Contemplative Haven

We will be with you in spirit this morning, Laura.  Carol is saving us a pew, and it stretches around the blogosphere.  But surely you knew that.  Surely you knew that we would sing for you. 

[Laura desired that her funeral be a teaching moment.  Perhaps we could begin here.]

For those of you who cannot see the embedded video, you may go here to see it at YouTube.

Sound familiar?

On this feastday of my Patroness, I would like to begin to share with you a method of meditating upon Our Lady’s icon, as outlined by the Redemptorists.

In, “Our Lady of Perpetual Help.  The Icon, Favors and Shrines“, the Redemptorist fathers write:  “An icon is an object of meditation.  When we come before an icon with an attitude of prayer, we can deepen our understanding of the mysterious reality that it represents and better appreciate the value of liturgical prayer.  Icons were created to foster contemplation.” 

If we were using this method to say a novena, we would focus on the following points one-by-one each day for nine days, but we can approach the icon in meditation and prayer in this way at any time, spending some quiet moments reflecting on each of the points in one sitting.

• The First Day:  Contemplating the Archangel Gabriel
• The Second Day:  Contemplating the Archangel Michael
• The Third Day:  Contemplating the Letters on the Icon
• The Fourth Day:  Contemplating the Left Hand of Mary
• The Fifth Day:  Contemplating “Hand in Hand”
• The Sixth Day:  Contemplating the Child in Your Arms
• The Seventh Day:  Contemplating the Star
• The Eighth Day:  Contemplating the Colours of the Icon
• The Ninth Day:  Contemplating the Eyes of Mary

In the next post, we will take a closer look at each point, in order to help us understand how this icon of Our Mother actually directs us to Jesus (doesn’t she always?), and we will see why this icon, as the Redemptorist fathers write, “is a synthesis of the mysteries of Salvation”.  I would like to end for today with a prayer composed by Pope John Paul II, which the Redemptorists have included in their book:

“O Virgin of Perpetual Help, great sign of our hope, Holy Mother of the Redeemer, we invoke your name.  Help your people who desire to be renewed.  Give us joy as we walk towards the future in conscious and active solidarity with the poorest of our brothers and sisters, announcing to them in a new and courageous way, the Gospel of Your Son, the beginning and the end of all human relationships that aspire to live a true, just and lasting peace.  As does the Child Jesus, Whom we admire in this venerable icon, so we also want to hold your right hand.  You have both the power and the goodness to help us in every need and circumstance of life.  This moment is yours.  Come then, and help us; be for us our refuge and our hope.  Amen.”   

[The beautiful little book which I am using for this post can be found online here, at Liguori Publications. The description doesn't do it justice, and the price is hard to believe, considering the quality of the content and the beauty of the publication itself.] 

…of having a blog if you can’t sneak in a little surprise once in a while?  Besides, I really love this outfit, and I don’t get enough chances to wear it.

So what’s up, you may ask?  Well, just a little festive occasion for one of our favourite bloggers, Pia (aka: forget-me-not). 

Please join me in wishing Pia (over at her blog!) and her wonderful husband a very happy

25TH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY! 

and many, many more blessed years together! 

Summer Dawn (by William Morris)

Pray but one prayer for me ‘twixt thy closed lips,
Think but one thought of me up in the stars.
The summer night waneth, the morning light slips,
Faint and grey ‘twixt the leaves of the aspen, betwixt the cloud-bars,
That are patiently waiting there for the dawn:
Patient and colourless, though Heaven’s gold
Waits to float through them along with the sun.
Far out in the meadows, above the young corn,
The heavy elms wait, and restless and cold
The uneasy wind rises; the roses are dun;
Through the long twilight they pray for the dawn,
Round the lone house in the midst of the corn.
Speak but one word to me over the corn,
Over the tender, bowed locks of the corn.

[The painting is: Elm Trees and Corn Field, by Jacques Raverat, 1915]

…to our friend Laura. 

Many things moved me over the course of Laura’s journey, but two things Abbot Joseph told us in his recent posts on Laura’s blog will stay with me for a long, long time.  They re-enkindled within me a sense of awe, of wonder, at the Lord’s workings.

One is that Laura was forty days on her deathbed without food, forty days of fasting while on this physical and spiritual journey to her Bridegroom.  The other was that she was only able to take a bit of water, placed on her lips, with a sponge. 

I believe it was Julian of Norwich (or was it St. Faustina?) who said, “The Bride must resemble the Bridegroom”.  Lord, please help us all to be as united to You as was Laura, to be as well-prepared to enter Your Kingdom.  Dear Laura, please pray for us.

I was tagged for this meme by Judy, our Mystical Midget, and also by Ann, at Poetry, Prayer, and Praise, in her post of June 18th called, “Reasons to love”.  Here are the rules:

• I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.
• Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
• People who are tagged need to write their own post about their eight things and post these rules.
• At the end of your post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
• Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged.

Well, I guess I don’t mind revealing a few more things, but remember, random is the operative word.

1. My knees are starting to give out, despite the fact that I’m convinced, and have told them so, that they’re definitely too young for this to be happening.
2. When I was in Grade 9 I took typing, and for a year I typed everything that anybody said to me in my head, at approximately 130 words per minute. 
3. I learned to swim when I was twenty-nine years old.  I signed myself up for beginners adult lessons being offered at the local YM/YWCA.  I was very proud of myself and pleased with the program, particularly since I had been so disappointed with the aerobics class (which consisted of a woman in her seventies teaching us how to dance with flowing scarves). 
4. I am a bit of a chocoholic.  I do not have anxiety attacks if there is none in the house, but I have been known to whimper – just loudly enough for someone to get in his car and drive to the drugstore.  He’s a good man, he is, and I do not even have to explain to him about seratonin.
5. Speaking of drugstores, I once flew out of the drugstore with an emergency purchase which we were in a frantic hurry to deliver to someone.  I flung myself into the car yelling something along the lines of, “Let’s move it!”  Unfortunately, it was a similar but wrong car, with a similar but wrong man at the wheel.  It has never happened since.
6. My mother taught me how to paint and wallpaper when I was a child, then she progressed to teaching me all things relative to repairs/maintenance (my dad had died when I was little).  Caretakers in apartment buildings where I lived as a young woman used to borrow things out of my toolbox.  I never understood all the fuss about feminism.  Just do it.
7. Sometimes I tip over for no apparent reason.  I should probably look into that, but in the meantime, it’s a source of amusement for the family.
8. This last one may help you to understand me a little bit better, and if it does, could you please let me in on it?  Several months ago, teenage son, in all seriousness, asked me:  “Mom, why is it you know so many things that no one else knows, but you never seem to know anything that everyone else knows?”  What could I say, except, “I don’t know”?

I’m breaking the rules here and won’t be tagging eight people, but if you read this and want to do the meme, just tell us in the combox, and we’ll head over to read all about you!  Until next time, I remain, yours truly, the tippy one with unreliable knees, the one who used to float through a room like Isadora Duncan.

From, “Handmaid of the Lord“, by Adrienne von Speyr:

“The Mother knows how one receives God’s mysteries.  Only in a distance of reverence, in adoration, in loving honor and shrouding can one even approach the divine things.  They are not, like any facts of history or science, to be learned without preparation; the air of the heavenly mystery-world clings to them so much that they are only perceptible in a shroud of silence, prayer and contemplation.  The Mother now creates by her silence and contemplation that atmosphere in which alone we too can fruitfully receive the mysteries of the Lord.  When she passes on to the Church the mysteries contemplated by her and borne in the womb of her spirit, it is not without giving something of her own contemplation as well.  Thus it comes about that Christians can find only in the hidden silence of Mary’s heart the true access to the interior world of the Son.  Precisely the Marian prayers – novenas, litanies, the Rosary – are prayers which need and create peace, distance, time.  They are all an exercise in the Mother’s contemplation which mediates the contemplation of the Son.”

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field.
I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas.
Language.
Even the phrase “each other”
Does not make any sense.

(Rumi, 1207-1273)