14th Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)

Short Reflection for the 14^th Sunday of the Ordinary Time (A)

 

Readings: Zechariah 9: 9-19; Romans 8: 9, 11-13; Matthew 11: 25-30

 

Gospel Passage: "Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11: 28)

 

Meditation: We need NOT carry our crosses ALONE. Life is NOT an endurance test!  Do you weary and fret over about many things? Often we act like gods… We are NOT! We need to learn how to relinquish control and let go and allow God to be in control.  Jesus invites us to go to him and share with him our burden. Visit:  www.badaliyya.blogspot.com

 

DHIKR SIMPLE METHOD

 

Dhikr is an Arabic word which means REMEMBRANCE.

1st step: Write the text in your heart.

2nd step: Let the text remain always in on your lips and mind - RECITING the text silently as often as possible...

3rd step:  Be attentive to the disclosure of the meaning/s of the text in your life.

 

 

13th Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)

Short Reflection for the 13^th Sunday of the Ordinary Year (A)

 

Readings: 2 Kings 4:8-11, 14-16a; Romans 6:3-4, 8-11; Matthew 10:37- 42

 

Selected Passage:  “If anyone gives so much as a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is a disciple, then I tell you solemnly, he will most certainly not lose his reward." (Mt. 10: 42).

 

Meditation: Any good deed will endure forever. Jesus also pays attention to the merits those who show gestures of kindness to his disciples.  And NO single act of hospitality will go to waste. Visit:  www.badaliyya.blogspot.com

 

DHIKR SIMPLE METHOD...

1^st step: Write the Dhikr in your heart.

2^nd step: Let the Dhikr remain always in on your lips and mind - RECITING the dihkr silently as often as possible...

3^rd step:  Be attentive to the disclosure of the meaning/s of the Dhikr in your life.

 

 

Everyday Life as Sacrament

EVERYDAY LIFE AS SACRAMENT

Our belief is that the universe shows forth God’s glory. That means each of us is made in God’s image, that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, that the food we eat is sacramental, and that in our work and in our sexual embrace, we are co-creators with God.

In Christianity “the word becomes flesh”, God enters into the physical and thus everything that is physical is potentially sacramental. It’s noteworthy that scripture does not simply say that God became a human being. It says more: “God becomes flesh” - physical, earth. 

There are many reasons why we aren’t more habitually alert to the fact that we are standing on holy ground. Although our everyday activities come laden with sacrament, most of them are rooted in the fact that we are human, that life is long, and that it isn’t easy to sustain high symbols, high language, and high ideals in the muck and grime of everyday life.

Eating, working, and making love should be holy, but too often we do them more for survival than for any sacramentality and “getting by” is about as high a symbol as we can muster on a weekday. I say this with sympathy. It isn’t easy, day by day, hour by hour, to experience sacrament in the ordinary actions of our lives.

But there’s another reason why we have lost the sense of sacramentality in our lives, namely, we have too little prayer and ritual around our ordinary actions. We too seldom use prayer or ritual to connect our actions – eating, drinking, working, socializing, making love, giving birth to things – to their sacred origins.

Generally, we don’t connect our food to its sacred origins, don’t consider our work as co-creation with God, don’t bless our workplaces and boardrooms, and would shrink at the very thought of blessing a bedroom where sex takes place.

We are the poorer for that, not just religiously, but humanly.

To read more click here or copy this address into your browser http://ronrolheiser.com/everyday-life-as-sacrament/#.XvDYMPJ7k_8
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Naming the Present Moment

NAMING THE PRESENT MOMENT & A RETREAT OPPORTUNITY

by Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI

John of the Cross suggests that God’s daily word is written inside of ordinary experience. Our task is to examine our own experiences and try to name what God is saying to us inside of them, by using images from scripture and our faith tradition

For example, today, a group of believers today might ask itself: “What time are we living in? Is this the time of the desert? Is this again the time of the Babylonian exile? Are we on the road to Emmaus? Are we meeting Jesus, along with the Syro-Phoenician woman, on the borders of ethnicity, religion, gender? Are we in the upper room, awaiting a new Pentecost, taking seriously Jesus’ counsel to not leave the city until we feel ourselves clothed with power?”

And given our experience of being Christian within a post-ecclesial society, we might ask too: “What is God saying to us inside of a culture that is spiritual but not ecclesial, Christian but mostly bitter and grandiose about its own roots? Is this a time of pruning, of special humbling? What is our task in a time of ecclesial, historical dis-privilege? What should our waiting consist of?”

To pray and struggle to name our experiences biblically and in faith is to “read the signs of the times”. It’s also good spiritual direction as John of the Cross defines it.

I like a comment I once heard from Richard Rohr: “Not everything can be cured or fixed, but it should be named properly.”

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12th Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)

Short Reflection for the 12^th Sunday in the Ordinary Time (A)

 

Readings: Jeremiah 20: 10 – 13; Romans 5: 12 – 15; Matthew 10: 26 - 33

 

Selected Passage: “Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father's knowledge. Even all the hairs of your head are counted. So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. (Matthew 10: 29-31)

 

Meditation: Jesus exhorts his apostles to take courage in their work and they should not be afraid to talk and to proclaim God’s kingdom. They may encounter hostilities along the way. But they have to take courage just the same.

 

Have NO fear! Trust in the Lord. Believe that we are worth more than many sparrows. Visit:  www.badaliyya.blogspot.com

 

DHIKR SIMPLE METHOD

 

Dhikr is an Arabic word which means REMEMBRANCE.

1st step: Write the text in your heart.

2nd step: Let the text remain always in on your lips and mind - RECITING the text silently as often as possible...

3rd step:  Be attentive to the disclosure of the meaning/s of the text in your life.

 

What Dark Nights Do for Us

WHAT DARK NIGHTS DO FOR US

On the surface this might seem incongruous, even contradictory; but those two things, her feeling that God was absent and her exceptional selflessness, are not unconnected. The opposite. The latter depends precisely upon the former; her inability to feel God affectively, the dryness of her faith experience, the dark night that enveloped her, were precisely the reason her faith was so pure, and her actions were so selfless.

In short, with all affective feelings gone and with her imagination helpless to create images of God and a concept of God’s existence, she was no longer able to manipulate her experience of God and reshape it to fit her own needs. She had to receive God on God’s own terms, not on her terms. The very dryness of her faith was what made it so pure. The seeming absence of God also helped assure the absence of her own ego.

Evidence suggests that 95% of the time we do manipulate our experience of God to serve our own interests. However, God arranges things so that we cannot do this all the time. God corrects our proclivity to create a God who works for our self-interest by sending us, as he did to Mother Teresa, crushing dark nights of the soul, namely, periods of imaginative and affective dryness within which we simply are unable to imagine and affectively feel either God’s existence or God’s love for us.

While we continue to somehow “know” God at a deeper level, our imaginations and our emotions run out of gas, completely. When this happens, we find ourselves powerless to manipulate our experience of God in any way – and certainly not to work it for our own benefit.

God can then flow into us purely, with our egos, narcissism, and selfishness now unable to color the experience.

To read more click here or copy this address into your browser
http://ronrolheiser.com/what-dark-nights-do-for-us/#.XtkkumpKg_8

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Private Integrity

PRIVATE INTEGRITY

What we do in secret ultimately shapes the person whom we present in public. Dishonesty changes the very way we look because it changes who we are. That’s the reason why so often those around us will intuit the truth about us, smell the lie, even when they don’t have any hard evidence on which to suspect us.

Doing something in secret that we can’t admit in public is the very definition of hypocrisy and hypocrisy forces us to lie. And lying, among all sins, is perhaps the most dangerous. Why? Because we hate ourselves for it and we stop respecting ourselves. When we stop respecting ourselves, we will, all too soon, notice that other people stop respecting us too.

The biblical image of the honest sinner humbly turning towards God is predicated precisely on honesty, on the sinner not hiding or lying about his or her sin. When we don’t honestly admit our sin we move in the opposite direction, namely, towards rationalization, hardness of attitude, and cynicism. When we hide a sin, we are forced to lie, and with that lie we immediately begin to harden and reshape our souls. You can do anything, as long as you don’t have to lie about it. That’s very different than saying that you can do anything as long as nobody finds out about it.

We should never delude ourselves into thinking that the things we do in private, including very small actions of infidelity, of self-indulgence, of bigotry, of jealousy, or of slander, are of no consequence since no one knows about them. Inside the mystery of our interconnectedness as a human family and as a family of faith and trust, even our most private actions, good or bad, like invisible bacteria inside the blood stream, affect the whole. Everything is known, felt, in one way or another.

Others know us, even when they don’t exactly know everything about us. They smell our vices just as they smell our virtues.

To read more click here or copy this address into your browser http://ronrolheiser.com/private-integrity/#.Xt5slGpKg_8
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Private Integrity

PRIVATE INTEGRITY

What we do in secret ultimately shapes the person whom we present in public. Dishonesty changes the very way we look because it changes who we are. That’s the reason why so often those around us will intuit the truth about us, smell the lie, even when they don’t have any hard evidence on which to suspect us.

Doing something in secret that we can’t admit in public is the very definition of hypocrisy and hypocrisy forces us to lie. And lying, among all sins, is perhaps the most dangerous. Why? Because we hate ourselves for it and we stop respecting ourselves. When we stop respecting ourselves, we will, all too soon, notice that other people stop respecting us too.

The biblical image of the honest sinner humbly turning towards God is predicated precisely on honesty, on the sinner not hiding or lying about his or her sin. When we don’t honestly admit our sin we move in the opposite direction, namely, towards rationalization, hardness of attitude, and cynicism. When we hide a sin, we are forced to lie, and with that lie we immediately begin to harden and reshape our souls. You can do anything, as long as you don’t have to lie about it. That’s very different than saying that you can do anything as long as nobody finds out about it.

We should never delude ourselves into thinking that the things we do in private, including very small actions of infidelity, of self-indulgence, of bigotry, of jealousy, or of slander, are of no consequence since no one knows about them. Inside the mystery of our interconnectedness as a human family and as a family of faith and trust, even our most private actions, good or bad, like invisible bacteria inside the blood stream, affect the whole. Everything is known, felt, in one way or another.

Others know us, even when they don’t exactly know everything about us. They smell our vices just as they smell our virtues.

To read more click here or copy this address into your browser http://ronrolheiser.com/private-integrity/#.Xt5slGpKg_8
Follow on Facebook www.facebook.com/ronrolheiser

Corpus Christi Sunday

Short Reflection for the Corpus et Sanguinis Christi Sunday (A)

Readings: Deuteronomy 8: 2-3. 14-16; 1 Corinthians 10: 16-17;mJohn 6: 51-58

Selected Passage: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world." (John 6: 51)

Meditation: The Feast of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ reminds us of the price of redemption.  He broke his body and shed his blood that we may have life!  When we eat his body and drink his blood we share his life. And if we do share his life, we, too, are invited to break our body and shed blood for others that they may have life. See www.badaliyya,blogspot.com

DHIKR SIMPLE METHOD

1st step: Write the text or Dhikr (the Arabic word for REMEMBRANCE) in your heart.

2nd step: Let the text remain always in on your lips and mind - RECITING the text silently as often as possible...

3rd step:  Be attentive to the disclosure of the meaning/s of the text in your life.

Our Need to Kneel....

OUR NEED TO KNEEL

Few things are as debilitating for true worship today as is the mistaken notion, popular in many circles, that somehow we belittle ourselves, are regressive, insult human dignity and put-down oppressed peoples, if we kneel, if we bow in obedience and if we genuflect so as to acknowledge that we are below and something else is above.

In the name of religious progress, we are teaching ourselves not to genuflect, not to kneel and not to think of ourselves (and feel ourselves) as living under God.

We mean this sincerely and there are some understandable reasons for why we feel this way, not the least of which is a religious upbringing that many of us are still reacting against. But this is not progress—religiously or otherwise. We are poorer because of this.

Genuflection is the ultimate moral act—and it lies at the basis of all morality. We become moral on that day when we first genuflect and know what we are doing.

Perhaps we need a new language which no longer uses phrases like "under" or ''below" (though, like Rohr, I doubt this) and perhaps we do need gestures other than genuflection and kneeling (though my imagination runs out of gas here). Whatever language and whatever the gesture, we need again to "kneel" and to "genuflect" and put ourselves "under" someone.

To kneel does not belittle or demean us. It does not make us smaller. It makes us larger. No person, female or male, is taller in terms of dignity and genuine adultness, than when she or he kneels in prayer, in adoration and in obedience.

There are few gestures singularly powerful as is that of bending the knee before the God who made us.

To read more click here or copy this address into your browser http://ronrolheiser.com/our-need-to-kneel/#.XnOn1JNKg_8
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Trinity Sunday

Short Reflection for the Trinity Sunday (A)

Readings: Exodus 34: 4-6. 8-9; 2 Corinthians 13: 11-13; John 3: 16-18

Selected Passage: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” (John 3: 16)

Meditation: We begin to understand the one Triune God through the contemplation of God as LOVE.  Fr. Cantalamessa in his homily for the Feast states that in every love there are always three realities or subjects: one who loves, one who is loved and the love that unites them.

Where God is understood as absolute power, there is no need for there to be more than one person, for power can be exercised quite well by one person; but if God is understood as absolute love, then it cannot be this way.  The life of the Trinity is a mystery of relation. This means that the divine persons do not “have” relations, but rather “are” relations.

DHIKR SIMPLE METHOD

1st step: Write the text or Dhikr (the Arabic word for REMEMBRANCE) in your heart.

2nd step: Let the text remain always in on your lips and mind - RECITING the text silently as often as possible...

3rd step:  Be attentive to the disclosure of the meaning/s of the text in your life.