Category Archives: Culture

Courts of Praise

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This poem was written to express celebration at Easter.  Everyday ordinary day is so full of God’s choice blessings, that praise should flow from every corner of the earth. In the deepest darkness, may hope arise through praise of God.

I invite you to linger a while and add a stanza.

Courts of Praise

Thank you, my Lord, for my life long,
For beloved family and friends,
And all dear hearts touching mine.

My treasure trove of souls
Spills far beyond my time
To number as my own
Those who have gone before,
Your saints of ages past,
The cloud of witnesses on high
And pure angelic beings
In realms veiled from the eye.

There never was a day
In which I was alone,
Nor forgotten
Before Your throne.

There, at Your feet,
All heaven sweet anthems raise,
To set celestial hearts ablaze.
My heart, in chorus,
Swells, dilating in love,
Grown great in gratitude.

Beside Your All Love,
I make small return.
You count my debt as paid,
And bid me enter courts of praise.

©2011 Joann Nelander

Considering Human Life

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  • From a comment considering human life
  • Yong Lee
  • Shanghai, China
  • We must not forget that life is a continuum and a mystery. Dissecting it into small fragments destroys both. One thing is for certain, destroying a fetus guarantees one less baby, one less toddler, one less child, one less adolescent, and one less adult man or woman in the world. With that, all of the potentials as well as detriments of the loss are gone. But it is not up to us to determine the value of a life by the outcome. We can only take it as it comes- that is the wonder of life.In all of nature, life cannot be chopped into pieces. Either we embrace it whole, or we lose it all. Disrupt the migration of salmons (a trip) and we destroy the species. The virtue, and perhaps the trouble of our existence, is that whole does indeed need every piece.

    By arguing and devaluing a passage in life common to us all, specially the most frail of our stages, we miss the point entirely. Argue endless about whose body it is, whose body it is not, whose right to choose it is, what a fetus is, and we forget that each of us belong to a web people without whom we cannot exist.

Fully Human, Fully Alive!

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When I worked NICU, I cared for a preemie that fit in my hand just like that, fully human,fully alive!

This is what we all looked like at 12 weeks in the womb. Legal to kill in all 50 states. Anyone think its not a person?

 

Human Responsibility Demands Freedom and Conscience

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Human Responsibility Demands Freedom and Conscience

H/T St. Thomas More“Go and Make Disciples”

Fr. Andrew was invited to lead the opening prayer at the 2012 Colorado Republican State Assembly and Convention in the Magness Arena at the University of Denver. The moral challenges facing our country are not caused by political affiliation, but rather by attacks on religious freedom. He invites all people of conscience to uphold religious freedom.

“The Church has rejected the totalitarian and atheistic ideologies associated in modem times with ‘communism’ or ‘socialism’.” – Catechism of the Catholic Church 2425

Into Stillness Poetry–Listen, Read, Preview /book

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Preview and Listen to the poetry of Joann Nelander

Listen to individual poems here

Welcome?

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"I stand at the door and knock"

I pass this welcoming scene everyday. I think it must qualify as an oxymoron. It may be indicative of this present age.
I call it: "I stand at the door and knock."