LENTEN RETREAT VII
Dear All of Us,
Ever since she was
a wee tiny delight,
I've described
my daughter as
"A Heart On Two Legs"
and she really is!
All heart!
Her name is
Janelle Lovelle,
Janelle from the
French for John,
The Apostle of Love"
and Lovell,
a family name
and heart hope
for centuries.
WE JUST KNEW
So what do we here
"just know"?
What names us
at our center:
- a sweet heart
- faint of heart
- hard hearted
- a sensitive heart
- a brave heart
- a dear heart
- cold hearted
- warm hearted
- all heart
- lonely heart
- heartless
- a generous heart
- a whimsical heart
That's more than
an idle question.
It is
THE QUESTION
The
HEART
is
who we actually are,
how we really are.
The heart is our
True Self.
The heart is our core,
our center from which all
radiates or darkens.
It's central
in way more than body.
The Desert
Mothers and Fathers
found a place and way
- inside and outside -
to get to the heart of things.
They freed up
to live out
LOVE
Richard Rohr and
Thomas Merton
paint it picture perfect:
The desert mystics
primary quest
was for God,
for Love;
everything else
was secondary.
Merton writes:
"All through the
Verba Seniorum
(Words of the
Desert Elders)
we find a
repeated insistence
on the primacy of love
over everything else
in the spiritual life:
over knowledge, gnosis,
asceticism, contemplation,
solitude, prayer.
Love, in fact,
is the spiritual life,
and without it
all other exercises
of the spirit,
however lofty,
are emptied
of content
and become
mere illusions.
The more lofty
they are,
the more
dangerous
the illusion." (1)
This is Essential Christianity.
Please, Please
let's stop and stay here,
see it soul deep,
Feel it, well,
in the heart.
What does it highlight
in our basic thinking,
feeling, acting, serving
as an individual
and as a people,
especially as
Eccesia
"The Gathered"
in
The Kin Domain
of
Love Lived
I'm going
to stop here
for those
who need to go.
See you next week.
In the deepest
of ways,
LOVE
to all.
For those able,
there's a lot more
to share if you care.
Please scroll down to
FURTHERANCE
below.
******
(1) Richard Rohr,
Daily Meditations,
Center for Action
and Contemplation
May 4, 2015
Thomas Merton
The Wisdom of the Desert
New Directions
1960
******
Next Edition
Online: Wednesday
March 27, 2024
Email: Friday
March 29, 2034
******
COMING SOON
Right After Easter
a
Special Edition
ELDERCHRIST
******
frankly speaking
spirituality for the street
johnfrankshares.blogspot.com
Click top left
FRANKLY SPEAKING
for current posting
LAST FIVE POSTINGS
Please scroll down
below this posting
PLEASE SHARE
frankly speaking
with others.
Thanks!
******
FURTHERANCE
After getting a cup of coffee,
or a glass of wine,
depending on our time zone
and preference,
let's pray pause over the
Rohr/Merton sharings above,
all of it, slowly and deeply.
In one way and many
it all comes down
to the up of:
"Love, in fact,
is the spiritual life."
Life these days is
oh so complex.
Just try to
seamlessly get through
your patient portal and
to your medical records.
Basic, for real life,
certainly spiritual life,
isn't at all like that.
It's simple and
straight forward.
Yet the young turks
in Silicon Valley
and too many more,
make their money
complicating things.
In that bunch are
theologians,
church bureaucrats,
"spiritual" leaders
and writers
(and pray I am not
one of them!!).
They spin the spiritual.
They dizzy our heads
and confuse our hearts.
The reduce God to
definition and dogma.
God is simply
to be experienced,
not explained.
Yet, they script one new
technique or tome
after another -
a storehouse of
reconditioned
spiritual hula hoops.
Admittedly I overstate,
but less than an inch off
from their complicating
buzzy busies.
The Desert
Mothers and Fathers
do us so much better.
They caught on and
happily got all caught up in
the sublime simplicity that
"God is love."
We can't figure that.
We can live it.
So, every aspiration
and activity are
weavings in a fabric of
Love Lived.
Put better,
in all things the
Desert Mothers and Faters
responded to
the God in themselves
and the God of
what was before them.
They danced God
as God led.
In suffering, joy,
patience, excitement,
moment and movement,
they lived a practical,
everyday, often mundane
"YES!!"
to
The Love Who Is God,
in solitude and in community.
They didn't find God.
They found themselves
in God and we can as well,
and well it is-
in everything
and always -
breathing, working, eating,
sleeping, helping, hurting,
crafting, making love,
cooking, cleaning,
raising kids,
easy, hard,
assisting the needy,
our day job,
being in community,
going into God's Love Tent
and letting God
love us to life.
That's what our
Lenten Retreat
has sought -
"Essential Christianity."
"Love God,
neighbor
self'
where and
as we are.
It's all a matter
and a fullness of
LOVE
at
HEART
******
AGAIN AND MORE
We have been blessed by
large groups from
HONG KONG
and
KOSOVO
joining in with us
this past week.
WELCOME
to them and all new with us.
So good, really,
So God
to be together
******
See you next week,
HOLY WEEK
As always and for sure,
Love
to all,
John Frank
******
