Posts from the ‘Dominican Life’ Category
Earth Belongs to All Living Creatures – Not Just Humans
To all earth’s creatures God has given the broad earth, the springs, the rivers and the forests, giving the air to the birds, and the waters to those who live in water, giving abundantly to all the basic needs of life, not as a private possession, not restricted by law, not divided by boundaries, but as common to all, amply and in rich measure.
– Gregory of Nazianzus
Wednesdays of Hope – The Feast of St. Dominic
Saint Dominic did not leave his sisters and brothers a wealth of written work. Therefore, I don’t have a quote of his that talks about “hope.” Nevertheless, those who followed after him have written many words. What else would one expect from The Order of Preachers?
One of those later Dominicans was Saint Thomas Aquinas, who at the end of his life looked back on his work and said that it was all straw. Thomas called hope, “a movement or stretching forth of the appetite towards an arduous good.” Surely Dominic would have agreed with and approved of, both of Thomas’s arduous study and pursuit of the good, the true and the beautiful, as well as of his hopeful look forward to what was yet to unfold.
We, in the manner of Dominic de Guzman, Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, and all those who have gone before us, continue to run with perseverance the race that is set before us.” (Hebrews 12:1)
Mosaic of St. Dominic in Caleruega, Spain, “The Nine Ways of Prayer”
Reverence and Respect for Life
Respect life, revere life. There is nothing more holy than life, nothing more divine than life.
– Osho
Let Us Care for our Soil
The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.
– Wendell Berry
Let’s go . . . Nowhere
Going nowhere … isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.
-Leonard Cohen
What Is Our Destiny?
The destiny of humans cannot be separated from the destiny of Earth.
-Thomas Berry
Celebrating the Feast of St. Catherine of Siena
Thanks to the Dominican Sisters of Amityville, I just discovered this wonderful quote, which was translated from the Italian by Suzanne Noffke, OP, a Dominican Sister of Racine. The door grating is in Siena, Italy.
Start being brave about everything. Drive out darkness and spread light. Don’t look at your weaknesses. Realize instead that in Christ . . . you can do everything.
– Catherine of Siena, Letter T200/G112/DT9 Frate Bartolomeo Dominici, in Asciano, written in late March 1372
