Category Archives: Spirituality

Bath Waters

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Heavenly Mother,
It is told,
You allowed a leper babe,
To be washed in your Baby’s bath,
And, immediately, the infant was healed,
His skin, supple and pink,
By an act of God,
A miraculous gift.

Plunge those forgotten in life,
Into that water of refreshment,
In which, to remove the dust of the world,
You bathed your Babe.

It is God, Who hears,
The cry of the poor.
God, Who, is not far off.
He sent His Christ,
To enter that sea,
The Jordan of Man’s Sin.

One day, it’s waters
Would wash the multitudes,
And it’s streams
Flow over the Ages.

God, indeed, hears
The cry of the poor,
As He heard the wail
Of the leper babe.

“This is my beloved Son.”,
He announces in loving unity,
As an open invitation for us to enter in,
And lay our claim in holy hope.

Mother, do for the disabled,
What they cannot
Do for themselves.
Meet us in our leprosy,
And, bathing us, say
With the Father,
“This is my son,
In whom I am well pleased.”

© 2012 Joann Nelander
All rights reserved

Golgotha of Jasna Gora

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1

H/T Julia : Golgotha of Jasna Gora – Artist: Jerzy Duda Gracz

 

 Here a bit more information about the images.

In the shrine at Czestochowa, upstairs from the famous icon of the Black Madonna, a 21st-century Way of the Cross reminds us that our real enemy is not the evil outside of us but the sin within us. In March 2001, the late Polish painter Jerzy Duda Gracz presented the monastery at Jasna Gora, one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in the world, with new Stations of the Cross. Gracz named these paintings after Golgotha, the mountain where Jesus was crucified, but many of the landscapes and faces he included in them are eerily recognizable to present-day viewers.

More Golgotha of Jasna Gora

Waiting for Me

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God is.
God is waiting for me.
He woos me.
He thirsts.
God thirsts
For my thirsting for Him

Here in the Now,
I Am.
I Am in mystery.
I Am in darkness.
Being of Light,
Overshadowed, as by a cloud,
As driving in the dark,
Seeing darkly,
Perceiving indistinctly,
All senses at high pitch.

Unify the threads of day.
Compose my hours
To sing one song.
Bathe me anew.
Let me swim in You.
Alive to Presence.
Awake in repose.
Listening.

I know You in fullness,
Fully and abundantly.
I know You
In the fullness of my emptiness,
Robed in the fullness of my sorrow,
In the fullness of my grief,
In the fullness of my joy and plenty,
In rapture,
Sweetly knowing
And by Love known.

© 2012 Joann Nelander

 

Be Ready for the Infant King

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The Holy Night by Carlo Maratta

Who will come to the stable
On Christmas Day?
And what will they take away?

Wise men, steadfast and earnest, came,
Instead of palace music,
They heard the donkey brae.
A lowly sound and sight,
Yet their wonder unallayed.

Many come rejoicing,
To behold the Newborn King,
Bowing low,
While angels sing.

Christ comes for all
But not all come.
Some come, behold, then fall away,
Being rootless, they merrily go their way.

Father God prepared a voice
To announce His Only Word,
A messenger, born before, to go before.
Another child, spared Ramah’s plight
To live and pierce Sin’s long night
John, O, John, still cries, “Repent!”

Prepare if you would follow.
At Jerusalem’s Gate,
Many cried, “Messiah,”
Who would soon cry, “Crucify.”

Whose will will you do,
When the music fades in life?
Pride prides itself on ‘my way,’
Confounds with will and strife.

Without a ready, willing heart,
Nothing changes Christmas Day.
Corrupt hearts go on corrupting,
All the while the kingly Infant cries,
As throughout His life,
“I am the Way.”

Whose heart will live in yours
As angelic songs fade away.
Will you simply leave the stable
To follow your own way?

Come, O come, rejoicing!
Praying for a change.
Receive the Babe within your Heart.
Beg Him forever stay.

©2010 Joann Nelander

Consolation of Eve

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Crayon and pencil by Sr. Grace Remington, OCSO Copyright 2005, Sisters of the Mississippi Abbey

Mother Eve, waiting long,
Your bones resting in the earth,
At Adam’s side,
From which you were taken,
Waiting, waiting for the Woman.

Sustained in weary life by a Promise.
Enduring the grave,
Counting the centuries,
Waiting for Good News.
The Virgin is with Child. Rejoice!

©2011 Joann Nelander All rights reserved

Winter Morn

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Winter clings lightly to the trees.

Clouds glower, fleeing rays of rising sun,

Whose streams split the heavens

With the warming smile of God.

©Joann Nelander