I am yours and for you I was born:
What do you want from me?
I am yours because you created me,
Yours because you redeemed me,
Yours because you called me to you,
Yours because you also waited for me,
And did not have me condemned.
What do you want of me?
See, here is my heart.
I place it in your hand,
Together with my body and my soul.
My inmost feelings and my love;
Dear Husband and Redeemer,
Since I have given myself to you,
What do you want from me?
Tag Archives: Reflections
The Borg: Master, Meister, Mind
Is he Borg? He is the Borg Master, and the Borg is on the move. It is hungry and ambitious, and knows no benevolent God of love and limits. By edict, it steals the inclination to Virtue, usurping the role of conscience. Borg Master, and no other, proclaims right limits and no limits. He declares who has a right to being and how to be. He looses the license of pride and greed into his pot of promises. He stirs his brew with class hatred and malcontention. Where there was the reign of virtue, decency, morality, there is enthroned a sceptered Specter; the One, the Borg Mind ruling a “no people – no voice.” The Borg Meister feeding on our fears, our frenzy and our fetuses.
The Borg Master contemplating and worshiping himself along with the adoring, mindless, masses. Everything becomes his; his hope, his audaciousness, his government, his plan! Your life is his to manipulate, as are your morals and your dreams. What you have will be his in the end. He covets your freedom and your laughter. He is building a State of being and a state of living in which you are a nobody, a number. Have no doubt; you, my dear cog, will be assimilated into the Borg.
Borg Mind Master wants your soul. He can taste it. He nibbles at your conscience. Resistance stirs his rhetoric, as word upon word, worms beneath your reason, reconstructing the underpinning of your logic, and your creed. Winning your vote, he has procured your serfdom. Licking his fingers, how delicious your servitude!
Meditation from Carmel
God does not ask a great deal from us. A brief remembrance from time to time. A brief act of adoration occasionally to ask Him for his grace,or offer Him your sufferings. At other times to thank him for the graces He has given you and is giving you. In the midst of your work find consolation in Him as often as possible. During your meals and conversations occasionally lift up your heart to Him The least little remembrance of Him will always be most agreeable. You need not shout out. He is closer to us than we may think.
A meditation by Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection (Letter 9 – page 69)
The Whole Truth – Make it Plain, Brother!
You don’t usually get to hear a Lutheran congregation holler an, “Amen” or “Preach it, Brother. ” Today was no different, but the minister seemed to want one. I was visiting with the Lutherans and the minister confessed that the one time he could remember that someone called out, “Amen, Brother”, it caught him so by surprise that it totally threw him into confusion. Now, however, Jesus was talking plain in the Gospel and the minister felt he could use a reminder from the pews to, “Make it plain; make it plain!” He was preaching John 3:16, “the Bible in a nutshell.”
The evening before, I heard a priest of the Roman Catholic Church preach it. He truly kept it simple. He said,
“Life is short. Hell is for Eternity. Think about it!” He sat down. That was it! Talk about nutshells.
My Lutheran friend said a bit more, before remembering his injunction to himself, “Make it plain!” The plain fact was that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” The minister said that the love He bore us was not the stuff of “warm fuzzies” but “agape”, that to die for love that willing died for all mankind; sparing not a drop of blood, or leaving a breathe unspent.
The sermon in my head reminded me, Jesus plainly and emphatically proclaimed that verse, now made famous by placards at football games and verse17: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” However, not many people finish the message. Jesus’ “make it plain” message, was also recorded by John in chapter 3:18-19.
No “warm fuzzies” here, either, only the uncomfortable part of the Truth, John 3:18-19.
“Whoever believes in him will not be condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil.”
Jesus spoke the whole Truth and so should we because: “Life is short. Hell is for Eternity. Think about it!”
Somewhere Nebraska – Somewhere Springtime
Getting to Nebraska, we passed a lot of dry, brown land. Colorful Colorado was a grayish tan. But here and there bright green fields told you things were ready to burst out at the first fall of rain.
On the surface things can look bleak. Beneath the surface, they are ready to pop. What I have to keep reminding myself is that life is thriving on planet Earth. God is in His heaven and that makes all the difference. Somewhere the bountiful and beautiful is happening, maybe not here, perhaps in distant, hidden places, but it’s happening and its abundant! While, there are dry spells, and dormant periods with things that go wrong, other things are so very right.
Change, for all my discomfort, is as ordinary as air. I know that if it’s happening, at very least, God is permitting it. He always has a plan and I don’t understand simply because He hasn’t run it past me. That does make even the present dilemma a work in progress – mysterious design and all that.
In the world or in the Church, it all hangs together. We are waiting for rain. John Paul II spoke of a Springtime for the Church and I believe that now, in this very dark hour, we are actually living it. Beneath the materialism and relativism and all those other ism’s, is a harvest in the making. It waits, perhaps, on laborers and a rain of prayer, but it none-the- less is hanging fire.
I find my Springtime in my prayer. Whether my experience of prayer is dry or consoling, doesn’t matter, anymore. I am praying. Day by day, I’m just doing it…. and I’m not alone in this. Whoever is waiting on change can actually move the hands of God in His heaven, turning the dreary grey of their waiting, into a poppin’ Springtime.
For me, it’s hidden but it’s happening. For each of us, it’s a “Just do it!” thing, hanging on a decision. What you don’t see, none-the-less, is building beneath the surface of our day to day. Days past, present and to come, days for forgiving, repenting, and imploring; all prayer, all the time. Springtime will come without me, but don’t want to miss it. I want to run through the fields and feel it in my soul.
Joan of Arc – A Prayer For Lent
Asked at her trial if she was in God’s grace:
“If I am not, may God put me there, and if I am, may God so keep me! I should be the saddest creature in the world if I knew I was not in His grace.”
Mark Twain said of her:
“She was truthful when lying was the common speech of men; she was honest when honest was become a lost virtue; she was a keeper of promises when the keeping of a promise was expected of no one; … she was full of pity when a merciless cruelty was the rule; she was steadfast when stability was unknown, and honorable in an age which had forgotten what honor was; she was a rock of convictions in a time when men believed in nothing and scoffed at all things; she was unfailingly true in an age that was false to the core; … she was of a dauntless courage when hope and courage had perished in the hearts of her nation…”
Be Holy! 