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Wholeness, Healing, & the OSL

(by A. F. Learmont) OSL stands for The Order of Saint Luke. When healing is mentioned, the first thought is usually the physical state of the body, a particular ailment or affliction; thus concentration of thought is purely on the physical. Man, however, is not wholly a physical being. Basically, he is a spiritual being. He has been created in the likeness and image of God, and God is a Spirit. God formed man out of a living soul....

Doubting Miracles, Or A Reason To Believe

(by Joe Simmons, SJ) This past weekend witnessed the canonization of seven new saints in Rome.  For holy men or women to be recognized as capital-S Saints in the Roman Catholic Church, typically two miracles need to be attributed to their intercession.  Usually these come when someone is healed without an easy medical explanation. Call me the modern skeptic, but I always found this litmus test to be… well… troubling, I guess.  In my...

On Groaning

Round Tones It’s almost onomatopoeia: sounding like its meaning. Like the word, buzz. OW— on the way to an OU-ch. It always strikes me when words contradict themselves. Take the word, rock: As a noun it means something that is absolutely stationary. As a verb it means to be in movement. Radical movement. Movement with sharp edges. So, back to groaning. That can be agony. Or joy. Or so I’m told. It’s fun to see what...

Letting Go

(by Scott Cairns) More than a hundred years ago, a chronically afflicted Emily Dickinson observed something of pain’s curious effects and aftermath.  “After great pain,” she wrote, ” a formal feeling comes.”  Her poem continues: The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs— The still Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’ And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’? The Feet, mechanical, go...

On Being Alone

Facing This begins with Jesus. He comes upon a man born deaf. And he separates him from the other people. Jesus takes the man where they can be alone. So he can spit, and dawdle, and chant incantations. Whatever he feels impelled to do that day. Whatever it was, he wanted to do it alone. For me, there’s alone— and there’s alone. Being alone physically gives me the actual space to bump around, bump up against, climb...

The Beloved

Connection It is the smoothing out of the path that lies before me. It is the complete rearrangement of my structure. It is my being set free. It is my complete capture. It is fullness. It is fulfillment. It is the heart of quietness, and the hand of eternity. It is the movement of life itself; the opening of what seemed to be the end. It is the beginning that occurs every second. It is wonderment and amazement; a child’s first...

To Restore

Echoes When I think of restoration, I think of destruction. First, something doesn’t need to be restored if it hadn’t been wrecked in the first place. But second, once something is restored, it can be wrecked all over again. Like a child’s building made of blocks. Up it goes. Down it comes. So what is the point of restoration, then? To a child, making infinite buildings after infinite demolitions is the fun of...

On Seeds

Transformation So, at first it’s easy. Growth. Green. Life. Creation. All sorts of good things. But what happens when something you don’t want comes up in the middle of your garden? Weeds, say. Weeds come from seeds, too, you know. But forget weeds for now.  They are, after all, minor annoyances that you are meant to pull up and destroy. What about a plant that you thought would be good—a plant you committed to taking care...

On Emptiness

Fullness It strikes me as impossible to write about emptiness. I realize that the prompt I am using here was geared toward photographers.  But, even there, it is impossible to photograph emptiness. Isn’t it? Emptiness—the absence of somethingness. And no matter what space you write about, or draw about, or photograph, there is something always there. God is never absent. There is no such thing as emptiness, unless you are...

Just A Red-Blooded American Male And Miracle Worker

(by Patricia Treece) Sixteen-month-old Elizabeth Fanning lies listlessly in her mother’s arms.  Anxiously, drawn-faced Mrs. Fanning coaxes her child to take even a spoonful of the liver soup recommended by doctors.  But although Elizabeth’s swollen belly and twiglike limbs make her look like a starvation victim, the lethargic baby has no interest in food of any kind.  Little Betsy, as her parents call her, has a fatal...

On Healing

Light and Dark Perhaps healing is the opposite of brokenness—or breaking, really. Breaking apart—putting the pieces back together is healing, isn’t it? Gluing the pieces back into its whole state.  Or the perceived whole state, anyway. I think we get lost in our understanding of healing when we force our idea of the outcome onto the process. Take a serious illness, for example.  We only see healing as a complete restoration of...

The Autobiography Of A Sea Creature

(by Wendy Patrice Williams) Coming Home To My Body Prologue Giraffes surrounded me on the wall, those long necks.  Covered by plastic, they were cold when I touched them.  The smell of alcohol reminded me of the nurse who would dab my arm with a wet cotton ball and prick me with a needle.  Dr. Constad’s voice was warm gravel.  “Look at you,” he said, squatting so his eyes were at equal height with mine.  “You are a miracle.”...

On Brokenness

Look to the Soul What is brokenness except the absence of wholeness? But when you break a whole apart, each piece is, in itself, another whole. Science teaches us that—that no matter how many times you break something apart, you find another whole. So what exactly does that mean in terms of humanity? Because when you take a child out of its family, he might not remain whole in terms of integrity.  But then being part of a whole family...

Waiting For Healing

(by Kathryn Belicki) Five years ago I had a remarkable lunch with my friend Linda.  It was a tough period for both of us—Linda had cancer and dearly wanted to avoid the prescribed surgery, and so had turned to naturopathic medicine and prayer.  I had an undiagnosed neuromuscular disorder and was in the nail-biting “wait and see” period, which would tell whether this was benign or something that would kill me. After...

On Home

Arena For me, home is associated with a person that you want to be with. The idea of home. The reality of home is something else completely different. Different from the idea. Different from the ideal. The reality of home is like being on a roller-coaster out-of-control at Niagara Falls in a hurricane. It is an emotional challenge,  a continual confront to my sense of balance. The assault is something I hunker down against. But the...

On Burdens

The Unseen Side Of Honor Burden is what shows us the unseen side of our responsibilities—our load. Instead of honor, it is burden.  Or, to be exact, it is both honor and burden. We have each other. And the burden of each and every breath. Each and every touch. Each and every exchange. There is family. There is friend. There is enemy. All have his own basket of regrets, of unfulfilled wants, of unreached goals. It’s a flowing...

On Mystery

The Unknown My whole life has been about The Mystery.  The mystery of God.  The mystery of life.  And this whole mystery thing has meant two things to me: the unknown and being wrong. The unknown feels like a bottomless chasm.  It only feels bottomless.  But, in fact, when it’s time for The Mystery to be resolved, I land at the bottom.  Hard.  Absolute.  The Truth Revealed. But in the meantime, between knowing that there is some...

Birdsong

(by Anne D. LeClaire) Learning the Difference Between Listening And Waiting To Talk When she first arrived at her uncle’s estate and was exploring the grounds, Mary Lennox caught sight of a bird with a bright red breast sitting on the topmost branch of a tree, “and suddenly he burst into his winter song – almost as if he had caught sight of her and was calling to her.” On one particular morning my friend Ann and I...

On Retreat

Walk Away It’s a battle term—retreat. It is the opposite of attack. To remove oneself from the fray. To hide amongst the trees, out of the sunlight, off the plain of conflict. It means to drop your weapon; to run, empty-handed away. It means to stop fighting; to stop thinking about fighting, even. Retreat. We want to think of it as a time of rest, of serenity, of knitting our frayed souls back together. But it’s really...

Here Is Good News

(by Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt) Jesus left there and went along the Sea of Galilee.  Then he went up on a mountainside and sat down.  Great crowds came to him, bringing the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute, and many others, and laid them at his feet; and he healed them.  The people were amazed when they saw the mute speaking, the crippled made well, the lame walking, and the blind seeing.  And they praised the God of...

To Wrestle

Open Hands A funny word, I thought when I first read it. Not just a funny word for a topic for contemplative prayer, but a funny word just on its own. Period. Full stop. Wrestle? Of course, all I could think of was the very common use of it these days—and very common indeed in terms of the quality of life—the term, mud wrestling. So, I am sitting in contemplative prayer and wondering what in Heaven’s name does mud wrestling—or...

On Freedom

Change There was the idea of openness at the beginning of the prayer. But that soon changed to change. Freedom as our ability to change. To change things around us. To change things about ourselves. To be changed. I don’t know why I saw this. To me, just off the cuff, what I would say freedom meant was the finding of an open door. Through which I could walk. Not to be trapped. Isn’t trapped the opposite of freedom? But...

A Turtle Came To Visit Me Today

Spiritual Warfare On The Move, Very Slowly I don’t know why, but I looked out onto the stoop of the back door.  And there he was.   I wondered what magic had brought him there.   He wasn’t there on his own, so to speak.  Next to him was an empty peanut shell, broken in half.   When I first spotted him, the turtle was vigorously wrestling with one piece of the shell.  Perhaps he was trying to eat it.  If so, he didn’t...

On Prayer

Slide Show What a full prayer this was! The images never stopped.  It was a slide show, with many images all montaged together. By the end I thought it had become a mosaic. And then the mosaic was on the ground, under my feet.  Instead of being on a wall. It was too much, really, to look at.  To take in. My life has been a path of prayer. I even wondered, during this time of prayer focusing on the concept of prayer, if every single...

On Love

Another Door It seems, these days, that when I do some contemplating doors are a recurring theme. I am grateful to you for teaching me about who I am. Picture: door. Death is behind a door.  A closed door. Life is at the top of an open door—a door leading up—not in. Strange. Now here is 20 minutes of contemplative prayer on the concept of love.  You’d think I’d get a lot.  Such an immense subject.  So fresh in my mind. And...