 25 children! Imagine!! Catherine had an intimate relationship with Christ and after 3 years of solitude Christ called her to serve the people of her time. She heard Christ say to her, “The service you cannot do me you must render your neighbors.” She helped the poor, nursed the sick, and ministered to prisoners. Catherine was a peacemaker and devoted her life to calling the pope back to Rome from Avignon.

St. Catherine was named a doctor of the Church in 1970. She truly was a remarkable woman and yet all of us can be remarkable if we listen to the voice of God within. Like Catherine we need to spend time alone with God and then go forth from that time on fire with the desire to serve. Dominicans would say, “To contemplate and give to others the fruits of our contemplation.” Why else were we born except to give ourselves totally to God and others?

Fifty Days of Joy!

Holy Week is a time to really reflect on the entire Paschal Mystery. I hope yours was as wonderful as mine!! Now we are in the Fifty Days of Easter. The hidden alleluia is in plain sight now. All is joy! So…what is joy? In my definition it’s not the same as happiness. Joy can be present even when there is sadness in your heart. Joy comes from a profound sense that you are doing the right thing and that you are at peace with yourself and with your God.  May the peace of Christ be with you!

Holy Week

Holy Week began yesterday with Palm/Passion Sunday. Officially Lent does not really end until Holy Thursday at which time the Holy Triduum will begin. Holy Week is the most important week of the church year. Today, tomorrow and Wednesday are days in which we prepare for the most Holy Triduum (Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter). What we celebrate this week is the Paschal Mystery but in a much more heightened way. How will you prepare for this?

At this time of such economic upheaval it seems there is suffering all around us. So many people have lost jobs and savings. Where is God in all of this? Well, maybe that is the point. God is in the middle of all of this! God has always stood with the suffering and the rejected of this world. Can we do anything less? How will you make this a truly Holy Week?!

Solemnity of the Annunciation

Today we celebrate the Annunciation – we remember the time when Gabriel came to Mary and asked her to bear the Savior of the world. Mary’s “fiat,” her yes, shows us how to respond to God’s invitation.  And she also shows us what we must do before we make a decision. We are to dialogue with God. Mary asked questions of the angel before she said yes. “How can this be?”

I think it is important for us to see how God treats us when we are asked to do something. God treats us with the utmost respect; we are not forced into a decision, we are asked. God allows us to ask questions. When God asks us to do something we are given the grace to do it. The angel Gabriel reassured Mary. God also reassures us, “Do not be afraid.” As Gabriel tells Mary, we must also remember that “nothing will be impossible for God.” God wants to dialogue with us. That’s what prayer is all about. If we are trying to figure out what God is asking us to do we must first of all listen just as Mary did. Amazing and marvelous things can happen when we take the time to be in conversation with God!

“Every Creature is a Word of God!”

That quote is from a Dominican mystic from the 14th century, Meister Eckhart. As the flowers begin to pop up and buds get ready to open it’s easy to see God in all of  creation.  Another quote I love of  Eckhart’s  is, “What we plant in the soil of contemplation, we shall reap in the harvest of action.” As Spring becomes more vivid and Lent passes the halfway mark it seems appropriate to ask ourselves, “Has this Lent helped me to prepare the soil of my heart for a deeper relationship with God? What seeds have been planted? What kind of action will break forth because of this Lenten time?”

The Paschal Mystery

The Paschal Mystery, the suffering, death and rising of Jesus is what our lives as Christians are all about. Somedays feel more like suffering and death and somedays feel more like resurrection. 

In the gospel today Jesus is asked what the greatest commandment is. He says to love God with all that you are is the most important commandment and to love your neighbor as yourself is a part of that same commandment. The commandment of love is part of the Paschal Mystery – somedays we feel more like loving people than others! We need to remember to ask God for more help on those days!

Today is the first day of Spring so I hope you are having a resurrection kind of day!