A weekly curated collection of essays, poetry, and reflections for your spiritual journey. From The Wisdom Years.
There are moments when all hope threatens to harden into cynical despair, when our compromises with the powers of the world threaten to exile us from God, our neighbor, and ourselves. It is there, at the brink of the grave, that Christ stands most ready to save, most eager to hold our loss in the fire of love, most able to transfigure everything.
Br. Keith Nelson, SSJE
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Let Your Life Speak
Listening for the voice of vocation as older adults
Online
Sept 7 – Oct 12
4 – 5:15 p.m. (Central time)
What is my purpose now, we ask. Now that I am retired, now that the kids are grown, now that I can’t do everything I used to be able to do, does God still have need of me? Emphatically, yes. In this 6-week study, starting September 7, we will use Parker Palmer’s book Let Your Life Speak to look at what our faith and experience have taught us and how we can continue to offer our skills and talents for God’s kingdom.
Click on the link for all the information: https://wisdomyears.org/let-your-life-speak/
What Is the False Self?
From Richard Rohr: “We each have different faces and different colors of skin; some of us have hair, some of us don’t; some are tall, some are a little shorter. If we are living out of the false self, all we can do is measure, compare, evaluate, and label.” Rohr adds that when we know our true self, we know our identity comes from God’s love.
Compulsion to Closure
We try and try to find a “final truth,” but as long as we are trying to find this kind of certainty, it is pretty much guaranteed that uncertainty and doubt will always be nipping at our heels, says writer Joan Tollifson. “And that nipping produces a kind of anxiety in us, an uneasiness, which sets us up to be easily attracted to people and systems that offer seemingly comprehensive answers that explain how the universe works.”
Thurman: Love
All of us want to be more loving in our hearts. Theologian Howard Thurman teaches that will only happen when we live in connection with the Holy Spirit, the divine within us. Then we will know the fruit of the spirit as we put ourselves in position to connect to God within.
From Joanna Seibert.
A Prophetic Mantra About the Poor
Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor, said James Forbes. Fr. Ron Rolheiser adds that the prophets of old said, “The quality of your faith will be judged by the quality of justice in the land. And the quality of justice in the land will always be judged by how widows, orphans, and strangers are faring while you are alive.”
Gathered Wisdom is an offering of The Wisdom Years, a ministry devoted to the spiritual journey of the last third of our lives.
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