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Dominican Preaching through Word and Image
Let the Forest Be Your Teacher
Believe me as one who has experience, you will find much more among the woods then ever you will among books. Woods and stones will teach you what you can never hear from any master.
– Bernard of Clairvaux
Wakening to Oneness – The All
Nothing is itself without everything else.
– Thomas Berry
Wednesday of Hope – Letting Go of Results
Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.
– Thomas Merton
The Paradox of Strength and Fragility
Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.
– Simone Weil
Where Do I Begin? Where Do I End?
Finding where exactly the outside world ends and I begin—is not so easy.
– Nora Bateson
Wednesday of Hope – Hope, a Revolutionary Practice
I heard a preacher say that hope is a revolutionary practice . . . hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up . . .
– Anne Lamott
Our Companions
There is a trough in waves,
A low spot
Where horizon disappears
And only sky
And water
Are our company.
– Judy Brown, From the poem “Trough” – book The Sea Accepts All Rivers
We Cannot Survive Singularly
Snowflakes, leaves, humans, plants, raindrops, stars, molecules, microscopic entities all come in communities. The singular cannot in reality exist.
– Paula Gunn Allen
Wednesday of Hope – Hope of Trees
May we never forget the crippled, wind-beaten trees, how they, too, bud, green and bloom. May we, too, take courage to bloom where we are planted.
– David Steindl-Rast
Walking a Labyrinth
Not too long ago I walked a labyrinth for the first time in my life. I had flirted with labyrinths for years, but my expectations were so high that I kept finding reasons not to walk one. I did not want to hurry. I did not want to share the labyrinth with anyone who might distract me. I did not want to be disappointed. I looked forward to walking a labyrinth so much that looking forward to it kept me from doing it for years.
– Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World
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