Spirituality: Please call me by my true names, Thich Nhat Hahn

Please call me by my true names

so I can hear all my cries and
my laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.

Photo: Colors

 

Spirituality: Brad Hornick from “Masculinity and the Landscape of the Soul”

The question is no longer just how to succeed in the world. It is how to remain human in a time of unraveling, and how to become, in the deepest sense, both soulful and revolutionary: ruthless in understanding the material conditions of the age, yet still capable of love, grief, reverence, and fidelity to life. That task may require discipline and strength, yes, but also the harder, slower, less glamorous work of entering the landscape of the soul.

Photo: Chapel at Stillwater, Oklahoma

 

Poem: “Under the Harvest Moon” by Carl Sandburg

                                           Under the harvest moon,

When the soft silver

Drips shimmering

Over the garden nights,

Death, the gray mocker,

Comes and whispers to you

As a beautiful friend

Who remembers.

 

Under the summer roses

When the flagrant crimson

Lurks in the dusk

Of the wild red leaves,

Love, with little hands,

Comes and touches you

With a thousand memories,

And asks you

Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

Spirituality: Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass

Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift. 

Photo: Goat on a Bridge

 

Prayer: Leo Tolstoy

It is within my power either to serve God, or not to serve. Serving, I add to my own good and the good of the whole world. Not serving, I forfeit my own good and deprive the world of that good, which was in my power to create.

Prayer: Benedict XVI

Jesus’ definitive hour will be his return at the end of time, yet he continually anticipates this hour in the Eucharist, in which, even now, he always comes to us.

Photo: Big Red Umbrella