spring flowers

Lilies of the field

I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon. With my cheap cameras it is hard to take pictures of flowers without the flower being over exposed. Flowers seem to reflect too much light for my cameras. As I used this picture as the focal point of my meditation this morning I started thinking about flowers and light, and thought: if I am made in the image of God and God is light then each created thing is light. Could we, like the flower, powerfully reflect the light of God?

Obviously, this is a rhetorical question, but if it is true, that I can reflect the light of God, then why don’t I? This is a sincere struggle for me. The rebel in me resists being light.

Reflection…

Maybe I do shine, and I don’t know it (rhetorical answer, therefore, part of the answer is to relax and simply let the light of God shine that is in me and always has been in me from the time of my first breath). Beyond my obvious dark side, and my tendency to live in it, why won’t I shine? Why do I resist being light? How can I be more like the flower and not hold back? How can I be more like the flower, and naturally let the light shine that is within me?

More pics...

All the best!

Why Didn't Someone Tell Me That Earlier? By Richard Rohr

The line I often quote from Paula D’Arcy should be obvious:  “God comes to you disguised as your life.”  Why didn’t someone tell me that earlier—that this life is the raw material that I need to take seriously?  Every day, what’s right in front of me is the agenda.  And even more, the natural world all around us has all the lessons that we need for life, love, death, and salvation.  Really!  Just look and listen, and note how Jesus himself seems to have looked and listened to lilies, birds, hens, sheep, “red sky in the morning,” green and dry wood, moth and worm, etc.

You can see how merely believing doctrines and practicing rituals is very often a clever diversionary tactic to avoid my actual life—to avoid the agenda that is right in front of me every day, which is always messy, always muddy, always mundane, always ordinary—and all around me.

By Richard Rohr

Adapted from Emerging Church Conference, Swannick, England, 2010 (unpublished) Website: https://cac.org/index.html

Pope on prayer

Pope begins new Wednesday teaching series on prayer
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/pope-begins-new-wednesday-teaching-series-on-prayer/