Lectio Divina - Seventy-Three

Carmina Gadelica, quoted in Esther de Waal, The Celtic Way of Prayer: The Recovery of the Religious Imagination. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2003, p.33-4.

God, kindle Thou in my heart within

A flame of love to my neighbor,

To my foe, to my friend, to my kindred all,

To the brave, to the knave, to the thrall,

O Son of the loveliest Mary,

From the lowliest thing that liveth,

To the Name that is highest of all.

O Son of the loveliest Mary,

From the lowliest thing that liveth,

To the Name that is highest of all.

Lectio Divina - Seventy-Two

Marie-Louise von Franz, Creation Myths. Boston: Shambhala, 1995, pp. 11-12.

One of Jung’s students asked him, “I am now seventy and you are eighty years old. Won’t you tell me what your thoughts are on life after death?” Jung’s answer was, “It won’t help you when you are lying on your deathbed to recall, ‘Jung said this or that.’ You must have your own ideas about it. You have to have your own myth. To have your own myth means to have suffered and struggled with a question until an answer has come to you from the depths of your soul. That does not imply that this is the definitive truth, but rather that this truth which has come is relevant for oneself as one now is, and believing in this truth helps one to feel well.”

Lectio Divina - Seventy-One

Ann & Barry Ulanov, Cinderella & Her Sisters: The Envied and the Envying. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1983, p.121.

Even the saints must not be envied or emulated here. Even their most daring deeds must not be coveted to replace our own little timid acts and to make us into mirrors of their majesty. Their daring is theirs, not ours. Their renunciation, if that is the mark of their holiness, is for them, not for us.

Lectio Divina - Seventy

Esther de Waal, The Celtic Way of Prayer: The Recovery of the Religious Imagination. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2003, p.8.

The word peregrinatio is almost untranslatable, but its essence is caught in the ninth-century story of three Irishmen drifting over the sea from Ireland for seven days, in coracles without oars, coming ashore in Cornwall and then being brought to the court of King Alfred. When he asked them where they had come from and where they were going they answered that they “stole away because we wanted for the love of God to be on pilgrimage, we cared not where”. This wonderful response and this amazing undertaking comes out of the inspirational character of early Irish spirituality. It shows at once how misleading is that word “pilgrimage” and how very different indeed is the Celtic peregrinatio from the pilgrimages of the Middle Ages or the present day. There is no specific end or goal such as that of reaching a shrine or a holy place which allows the pilgrim at the end of the journey to return home with a sense of a mission accomplished. Peregrinatio is not undertaken at the suggestion of some monastic abbot or superior but because of an inner prompting in those who set out, a passionate conviction that they must undertake what was essentially an inner journey. Ready to go wherever the Spirit might take them, seeing themselves as hospites mundi “guests of the world”, what they are seeking is the place of their resurrection, the resurrected self, the true self in Christ, which is for all of us our true home.

Lectio Divina - Sixty-nine

Thomas Keating, The Daily Reader for Contemplative Living. New York: Continuum, 2007, p. 358.

The joy of Christmas is the intuition that all limitations to growth into higher consciousness have been overcome. The divine light cuts across all darkness, prejudice, preconceived ideas, prepackaged values, false expectations, phoniness and hypocrisy. It presents us with the truth. To act out of the truth is to make Christ grow not only in ourselves, but in others. Thus, the humdrum duties and events of daily live become sacramental, shot through with eternal implications.

Lectio Divina - Sixty-eight

John Jay Chapman, quoted in W.H. Auden, A Certain World: A Commonplace Book. New York: Viking, 1970, pp 192-3.

The men and women who make the best boon companions seem to have given up hope of doing something else. They have, perhaps, tried to be poets or painters; they have tried to be actors, scientists and musicians. But some defect of talent or opportunity has cut them off from their pet ambition and has left them with leisure to take an interest in the lives of others. Your ambitious man is selfish. No matter how secret his ambition may be, it makes him keep his thoughts at home. But the heartbroken people -- if I may use the word in a mild benevolent sense -- the people whose wills are subdued to fate, give us consideration, recognition and welcome.

Lectio Divina - Sixty-seven

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. New York: Image, 1968, pp. 156-7

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness . . . My happiness could have taken form in the words: “Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.”