OPreach
Dominican Preaching through Word and Image
Love, the Key to Hope
Today’s Gospel story, on this 5th Sunday of Lent, is the raising of Lazarus from the dead. We are reminded, then, to hope when our situation looks bleakest.
True love is embodied in expectancy, an eagerness to love God now as a preparation for God’s Kingdom. Our ultimate hopes are expressed by whom and what and how we now love…. True love is embodied in the act of giving and forgiving, without stint or stipulations, without anxiety or compulsion. The forgiven is not made dependent upon the giver, but upon a free un-coerced love.
– Paul S. Minear, Source: The Kingdom and the Power
What Is God Saying?
Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
During this season of Lent, let us be attentive to the love letters that God is writing to us.
The Miracle of Love
This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
– C.S. Lewis
Seeing with Beginners Sight
What kind of seeing should we do during this Lenten season? In Buddhism they talk about Beginner’s Mind. Perhaps we should work at Beginners Sight.
Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.
– Betty Smith (There are certainly many Betty Smiths in the world – I’ll leave it up to the readers to discover which one she is.)
How Do I See the Beauty of Flowers?
Back to our Weekly Lenten theme of Sight.
Many people have never learned to see the beauty of flowers, especially those that grow unnoticed. For instance, when you walk outside and look down at your feet, you may see tiny flowers nestled in the moss and clover hiding under a curled fern. Most people just step on them. I paint them.
– Erika Just, Flowers
Is Love for Fools?
Oscar Wilde said,
Love is understanding between two fools.
On this April Fools Day – and an April day in Lent, let us never tire of being great fools, if it also means that we are great lovers, following the Greatest Lover of them all – One Who was willing to look the fool for love’s sake.
Proust on Truly Seeing
I have always appreciated this quote by Marcel Proust:
The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Meister Eckhart on Sight
On this 4th Sunday of Lent, we read how Jesus heals the man who had been born blind. So this week we will reflect on sight.
The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.
― Meister Eckhart, Sermons of Meister Eckhart
Thirst by Mary Oliver
Another morning and I wake with thirst
for the goodness I do not have.
I walk
out to the pond and all the way God has
given us such beautiful lessons.
Oh Lord,
I was never a quick scholar but sulked
and hunched over my books past the hour
and the bell; grant me, in your mercy,
a little more time.
Love for the earth
and love for you are having such a long
conversation in my heart.
Who knows what
will finally happen or where I will be sent,
yet already I have given a great many things
away, expecting to be told to pack nothing,
except the prayers which, with this thirst,
I am slowy learning.— Mary Oliver, Thirst, Beacon Press, Boston, 2006, pp. 1, 52, 69
Good Things to Thirst for
Yogis are drunk on discipline. Priests are drunk on scriptures. Celibates are drunk on vanity. Monks are drunk on prestige. So what’s left for you? What could you possibly get drunk on? I recommend being drunk on peace, being drunk on joy, being drunk on the fulfillment of the quest of a human being.
-Maharji
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