Contemplative Haven

gabrielle July 17th, 2008

As I look around the blogosphere lately, I find infrequent postings and dwindling comments.  This is perfectly understandable, since many of us are enjoying summer after a long, hard winter, and entertaining visitors from afar.  For those whose winter has arrived, perhaps they are cozying up more frequently near the fireplace, sipping hot drinks and getting to bed earlier every night.
 
I think this is a good thing.  Apart from considerations of our natural seasons, I hope it is a reflection of the fact that we are in the liturgical season of Ordinary Time.  Liturgically, Ordinary Time means ordered or numbered time, a period when priests predominantly wear green vestments signifying hope and growth.

Ordinary Time is the season for steady and unhurried nourishment of body and soul, a time when the anticipation of major feasts such as Christmas and Easter are not the focal point of our attention, with their attendant periods of Advent and Lent for which so many of us make specific plans.

As this entry at Catholic Culture tells us, Ordinary Time is a time to “pasture” in “vast verdant meadows”.  So let us take this time to enter into Christ’s mystery through the people and the creation around us.  From my point of view, since it is summer here and the house is buzzing off and on with visiting family and friends, I just want to relax into and sanctify the changing of bed linens, the table-setting, the floor-sweeping, the lawn-mowing, the hedge-clipping and the flower-watering, all the while absorbing the chirping of sparrows and the scurrying of baby chipmunks.

I want to nourish my body with fresh fruits and vegetables - local blueberries and farmers’-market corn. I want to feed my soul daily with contemplative prayer, all else such as Lectio Divina, spiritual audio or video resources and blog-reading being added at my own pace, stopping whenever my spirit draws me to simply sit and gaze at tree limbs, cone flowers or cardinals, allowing the Holy Spirit to enlighten my heart and my mind as He pleases.

Yes, it’s Ordinary Time, and I am tired and hungry.

• Present Moment , Time
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gabrielle July 14th, 2008

Excerpt from The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, by Michael Mott [pg. 337]:

“A little more than a year later, on December 26, 1960, through a series of circumstances he could not have foreseen, Thomas Merton had his high place at Gethsemani and his hermitage:

Lit candles in the dusk. Haec regina mea in saeculum saeculi [This queen of mine to the end of the ages] - the sense of a journey ended, of wandering at an end. The first time in my life I ever really felt that I had come home and that my roaming and looking were ended.

A burst of sun through the window. Wind in the pines. Fire in the grate. Silence over the whole valley.

He was less than a mile from the monastery, still within the sound of its bells, writing by candlelight and the last sunlight of the short winter’s day in a small building constructed of cement blocks set on the crest of a low knob called Mount Olivet, a view of the valley in front, woods and a spinney at the back.

When he wrote to Catherine de Hueck Doherty, he called it his dacha.” [a Russian country cottage]

Thomas Merton’s Hermitage

With thanks to YouTube Channel: Gethsemani3

• Merton
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gabrielle July 11th, 2008

I cannot dance, O Lord,
Unless You lead me,
If You wish me to leap joyfully,
Let me see You dance and sing -

Then I will leap into Love -
And from Love into Knowledge,
And from Knowledge into the Harvest,
That sweetest Fruit beyond human sense.

There I will stay with You, whirling.

[Mechthild of Magdeburg] 

• Mysticism , Prayer , Saints
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gabrielle July 8th, 2008

Congratulations to the members of the Madonna House Apostolate (see links in my sidebar) for their decision to return Catherine Doherty’s “Order of Canada”, in protest against its having also been recently awarded to abortionist/abortion rights crusader Henry Morgentaler (as I outlined in this post). 

The media is covering the story today. The CBC has an article here, and CTV News has an article as well as an excellent video interview with Susanne Stubbs of Madonna House at Rideau Hall.

Catherine Doherty, whose writings I have often quoted here at the Haven and also at my other blog, “Consecrated to Mary”, received the Order of Canada in 1976, for “a lifetime of devoted services to the underprivileged of many nationalities, both in Canada and abroad”.  There is no doubt in my mind that if Catherine were alive today, she would have walked from Combermere to Ottawa to return the award, if there had been no other way.

Let us be done with human respect that bites so deep in our human hearts.  Let us cease to be bothered about what people think and worry only about what God thinks.  That is all that matters.

[Catherine Doherty: Bogoroditza, pg. 118]

• Canadian , Sanctity of Life
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