I have carried you since you were born;

I have taken care of you from your birth.

Even when you are old, I will be he same.

Even when your hair has turned gray,

I will take care of you.

I made you and will take care of you, says the Lord.

My strength and my weakness are in your hands; preserve the one and heal the other.

My knowledge and my ignorance are in your hands; where you have been closed to me, open my knocking. Let me remember you, understand you, love you. Increase these things in me, until you restore me wholly.

Amen.

-St. Ignatius

I ask for the grace to trust myself totally to God’s love.

Let go

The less I do, the more god can do

This prayer is a vestibule, a way into God’s presence

When a thought or felling attacts your attention, return to the sacred word. Don’t take possession of it. Sink into a deep peace.

Don’t possess, let go.

Help us remember that what we keep we lose, and only what we give remains our own.

Time is too fast for those who fear,

Time is too long for those who mourn,

Time is too short for those who rejoice,

But for those who love, time is eternity.

Times of sorrow seem interminable. There is the need to remember and rejoice- a great part of this is remembering of childhood memories. The care of my family.

Care- I felt cared for and that care translated into love for me. That love translated into the center of my vocation. But the sorrow of loss does not easily turn to joy. The eternal name of love- that same love- Jesus yesterday, today, forever. That love cannot be taken away. There is a deep consolation in knowing that love for all eternity.

-St. Augustine

Today God still speaks to us as he used to speak to our ancestors at a time when there were neither spiritual directors nor any systems of spirituality. To be faithful to the designs of God then comprised the whole of one’s spiritual life. Religious devotion had not become a science crammed with precepts and detailed instructions. Nowadays, no doubt, our special needs make this necessary, but in the old days people were less complex and more straightforward. Then they knew only that each moment brought a duty which much be faithfully fulfilled. Those spiritually inclined needed nothing more. They were like the hand of a clock which, minute by minute, crosses its appointed space, for, ceaselessly prompted by divine grace, they attended without thinking to each new task offered them by God at every hour of the day.

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spiritually inclined like the hands of a clock

minute by minute

crosses its appointed space

faithful to the designs of God

each moment brought a duty which must be faithfully fulfilled

designs- a hand of a clock moment by moment

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Find the sacred word, be in God’s presence

Let go

The less I do, the more God can do

This prayer is a vestibule, away into God’s presence

When a thought or felling attention, return to the sacred word. DOn’t take possession of it. Sink into a deep peace.

Don’t possess, let go.

Help us to remember that what we keep we lose, and only what we give remains our own.

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These are times during the grieving process when we break apart to a gamut of emotions.

There is crying. There are tears- and certainly regrets.

I hold onto something I heard once, that the past is a dream, the future is a vision. But he present well lived makes the past a dream of beauty and the future a vision of hope. We learn to live with our remembering- with this dream of beauty, this vision of hope.

Obedience is beter than sacrifice – the words from the first reading from the Book of Samuel- point out a similar truth. We all want to do the discipline we want to do. We choose penances- our sacrifices. But the ultimate penance, however, may be simply to learn from each moment- to live in the present and not to run away from the message of this present moment. The challenges we face in life right now are what will purify us and what is old and useless- those old wineskins.

And God alone knows what each of us needs to be spiritually whole- to receive new wine…whether it be to reconcile- to give our natural gifts for the sake of another- to learn from another- to live for something larger than ourselves- to live in the present without counting time, comparing our efforts.

What we have to do this year- this day- this hour is to accept what comes our way- as the raw material of our growth, our faith. To the yes of faith there is no such thing as a dull moment. When we let the spirit of Christ sharpen our senses and free us from useless anxieties and worries about tomorrow, we can begin a new to find true life in each present moment.

A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.

That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

Read More!

By: Adam Gopnik

Sculpting Movement and Time: Making Slow Dancing

Slow Dancing, David Michalek’s video installation featuring larger-than-life, hyper-slow-motion video portraits of dancers and choreographers, offers insight into the physics of movement and the essence of creativity.

With these images, Michalek conjures a fluid stillness, creating a meditative time and space amidst the rush and crush of contemporary life. Slow Dancing engages the senses and the mind in an encompassing experience of awareness. The work also transforms Harvard Yard, calling forth its symbolic significance as a place for contemplation.

Michalek stresses the importance of incorporating different styles of dance as not simply pluralistic, but also as aesthetically interesting. A ballerina’s split-second pirouette drags out across an agonizing span of time, and each muscle’s contraction gets a starring role in its own few moments of screen time. Meanwhile, on a neighboring screen, a break-dancer’s gravity-defying movements change at a glacial, gorgeous step. Creative imagination, says Michalek, lives in that tension. And the work itself is driven by his desire to create “a little oasis of contemplation—a secular chapel—” in the midst of our daily bustle.

This time of year we are bringing some things to a close for the season – our academic institutions, for instance – and entering into the more relaxed season of summer.  The men who have been studying for the priesthood for so many years are finishing their studies and we will soon celebrate their ordination.  We take time to pause and celebrate the lives of our Jubilarians.  The season of Easter is similarly drawing to a close with Pentecost.  How do we name the Holy Spirit whose presence is felt in all these activities?  How do we continue to be converted to God at the core of our being?  How do we become persons of the Holy Spirit?

For Wisdom is mobile beyond all motion and she penetrates and
pervades all things by reason of her purity.  For she is an aura of the
might of God and a pure effusion of the glory of the Almighty…For she
is the refulgence of eternal light, the spotless mirror of the power of
God, the image of his goodness.

Bernard of Clairvaux called the Holy Spirit the kiss of God.  St. Hildegarde saw the Holy Spirit as the “breast-plate of life, girdle of beautiful energy.”  The Nicene Creed refers to the Spirit as the Lord and Giver of Life.  Other images are found in the Litany of the Holy Spirit:  Consuming Fire, Burning Love, Author of All Good.  The Curé of Ars saw the Spirit “Like a mother leading by the hand her child.”  Dietrich Bonhoeffer considered the Spirit to be the “Pledge of the abiding presence of Jesus.”

And she, who is one, can do all things, and renews everything
while herself perduring; and passing into holy souls from age to age,
she produces friends of God and prophets.  For there is nought
God loves, be it not one who dwells with Wisdom.  For she is fairer
than the sun and surpasses every constellation of the stars.  Compared
to light, she takes precedence; for that, indeed, night supplants, but
wickedness prevails not over Wisdom.  Indeed, she reaches from end to
end mightily and governs all things well

Wisdom 7: 21-8:1

How do we name the Spirit?  Are we willing to surrender ourselves to the Spirit, receiving the grace of encouragement to become utterly enthralled with God through Jesus?  Do we allow ourselves to be guided by the Holy Spirit?  Do we allow ourselves to live in God’s love and allow that love to live in us?  When we do, we become something more.  We become people conformed to the image of Christ.  Ignatius understood this and provided us with the tools to stir up our love of God to the point of being enthralled through the Exercises.