Tuesday, May 5, 2009

In His Pleasure


"I believe that God made me for a purpose, but He also made me fast. When I run it is in His pleasure." - Eric Liddell

The movie "Chariots of Fire" is my all-time favorite, and the quote from Eric Liddell about feeling God's pleasure when he would run is really one of the best lines ever! If only each and every one of us could be fully aware of what exactly is the unique and special talent that God has specifically given us, and make developing it and living it out our life's focus. If only like Eric Liddell, we could really feel God's pleasure as we do that which we are really good at.

Inside and outside of my workplace, I love observing and discovering what strengths and gifts people have within them, witnessing how these unfold - get nurtured, stretched, the good effects creatively spread to a wide base of others, and become concrete examples of God's enlivening spirit flowing through people. It is easy to imagine God smiling at what goes on and feeling great pleasure over His gifts planted in the person when its wings spread and take flight.

It's also like the petals of a beautiful flower opening up to our Creator God and basking in His pleasure.




Friday, April 10, 2009

Into Your Hands


Sometimes one can be so sure about one's desire to live a life fully for God, but quite unsure about what would be the best way for this to happen. Unsure and at times impatient, wanting things to be clear right away, wanting to jump right into action so that one can feel that at least one is DOING something.

When to take action and when to stay still? When to reach out in service to others and when to reach out through quiet but active prayer? When to take courageous moves in new directions outside of the comfort zone, and when to just wait with full trust that He will cue when the timing is right? When to DO... and when to just BE...

It is harder to keep still, to just BE for the meantime, and to listen. To be mindful that timing is His, that the WHEN and the HOW will come when He decides to let it be known.

The different Holy Week recollection talks as well as homilies the past days centered around the theme of God loving us first and how loving Him back calls us to love others, especially those who are in great need of help, more concretely. To love in the way He loves. Or at least, to keep trying to do so. It is easy to desire to live this truth, but much more difficult to live this out concretely, consistently, creatively and true to what He intends for us.

With all of these in mind, I find some consolation from the verses of a simple song we learned in grade school, and which also contain the final of the Seven Last Words of Jesus on the cross:

"Into Your Hands, I commend my spirit Oh Lord
Into Your Hands, I commend my life"

I surrender my life to Him, trusting that He will help me properly discern His will.

For now, I will just BE... in His Hands.


Sunday, April 5, 2009

Looking Forward


Lent began with an effort on Ash Wednesday to fast from any intake of food or liquid for 12 hours. It was easier said than done especially since the office environment is one where food is the favorite pastime of everyone. Come the 12th hour, I was already dizzy from the hunger but was able to draw strength from within to overcome it. The experience made me realize that strength of will is something that we can cultivate with conscious effort and with prayer.

The past few weeks I've felt my heart stirred many times and in many ways both during and outside of prayer. It's been such a graced season. "Dear Lord, how truly present you are!" I've found myself saying to Him. "How true it is that You love us first." I long to curl up like a little child and rest "in the palm of his Hand" like the prayer goes. And this while remembering His great sacrifice of love as concretized by His suffering and death on the cross.

My resolve to lay my whole being at His feet and offer the rest of my life for Him to use as He pleases is as strong as ever. And like the fasting experience, the strength to make good this offering will have to come from conscious effort, much prayer and a continued going back to the experience of being loved by Him first.

"Oh dearest, dearest Lord, make me worthy of your Love. Teach me to want only what You want, to live and work only in the way You want me to do so, to be open to everything from and for You..."

A "SAMPLE" way of living for Him, until it becomes clearer how else to love Him better:

S - implicity of lifestyle
A - cceptance of self and others
M -ission
P - resence
L - istening with love
E - mbracing His cross

The graces of Lent!


Saturday, March 14, 2009

Please Do the Work


How truly wonderful it is that at the start of each day we can freely offer up our work life to Him!

"My dearest Lord,
Please do the work
While I simply be your instrument
Lead, and let me follow You."

I find that praying the above makes me excited over the outcome of my work. While in the process of working, I know I am not alone, but that there are two of us caring for what happens, and working hard for the best outcome. When there are difficulties, I can more calmly figure out how best to go about things, knowing that my partner is all-knowing and all-wise. This realization gives me confidence. When things turn out well, I feel a sense joy in recognizing that it is He who did the actual work.

Throughout the preparations for our annual people planning in the office, I would pray the above each morning. Now that the main planning day is over, I look back on the richness of insights and other fruits of the month-long discussion meetings, and just know from the core of my soul that He WAS present and was actively working with us all through out.

"Lord, please do the work."

This is not about laziness to do work by oneself. Rather, it is about asking for the gift of partnership with Him in all things.


Thursday, December 11, 2008

Advent Gaze

.

ADVENT

A time for gazing upon Him

With a heart slowly and quietly

Pondering over the meaning of His gifts


Dearest gentle Mama,

May we stay beside you throughout this Advent season

And with you, allow only His Word to fill our soul

Till it radiates nothing less than the love and the joy

That He wants us to bring to others


You are our precious model

Of a most quiet gaze

And a peaceful pondering heart


.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

God Within


God's creativity is so amazing. He designed things in such a way that we can experience His presence "in all things", but as if that was not enough and He wanted to lodge Himself so fully within us, He also reserved the deepest part of our very being as the place where He makes His home and where He constantly breathes His life and love.

I feel so blessed to have stumbled upon this article by George Aschenbrenner S.J. entitled, "A Hidden Self Grown Strong", located in the book "Handbook of Spirituality for Ministers" edited by Robert Wicks. It describes our God within us:

"This inner core of a person has a profundity and a simplicity that is literally beyond words. The core of the soul is not a place upon which to take a stand; nor is it a thing to be grasped. To speak of the core of a person in such terms is very misleading. Our deepest center stretches far beyond what can be conceived in clear and distinct ideas and what can be fully expressed in words. As we grow in our appreciation of this personal center, its presence dawns, alluringly shrouded in mist and mystery. Such mysteriousness does not imply cloudy ambiguity. Rather, within the shifting mists of this inner mysterious realm there can dawn a great quiet and clarity of vision. Allowing ourselves to be led further into this core of self facilitates a wonderful process of simplification. Life's complexities fuse into an undaunted simplicity. A noisy world hushes into a resounding quiet. And a polluted heart is stripped clear and clean. This core of the soul is marked by a simple calm and quiet beyond any cataclysmic storms and brutalizing temper tantrums. This deepest core of soul speaks of the infinite simplicity of God and of love beyond words that, even as you now read, is breathing life within you."

Further on in his article, Fr. Aschenbrenner S.J. continues to describe the core of our soul:

"Our most profound and personal experience of God, as mentioned earlier, is in the core of our soul. The core's profundity is not given to intensely exhilarating experiences. Because the waters of our core identity run deep beyond words, God's love is not experienced there like the excitement of cresting and breaking waves of emotion. Rather God's love resounds as a presence perduring and endearing. This profundity of God's perduring presence can produce an inner quiet - like the catching of one's breath - behind and beyond all exciting spontaneity and breathless activity.

At our deepest center we are not actually doing or feeling anything. This is the point where we are - where we are in God, and are continually coming to be in the breath of God's loving Spirit. This center of being, this presence does not completely elude conscious grasp. Moments of prayerful reflection, sometimes carefully attuned to our breathing, can reveal a deep inner calm and quiet, that does not have a deadening effect but rather renews and enlivens. This is holy ground. In the holiness of this quiet sanctuary, with an attractiveness beyond imagining, God's love is grasping, laying claim to and identifying each of us in Christ. It is the still point in the ever turning world of our own person and of the whole cosmos."

May each of us be given the grace to enter the inner core of our soul and discover that holy ground of calm and quiet, the seed bed of God's creative and enlivening Spirit.


Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Prayer for Oneness



My dearest Lord,


Make my heart wed Thine

May the hole in my heart be one with the cross in Thine

Be the source of all that is

And the source of all that I am

In Thy most gracious love

Amen.


- at the start of a new spiritual year
& the Feast of St. Therese