….FOR JUSTICE
TAKE A MINUTE TO MEDITATE TODAY
TUESDAY
When I call, answer me, O
my God, you who believe me when I am in distress; Have pity on me, and
hear my prayer!
·
Psalms
4:1
If nothing else, prayer
was the glue that enabled my freedom, an inner freedom first and later
the miracle of being released during a war in which the regime had no
real incentive to free us. It didn’t make sense, but faith did.
·
James Foley
executed by ISIS, Aug. 19, 2014
WEDNESDAY
Tell the rich in the
present age not to be proud and not to rely on so uncertain a thing as
wealth but rather on God, who richly provides us with all things for our
enjoyment. Tell them to do good, to be rich in good works, to be
generous, ready to share, thus accumulating as treasure a
good foundation for the
future, so as to win the life that is true life.
·
1 Timothy 6:17-19
As Pope Leo
XIII so wisely taught in Rerum Novarum, “whoever has received
from the divine bounty a large share of temporal blessing, whether they
be external and corporeal, or gifts of the mind, has received them for
the purpose of using them for the perfecting of his own nature, and, at
the same time, that he may employ them, as the steward of God’s
Providence, for the benefit of
others. “He that
hath a talent,” says St. Gregory the Great, “let him see that he hide it
not; he that hath abundance, let him quicken himself to mercy and
generosity; he that hath art and skill, let him do his best to share the
use and the utility thereof with his neighbor.
St. John XXIII
THURSDAY
Do nothing out of
selfishness or out of vainglory; rather, humbly regard others as more
important than yourselves, each looking out not for his own interests,
but also everyone for those of others. Have among yourselves the
same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus.
·
Philippians 2:3-5
Making progress means
lowering oneself on the road of humility in order to allow God’s love to
emerge and be clearly seen. The way of Christian humility rises up
to God, as those who bear witness to it “stoop low” to make room for
charity. This was the road taken by Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem.
This is the golden rule for Christians, but it doesn’t mean travelling
the road with downcast eyes. Humility is the way by which charity
surely passes, for if there is no humility, love remains blocked, it
cannot go forward.
·
Pope Francis
FRIDAY
I have given them the
glory that you, Father, gave me, so that they may be one, as we are one,
I in them and you in me, that they may be brought to perfection as one,
that the world may know that you sent me, and that you loved them even
as you loved me.
John 17:22-23
The deepest level of
communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless.
It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept.
Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity.
My dear brothers, we are already one. But we imagine that we are
not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What
we have to be is what we are.
- Thomas Merton
Fast
from division.
Meditate on Oneness
as the Lord Lives.
http://www.christian-oneness.org/oneness.html
SATURDAY
Growing fruits and
vegetables for the market on our 27-acre farm takes time. But time
is at a premium for me, with a full-time job and three young children,
so during the season I’m up and running a 5:00 a.m. to take advantage of
two precious hours for farm work before heading off to my job. My
morning chore time is essential not just to keeping the farm running; it
is also when I get some vital time by myself. I do some of my best
praying in the morning, usually with a hoe handle or a tractor
steering wheel in my hands. I often listen to public radio
or podcasts to keep my brain alive and functioning. I savor the
lovely silence of the waking day and the soft, early light of
summer-solstice mornings.
One morning last season I
was cultivating some of the bottomland market garden beds, a few hundred
feet from our house. At the end of the row I wrestled the tiller
around for the next pass and saw my 2-year-old identical twin daughters,
Eva and Clare, right behind me. As my wife and infant son slept,
they had awakened early, and finding me nowhere in the house but hearing
the tiller engine going, they had put on their garden clogs and wandered
down in their pajamas through a head-high field of uncut hay to find me.
Seeing this pair of young twins, wet with dew and eager for inclusion,
is enough to melt even my strongest focus on a given task. I shut
off the tiller and my iPod and gave the girls a kiss and big hug.
After asking what I was doing, they piped up in unison: “We want to
help, Papa!”
Perhaps it is because I
work at a Benedictine monastery that I have held a rather monastic
vision of the life of prayer: regular periods of time set aside each day
for stillness, silence, Scripture reading and other devotions. But
I am not a monk, and even monks are busy. Like many I know, I
struggle constantly to find a way to nurture my relationship with God
while at the same time juggling the various responsibilities of life as
husband, father, farmer, carpenter, employee and so forth. I have
tried the Liturgy of the Hours, journaling, meditation of various
ecumenical flavors, the Rosary, you name it, always seeking some silver
bullet or magical combination that will order the day and assuage my
ever-present Catholic guilt that I am not doing enough spiritually.
Most of these practices have been of some help, but managing to stay at
them consistently, particularly amid the exigencies of parenting young
children and farming, has generally proven a task far beyond me.
I think routine is
essential for staying spiritually grounded. But to my mind, what
is important about the routine is not that it follow some prescribed
form of piety or devotion (although it can), but that it simply connects
a person to essential things. For me, during much of the year that
connective routine is the manual work of operating an organic farm and
trying to tend the earth kindly and well: tilling, planting, weeding,
harvesting, spreading manure, cutting firewood, fixing machinery and
tools. For my wife, it is changing diapers, nursing, cooking and
preserving, and minding young children as a stay-at-home parent.
Even a good routine,
however, can become a rut, or a god-especially for someone with a
driven, task-oriented personality like mine, When my daughters bounded
down through the fields to upset my well-laid plans, they came also as
holy interruptions, as messengers from the world of kairos time.
They reminded me that while God may well be found in the grounding
rhythms of my morning work, God is also and more insistently present in
the very things that upset those rhythms.
I did not get as much farm
work done that morning as I had hoped, and what I did accomplish was not
done as well or quickly as I would have managed without the company of
my daughters. Nor did I have the soul-feeding interior silence and
solitude I had planned on. But I was fed nonetheless, and
transformed by the incarnational, unexpected grace. Wendell Berry
has it right when he insists that one of the most important products of
a farm is not just the harvest, but the content of the farmer’s mind and
character. If so, then that morning, in saying yes to the blessed
interruption of my children, I reaped boundeously.
·
Kyle Kramer
-
SUNDAY
Work for six days, and rest on the seventh. - Exodus 23:12
Be still, and know that I am God. - Psalms 46:10
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PRAYER FOR SOCIAL
JUSTICE
Lord Jesus, Carpenter and King, supreme Sovereign of
all, look with tender mercy upon the multitudes of our day who bear the
indignities of injustice everywhere.
Raise up leaders in every land dedic
Grant unto us, Lord Jesus, the grace to be worthy
members of Your Mystical Body, laboring unceasingly to fulfill our voc
Guide
our minds to a meaningful understanding of the problems of the poor, of
the oppressed, of the unemployed, of all in need of assistance anywhere.
Guide our hearts against the subtle lure of earthly
things and undue regard for those who possess them.
May we hunger and thirst after justice always.
Amen.