Touching the Sunrise with Sister Kathryn – Détails, épisodes et analyse

 You are an indispensable instrument of God’s plan and in perfectly surrendering to the divine flow of love, as mysterious and incomprehensible as it sometimes appears, you will find your happiness.

New Year's Resolutions often target weaknesses in order to increase strengths so we can be who we want to be. Mystery and divine providence often relies specifically on our weaknesses to be the places where the glory of God shines through as we play our part in the drama of the mysterious plan of salvation.

In the end, life is Mystery:  not perplexing confusion, but the Wisdom that is larger than our strategies, the Future that is greater than our projects, the Love that will encompass all of our potential.

Mystery means God has a plan for you that is perfect in every way, a plan that can encompass and save even suffering and disappointment.

Mystery means God will use you just as you are for a plan that has existed since before the foundation of the world and will exist into the unending future of the eternal kingdom.

I've been missing for 6 months because I've been home caregiving for my parents. What a gift, what a wealth of healing and mercy it has been.

Today I share a story from a young mother whom I observed yesterday that was also a moment of healing and grace.

As we gather near Jesus this Christmas season, we all have moments of tears, wistful memories of what could have been, empty places in our hearts and at our tables…. We sometimes shed tears, and are unable to explain exactly what they mean or what it is we need. God, like a good mother, says to you, “It’s okay to cry.”

God wraps his arms around you, kneels down to look you right in the eye, and whispers, “It’s okay to feel the way you do.” In a season where we are told we should be happy and nostalgic and romantic and excitedly anticipating sleigh rides “over the mountains and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go….”, it’s more than okay if your heart also carries a weight that is tearing open the veil to eternity from whence comes “the Dawn from on High.”

Music from ashamaluevmusic "Heaven"

These past two weeks I have spent from 3 to 5 hours most evenings or early mornings sitting beside a dear sister-friend who was making her last great ascent. That final walk. The ultimate journey. The loving return.

Each breath of hers was precious and on that last night before she died God helped me to realize that in the end, really, that is all we have…our breath…our current breath. We are not promised our next breath. We already have kissed the last breath goodbye. We cannot cling to it, as we cannot hold onto the past.

And even that breath is a gift. A gift of total gratuitously glorious love from a divine Lover who is supporting us in his arms even as we breath.

On that last ascent, it will not matter what we have created or achieved or known or acquired. The fact that I have written a book, or started a company, or sold an astounding number of widgets, or even loved will not be mine as a monument to me..

I will have only this breath that is a gift to me right now at this moment.

The years of midlife. Transitions. Endings. Wanderings. Grieving.

But also new beginnings. Surprises. Unexpected redirection. Unsuspected rewrites to your accepted narrative for the “you” that you’ve grown comfortable with.

This is the first in a series on the middle years in which we are looking at our midlife transitions, our ultimate yesses to our vocations in the light of the women and men who at midlife responded to God's gift and call. Today we're talking about Zechariah and Elizabeth, the parents of John the Baptist.

This year’s Christmas season is not laden with the expectations of extended family celebrations, festive Christmas meals, and open doors to visitors come to share the joy of the days of rest and peace that fill the Christmas season.

Pandemic loss and grief weigh upon these Christmas days and bring shadows to our hearts.

Maybe we feel empty. Like the world has stopped. Worry for the future seeps into the celebration of God-with-us who was born among us…. And…where is he for me? Now?

Your heart’s cry, whatever it may be, let it blend with the wail of the Infant King that midnight at his birth.

Sr Kathryn Hermes, FSP, author of Surviving Depression: A Catholic Approach and Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life's Disappointments

As we journey into the new year I’ve been thinking a lot about St Joseph. He is a “star” in the Christmas narrative, leading Mary to Bethlehem for the census. He protected her on that blessed night when the Savior of the world was born in a stable in the midnight dark.  Joseph stands out again as he saves the day, whisking Mary and Jesus off to Egypt and safely out of the clutches of Herod, who attempted to kill the baby.

Perhaps from the perspective of our eternal reward we’ll see how we too were the amazing actors in a moment of history—large or small—upon which the future of others rested.

But as Joseph trudged away from Nazareth I think he wasn’t imagining himself in any saintly celebrity status.

He was leaving his plans, his preparations for the Messiah’s birth, his workshop and place in Nazareth as the village carpenter. He was leaving behind his family, his support, his home, his synagogue. He left everything he had known, built, and shared for so many years of his life: the self he knew, the role he played in the community, his place in the larger family.

He walked into silence, mystery, glory…

This is probably a more difficult Advent than most, a time when we long for the joys of Christmas, even for our own emotional equilibrium. Today we talk about how God stoops to us in our weakness with an amazing love that changes everything.

This Sunday is the Feast of Christ the King. I've been thinking a lot about the Kingdom of Christ within me, how I surrender to the power of the King, how I turn my life over entirely to the reign of the Kingdom. As we close this year, it is a perfect liturgical Feast to prepare us for Advent and Christmas. Both an end and a beginning.

When we nourish ourselves on the Word of God we gradually are able to see an unexpected, unearned future: new life, a new heart, a new future, a new relationship with God. The word of the Lord became a part of Ezekiel’s being when the prophet was told at his calling, "Eat the Scroll," and it can become a part of our being as well. When we regularly digest God’s word, options become available to us that we couldn’t anticipate.

In the Gospels Jesus often asks seemingly useless questions. He asks a blind man, “Do you want to see?” He asks a leper, “What do you want me to do for you?” He asks a man who had been sick for thirty-eight years and is sitting by the side of the sheep pool, “Do you want to be made well?” What answer was Jesus expecting?

If we are suffering with anxiety or depression, or just trying to to survive these last months of 2020, the attempt to just survive can contract our personal universe to a “safe” size. Our thinking patterns can become caught in overcontrolled ruts. We lose flexibility in favor of the fight/flight/freeze mechanism that leads to hypervigilance and shutdown.

Jesus invites us to see in new ways.