CELEBRATE LIFE, SHINE THROUGH!

The purpose of life is to matter,

to stand for something,

to have it make a difference

that we have lived at all.

Leo Rosten

Sunrise at Chicamauga Dam
GOD'S PRESENCE
This snapshot was entered in the 6th Annual Exhibit and Awards of the National Arts Program and CHI Memorial Health System recently held at Memorial Hospital - Chattanooga. This entry has won the First Prize Award in Photography Amateur Level. The original copy is ob displayed at the Rembrandt Hall of Memorial Hospital from October 2012 to September 2013.
 http://www.nationalartsprogram.org/venues/memorial-health-care-system-chattanooga-tn/images/gods-presence

May we always experience God's abiding love,

which is "all 'round us, embracing us all!"

- Meister Eckhart -


COROLLARY REFLECTION

     "Rudolf Otto in his book, "The Idea of the Holy" says that when someone has an authentic experience of the Holy, they find themselves caught up in two opposite movements at the same time: mysterium tremendum and mysterium fascionosum, a scary mystery and a very alluring mystery. We both draw back from and are pulled forward into a kind of liminal space where we are not at home at all and yet totally at home for the perhaps the first time.

     In the mysterium tremendum, you know God as far and beyond - unreachable and beyond description! Here you experience God as dreadful and fearful, as one who has all the power, and in whose presence I am utterly powerless.  People at that stage tend to become overwhelmed by a sense of separation or alienation.  If you stop here, you either become an atheist, an agnostic, or a loyal but distant soldier. The defining of sin and sin management becomes the nature of religion.

     But simultaneously with this dimension is an opposite feeling of fascination, allurement, and seduction, a being pulled and drawn into something very satisfying and inviting. This is mysterium fascinosum.. If you only have the alluring part of this mystery you get merely sentimental and emotional religion, usually without any real social consequences ("Sweet Jesus," Christianity, as it sometimes called.). Otto says that if you don't have both, you have not have a true or full experience of The Holy." -  Richard Rohr, "Experiencing the Holy," RICHARD's DAILY MEDITATION, @ cac@cacradicalgrace.org

We are bathed in God

who is around us all,

EMBRACING us!

Meister Eckhart

This looking to God is 
CONTEMPLATION.
It is an inward gaze into the depths of the soul
and, for that very reason, beyond the soul to God.
The more the soul finds God, 
the more it forgets itself and yet finds itself in God. 
It is an "unwavering gaze,"
where "looking" is always "hearing."
For what is looked at is the free and infinite Person
who, from the depths of his freedom,
is able to give himself 
in a manner ever new, unexpected and unpredictable.
That is why the Word of God 
 is never something settled once for all
that can be surveyed like a clearly defined landscape,
but something that comes forth ever new,
like water from a spring or
rays from a light.

Hans Urs von Balthasar

OPEN MY EYES, LORD
Open my eyes, Lord, help me to "see";
Open my ears, Lord, help me to "hear"
Open my heart, Lord, help me to "love."
I live within your heart; rest in me Lord! 

Be Yourself...Life is Precious as it is!

Live your Life to the fullest,
not in counting the years
but in making each moment extraordinary.
Let us be reminded that there is Something Bigger that are constantly calling us to greatness 
and that are always drawing us 
to greater union and intimacy 
with our Ever Loving Creator.
Shine through,
"Go forth and set the world on fire!(St. Ignatius)" 


If You ...

People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered; Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.If you are successful,  you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.


If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could
destroy overnight; Build anyway.


If you find serenity and happiness, there may be jealousy;
Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you've got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway.

Mother Teresa

Ministry Appropriating Issues on Responses to Life and Vocations

Seeing the Beauty and God's Grace in all of our Life endeavors! Ministry Appropriating Issues on Responses to Life and Vocations

Bearded Iris from http://www.flickr.com/photos/exequiel_mapa/6782993493/in/photostream/
BEAUTY

"True Beauty is from elsewhere, a pure gift. It cannot be programmed nor its arrival foreseen. It never falls simply into the old patterns of what is already there nor is it frivolous or burdened with leaden solemnity. 

Frequently, beauty is playful like dancing sunlight, it cannot be predicted, and in the most unlikely scene or situation can suddenly emerge. This spontaneity and playfulness often subverts our self-importance and throws our plans and intentions into disarray. Without intending it, we find ourselves coming alive in a sense of celebration and delight. The pedestrian sequence of a working day breaks, a new door opens and the heart recognizes the silent majesty of the ordinary. The things we never notice, like health, friends and love, emerge from their subdued presence and stand out in their true radiance as gifts we could never have earned or achieved.''

- Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, John O'Donohue -

May we never lose our sense of awe and wonder in whatever we do in all of our life endeavors!  May our God of Wonder continue to surprise our lives with this sense of celebration and delight in whatever circumstances we may found ourselves in our life situations and ministries!

WONDER

"Among the many things that the religious tradition hold in store for us

is the LEGACY OF WONDER. The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is TO TAKE THINGS FOR GRANTED. Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin.

AWARENESS OF THE DIVINE start with WONDER. It is the result of what humanity does with its higher comprehension.  The greatest hindrance to such awareness is our adjustment to conventional notions, to mental cliches. Wonder or radical amazement, the state of maladjustment to words and notions, is therefore a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of that which is.


RADICAL AMAZEMENT has a wider scope than any other act of humanity. While any act of perception or cognition has as its object a selected segment of reality, radical amazement refers to all of reality; not only to what we see, but also to the very act of seeing as well as to our own selves, to the selves that see and are amazed at their ability to see.


The grandeur or mystery of being is not a particular puzzle to the mind, as for example, the cause for volcanic eruptions.  We do not have to go to the end of reasoning to encounter it. Grandeur or mystery is something with which we confronted everywhere and at all times. Even the very act of thinking baffles our thinking, just as every intelligible fact is, by virtue of its being a face, drunk with baffling aloofness. Does not mystery reign within the reasoning, within perception, without explanation? Where is is the self-understanding that could unfurl the marvel of our own thinking, that could explain the grace of our emptying the concrete with charms of abstraction? What formula could explain and solve the enigma of the very fact of thinking? Out is neither thing nor thought but only the subtle magic of blending the two.


What fills us with radical amazement is the relations in which everything is embedded bu the fact that even the minimum of perception is a maximum of enigma. The most incomprehensible fact is the fact that comprehend at all.


The way to faith leads thought acts of wonder and radical amazement.


Abraham Joshua Heschel, "GOD IN SEARCH OF MAN"

Creativity

Creation, on the human level, does not come from nothing.  Human creation has something to do the with the production of something that is new and different from what the subject has originally been created for.  We all know that only God can "create something out of nothing," as St. Thomas Aquinas has reminded us. We humans, on the other hand, can be God's co-creator, as we are all born with the creative and dynamic potentials as created beings made in the image of God. 

 I believe that in all of us, there is this God given gift of innate creativity.  I may not have enough
time, talent and resources like some gifted artists.  But I wonder how creative we all can be if we would be imaginative and expressive enough to capture the inexhaustible beauty around us. 

  May we all live inspired and always in awe and wonder!

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all that is seared with trade'bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is here now, not can foot feel, being sod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs-

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

                          -Gerald Manley Hopkins, S.J. (1844-89)