30 December 2005

Shameless self-promotion:

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Infant King.

The mouth that breathed the stars into the night now mingles breath with cow and ass.


How is it that this Child King places Himself in such a position that I must crouch down to enter its darkness and look down at Him? Look down at this King, snuggled amidst the winding cloths in the animals' feed?

You are always hidden in the most ordinary ordinariness, among the lowest and the least, reaching through accidents unworthy of You - elevating every low thing and humbling the self-elevated. Unless we are willing to bow our heads to enter the low entryway, we will not find You. Unless we turn our prideful heads downward, we may miss You altogether. You share the cave's air with simple beasts, and the shepherds and kings (truly wise men, to see beyond appearances) are not loathe to enter and praise You in the dim light.

"For unto us a child is born. Unto us a son is given."

A baby. No one fears a baby, except the madmen.

A baby, unseen, unknown, hidden in a cave. Love Incarnate is helpless and unthreathening.

Come, let us adore Him.

28 December 2005

Holy Innocents.
Innocentes pro Christo
primitiae Deo, et Agno -
not fruits of the harvest, but
fruits of the season's hope and promise.
First fruits sacrificed on the altars of
the grief-hot hearts of new motherhood, abrupted.
The raging selfishness of the tyrant
still rages on, sees a threat that is no threat
still sees others as obstacles or objects only
still spawns erratic fear and blinding obsession
still boils in the veins
still sacrifices the simple, the innocent,
on the self-turned hearts of new motherhood, aborted.

12 December 2005

Father, Son, Spirit; Mercy, Gift, Love.
Always reaching down to us, always desiring to lift us up to free us.

Your mercy, grace and love are Your desire in action, Your will to save us, Your desire to draw us near You forever, Your movement toward us, which desires to make us whole and free.

You long to unite Yourself with us, to fill us with Your life and its peace, but the vehemence of this longing is balanced by its absolute purity, which cannot take more than we freely give, and which knows the precise limits we set even when we do not fully know them. Our freedom is ours, and if we subtly withold something for ourselves, You will not take it by force.

And yet, You magnanimously step into every crack we (sometimes hesitatingly) open to You - as You did with the woman at the well, You step boldly into every half-truth we admit and gently invite us to admit the whole truth. And You step in as deeply as we allow You.

Your Mercy never fails to accept what we offer, even if You know we will soon grab it back again. And Your love never ceases to find new ways to call to us, new ways to give Yourself to us, new ways to lift us beyond ourselves. Because we are so much more than we recognize, loved so deeply, given so much, called to such dignity! We are indeed breathed forth in love, called to love, and drawn by love at every moment. But this love calls to us from the cross, where love's burden is made clear. We are freed for love by suffering.

Mercy goes THROUGH sin, and not around it; Love does not COVER our sin, but USES it to reach us; You give Yourself WHILE WE ARE YET SINNING, rather than reject what is unworthy of You. You come to us and make us worthy; You come to us and sanctify us with Your Presence immediately and as fully as we allow, as soon as we acknowledge and confess our sinfulness. You do not want one soul to be lost and You never cease to find ways to reach in with Your love and mercy to free each one from its exile.

Mercy. You are Mercy. The enemy has done a thorough job of convincing the world that You are everything but a tender, merciful Father by distorting the meaning of every good thing. But Mercy has the final victory. Love still gives depite its being ignored, misunderstood, maligned, even persecuted. Grace is ever being given, in ways we often fail to recognize and sometimes reject. Still, we are deeply impelled to love.

And in the end, we are judged by Love.

06 December 2005

In what wild wilderness will You
leave me to weep, waiting
for some sign that what I seek is
already mine, unseen?

I have given all to You to take, use,
keep safe, bring brightly home, and
every burn and ache I vowed to bear
for You alone, for Love's sake.

But all appears empty now and gray,
and my greatest fear here is that at the end
of the day I am only me alone and
exerting
nothing.

The delight of desire dampened
to vague trust, the former fire dulled to
ash and every breath that once was prayer
is now just dust, lifeless air.

Is this the lowliness of love, the way
that is no way at all, the weird half-dark
before lonelines is at last pure enough to be
lit with the deep lightnings of God?

When will fire again flash in this vast
uninteresting landscape in me where You
promised to pitch Your tent, to
delight in dwelling?

Or at least when will You again at last let my
shoulder feel the weight of the cross, my
arms measure the circumference of rough wood, my
hands know the consolation of its splinters, my
heart the rending of
pure
love?

02 December 2005

We talk about “abandonment to God” as if we were giving up something that belongs to us, something we have earned – and our fallen nature does perceive some loss. We cling so vehemently to these shreds we consider so valuable, these handfuls of gravel that appear to our unseeing eyes as precious stone to be retained at any cost.What then, when our blindness is cured?

Then we grin at the self that once clung to handfuls of rock in the same way we grin at the memory of our childhood arguments over toys. We wonder what all that intensity was about. A yo-yo?

We see at last that we are not abandoning ourselves when we give ourselves to You – we are only abandoning our fistfuls of worthless stone and FINDING ourselves under the rubble. Our abandonment loses its negative dimension altogether; we no longer see this as what we “give up” or “forego” for You, but rather what we EMBRACE for love of You. Self-denial becomes gift-of-self, and the focus is no longer on saying “no” to ourselves, but on saying “yes” to You. And our "letting go" becomes our receiving, our giving comes back to us, as it always does.

But how many of us are capable of a “yes” that is strong enough to embrace all You want for us, a “yes” that will not hesitate at each decision, a “yes” that isn’t tempted to be withdrawn with each pain, a “yes” that isn’t forgotten in the thousand interactions of the day, a “yes” that doesn’t waver when fatigue clouds the mind and drains the body – a FIAT like Mary’s that can save the whole world?

Give us the grace of ever-YES!

But this takes perfect love. It’s all about love, all about You. Your love WITH us, FOR us, IN us, THROUGH us, reaching toward others through our “yes.” If we could keep present in our minds the truth that we come FROM Your love are SAVED BY Your love, are made FOR Your love, to RECEIVE Your love, to GIVE Your love, to be FILLED with the UTTER FULLNESS of Your love, we would say “yes” to Your grace. And grace is Your love.

Our lives might be punctuated with ordinary and even extraordinary manifestations of Your grace, but all that matters is our “yes” to that grace. If we are not impelled toward greater love, then the experience is meaningless for us, for surely You invite us to greater generosity, a bigger “yes,” a more profound indwelling…

This is my only way to judge – am I more in love with Love?
Nothing else matters.

01 December 2005

Life is good.
And so is the view out my window.