Contemplative Haven

Autumn Closing (Bliss Carman)

The show is over, and the leafy tent
All gold and crimson where the sunlight lingered
Through the slow afternoon, is coming down.
The bittersweet is scarlet on the bough
Reluctant to be gone, though frosts have strewn
Patins of glory on the forest trails,
While tatters of torn splendour go to feed
The smoky bonfires in the village street.
What singer pipes the closing autumn hush
With surest note of cheer in all the wild?
A dauntless minstrel of the changing year,
Chickadee of the wilderness! He knows
What sweetness gathers in the winter’s heart,
What saving oracles the North Wind sings.

Well, call me a diehard, but our turkey is real and I’ll be up all night making the pumpkin pies!

CBC Archives

Happy Thanksgiving weekend, my fellow Canadians!

Jerome, of Living Monstrance, has a gift for taking everyday incidents and making a spiritual connection; this is the main thrust of his blog, and his posts are consistently some of the most insightful, uplifting and encouraging that I have read anywhere online.  While I do experience an awareness of the sacred and sacramental in everyday life, my mind does not work like Jerome’s, in terms of a natural spiritual interpretation arising so frequently for small, seemingly ordinary daily occurrences.  So when, in my second-to-last post, Jerome asked me, via the comments, to “unwrap” the spiritual significance within the anecdote I posted (I’m So Impulsive), I was ready to just dismiss that as not being a part of “who I am”, and that it would be an artificial practice for me, whereas for Jerome, it is a God-given way of interpreting the world.

Yet the incident stayed with me after Jerome’s spurring me on, and more specifically, the comment from Carol, who very humorously said that I should have told the driver, “You knoooow.. I hadn’t even thought about doing that, until now…”, which idea Kristin also reinforced in a later comment.

And that’s the truth of it.  The thought came from him; a thought which never would have occurred to any of us entered our minds via another person and stuck.  It reminded me of a story one of my friends used to tell.  When she was little, her mother gave her her first little box of Sunmaid raisins, and said, “Now, don’t stick those up your nose.”  Well, my friend said it never would have occurred to her to stick them up her nose, but since her mother had said it, what did she do?  She stuck them up her nose, which then entailed a trip to the emergency ward.

We have to be so careful of the thoughts we put into other peoples’ heads.  As an adult, there are so many things I wish I had never seen, never heard, never encountered.  I’m not speaking so much of the general things we all wish we had never been forced to witness, such as war, poverty, abortion, etc., but of specific thoughts and/or images.  It’s no wonder that older Catholic instruction booklets and religious aids emphasized the importance of monitoring what we watched, which books and magazines we read, and what events we participated in.  Self-monitoring is part of the walk down the path of holiness.  We must be careful what we allow ourselves to absorb, and also very careful of what we express to others.  Garbage in, garbage out.  Holiness in, holiness out.  It’s a big responsibility, and it’s ours.

But it is comforting also to know that, since we cannot live in a bubble and avoid every unpleasant, unholy thought, image or word around us, nor even can we generally avoid having some of these unholy things pop up in our own minds in a seemingly uncontrolled or spontaneous fashion, that God looks at the heart; I’m sure He’s well aware of the plethora of negative and/or unholy things that have the potential of saturating our day and our minds in this world.  With His grace, these things touch but don’t stick; they alight, then move on quickly.  He knows they can enter our minds from outside, but they are not coming from within our hearts, just as we heard in the Gospel this past Sunday (Mark, Ch. 7):

Listen to me, all of you, and understand:  there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile them, but the things that come out of a person are what defile them.

For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come… 

I had a very peculiar experience coming home from work yesterday.  I was on the bus coming from downtown to home, when about three-quarters of the way through my commute the back door of the bus started acting up.  The open-shut mechanism wasn’t working properly; people would get off and the door wouldn’t fully shut, etc., and the driver was trying to fix it with his controls from the front for quite a while.

 As we approached my neighbourhood he pretty much gave up trying to do anything about it.  He closed it for good, but opened the front door and left it open (I don’t know why, but this is what he did.)  Anyway, then he turned around and said, very seriously:  “Please don’t anybody jump out the front door while the bus is still moving.” 

Now at this point, since it was nearing the end of the route, there were only four of us left on the bus; myself, a teenager and two men in suits with briefcases.  I had stopped after work to do some errands, so besides my large purse, I had two fairly heavy shopping bags.  The thing is, when the driver said:  “Please don’t anybody jump out the front door while the bus is still moving”, he looked straight at me, and very insistently.

Now I ask you, do I seem like a candidate for hurling myself out the front door of a bus while it is careening through the city streets?  Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I’ve thrown myself out of a moving vehicle.   Granted, in my younger days I was once told that I darted through traffic “like a gazelle”, but really, these knees haven’t produced gazelle-like movements for quite some time.  I can barely genuflect, let alone throw myself off a bus, drop and roll. 

I guess I’ll never know what he was thinking.  Maybe I just look a tad impulsive. 

To start the day’s celebrations, a prayer to St. Joseph, patron saint of Canada:

 
                                                  
Joseph, Guardian of the Pure in Heart

Gentle Joseph, God is captivated by the
quality of your heart. Your entire being is
focused on doing his will. With Mary and Jesus,
you answer the Holy Spirit’s call to build a better world.

With one heart, we join you in saying:
”Here we are, Lord, your will be done!
Your kingdom come nearer to us!”

Keep the hope of a new world alive in our hearts.
Inspire us to speak words of tenderness to awaken
the love of hearts.

May we draw the energy for our actions from the source
of all Love so our faces may shine with the freedom
of the children of God.

Amen

[This prayer was found on the website of St. Joseph's Oratory, Montreal, Quebec]

* * * * * * * * * * * *

And now a little something from our beloved Stephen Leacock…from the short story, The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias, in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town:      

You may talk as you will about the intoning choirs of your European cathedrals, but the sound of “O Can-a-da”, borne across the waters of a silent lake at evening is good enough for those of us who know Mariposa.

I think that it was just as they were singing like this: “O Can-a-da”, that word went round that the boat was sinking….

What? Hadn’t I explained about the depth of Lake Wissanotti? I had taken for granted that you knew; and in any case parts of it are deep enough, though I don’t suppose in this stretch of it from the big reed beds up to within a mile of the town wharf, you could find six feet of water in it if you tried….if a person arrives late anywhere and explains that the steamer sank, everybody understands the situation….

So you can imagine now that I’ve explained it a little straighter, the indignation of the people when they knew that the boat had uncorked and that they might be stuck out there on a shoal or a mud-bank half the night….

So pretty soon they had the davits swung out over the side and were lowering the old lifeboat from the top deck into the water.

There were men leaning out over the rail of the Mariposa Belle with lanterns that threw the light as they let her down, and the glare fell on the water and the reeds. But when they got the boat lowered, it looked such a frail, clumsy thing as one saw it from the rail above, that the cry was raised: “Women and children first!” For what was the sense, if it should turn out that the boat wouldn’t even hold women and children, of trying to jam a lot of heavy men into it?

Then Jesus took his disciples up the mountain, and gathering them about him, he taught them, saying:

Blessed are the poor…
Blessed are the hungry…
Blessed are those who mourn…
Blessed are the oppressed…

Then Simon Peter said, “Do we have to write this down?”
And Andrew said, “Are we supposed to know this?”
And James said, “I don’t have papyrus with me.”
And Philip said, “Will we have a test on this?”
And Bartholomew said, “Do we have to turn this in?”
And John said, “The other disciples didn’t have to learn this.”
And Matthew said, “Can I be excused?”
And Judas said, “What does this have to do with the real world?”

Then one of the Pharisees who was present asked to see Jesus’ lesson plan and inquired: “Is this lesson aligned with current standards? Does it address multiple intelligences? Where are your objectives in the cognitive domain?”

And Jesus wept.

[A teacher friend sent me this a few years ago.  :)  I just found it in a pile of papers - yes, I'm in clean-up-the-desk mode.]

If you have young children or grandchildren (or are just a kid at heart), here is a wonderful site:  My Light Magazine

It’s an online Catholic magazine for children, with lots of activities, and you can also receive it in PDF format in your inbox.

I just spent 18 minutes and 37 seconds trying to put together one of the virtual jigsaw puzzles, called My Light’s Logo.  Keep in mind (if you do it yourself in under a minute) that I have always been spatially-challenged.  Well I remember my then two-year-old looking at me with such a gaze of sympathy and consternation as I tried to demonstrate his new toy and could not for the life of me get the geometric plastic blocks through the proper holes.  He took it away from me and did it himself in less than a minute.  It wasn’t long after that that he began his semi-annual questioning of myself and his father, asking us with a very hopeful look on his face if he had been adopted. 

I purchased “The Sermons and Collations of Meister Eckhart” last October. 

It has 264 pages.

I’m on page, let’s see now, ah yes, page 9.

The first sentence is, “Dum medium silentium tenerent omnia et nox in suo cursu medium iter haberet, etc.”  The last sentence is, “Amen.”  Don’t worry, there is English inbetween.

I’ll keep you informed. 

Oh please, tell me I’m not the only one who didn’t know about this.  I mean, it’s not like it just slipped my mind in recent years or anything; I’ve been a practising Catholic all my life, and I’ve never once heard of it.  And no disrespect intended, but I can hardly imagine, when it’s so difficult to even find a priest available these days to give the Last Rites in time, that we are going to be able to persuade them to come to all of our homes and inscribe the Magis’ initials over our doors.  Well, thank goodness the father of the family can take the priest’s place in this situation.  Now all I have to do is find some blessed chalk.  And my husband.  Has anyone ever heard of blessed chalk?  Of course you have.  I’m the only one who doesn’t know what’s going on. 

Edited to add:   Believe me, I’m all for the blessing of our homes, whether it is when we move in, once a year or for any occasion when the family desires it.  I’ve also been told to put little containers of holy water on the windowsills every January 1st, and I have done this in the past.  What took me by surprise was reading that apparently it is part of our Catholic tradition to bless our homes in the name of the Magis, and I really can’t imagine any Catholic priest or family wishing to do so.  If you google this Epiphany House Blessing and look at the information on the Catholic Culture site, for example, you’ll find the entire blessing.  It also states that the initials, C, M, B, (of the Magi) can also be interpreted as the Latin phrase Christus mansionem benedicat which means Christ bless this house.  I think that’s more like it.