gathered wisdom – Page 7 – The Wisdom Years

Gathered Wisdom, Dec 12, 2023

December 12, 2023Marjorie George

A weekly curated collection of essays, poetry, and reflections for your spiritual journey. From The Wisdom Years.

We are so often in too much of a hurry, expecting God, at our bidding, to work miracles overnight. And we often judge the progress of God’s Kingdom by what we can see. But so often the real growth happens unseen.

Br. Geoffrey Tristram, SSJE
Read More

Voluntary Simplicity

Voluntary simplicity is about doing one thing at a time and being present at the doing of it. It is taking a walk and noticing what there is to see and smell. It means “going fewer places in one day rather than more, seeing less so I can see more, doing less so I can do more, acquiring less so I can have more,” says Jon Kabat-Zinn.

Read the essay.

From Awakin.

The Constellation of Your Belonging

This brief meditation invites us to imagine the constellation of our life. Using guided visualization and reflective prompts, this simple practice invites us into the realization of our connectedness to ourselves and everything around us.

Engage with the practice/meditation.

From Grateful Living.

Telling our story this Advent

It is easy to give up as we get older. To think there is nothing new to learn. To believe we are no longer needed. But Joanna Seibert reminds us of the importance of telling our stories, especially to our families.

Read the reflection.

From Joanna Seibert.

Mary as a Model of Faith

Giving birth to Christ is something more than biological, says Fr. Ron Rolheiser. “Mary is the pre-eminent example of the one who hears the word of God and keeps it. For this reason, more than because of biological motherhood, Jesus claims her as his mother.” And we, too, are asked to give birth to faith.

Read the essay.

From the blog of Ron Rolheiser.

The Spiritual Practice of Awe

What does it mean to experience awe? Is it sitting in your backyard listening to the songbirds? Or seeing a magnificent sunset? But can it also be seeing the scab that has grown over a cut on your arm or looking into the face of your neighbor?

Read the reflection.

From Center for Action and Contemplation.

Gathered Wisdom is an offering of The Wisdom Years, a ministry devoted to the spiritual journey of the last third of our lives.

If this post was forwarded to you, sign up to receive Gathered Wisdom in your email by subscribing at wisdomyears.org.

To learn more visit our website.

Gathered Wisdom, Dec. 5, 2023

December 5, 2023Marjorie George

A weekly curated collection of essays, poetry, and reflections for your spiritual journey. From The Wisdom Years.

Learning how to be still,
to really be still and let life happen –
that stillness becomes a radiance.

-Morgan Freeman, actor and producer
From Well for the Journey

Advent One

Give us grace to cast away
the things designed to lead astray,
the things that of necessity
distract our hearts most easily,

Read the rest of the poem.

From Joanna Seibert’s blog.

Sympathy, Empathy And Compassion

Compassion, says Jay Litvin, is not the same as sympathy or empathy. It is not limited as a response to suffering, but rather is a response to life itself. It is a quality that one would live with “in every situation, with every person, rather than only with one who is in distress.”

Read the reflection.

From Awakin.

A Deeper Lightness

In the second half of life, even though there is suffering, there is now “a changed capacity to hold it creatively and with less anxiety,” says Richard Rohr, adding, “In the second half of life, it is good just to be a part of the general dance. We do not have to stand out, make defining moves, or be better than anyone else on the dance floor.”

Read the reflection.

From Center for Action and Contemplation.

Sabbath Moment

How hard it was for the little boy to accept that he would not get the Lionel train set for Christmas this year. He had so wanted it, but father was in the hospital and money was tight. Then he discovered that the whole word is a Lionel train set.

Read the reflection.

From Terry Hershey’s Sabbath Moment.

Finding God in Community

God is not, first of all, a formula, a dogma, a creedal statement, or a metaphysics that demands our assent,” says Fr. Ron Rolheiser. “God is a flow of living relationships, a trinity, a family of life that we can enter, taste, breathe within, and let flow through us.”

Read the reflection.

From Ron Rolheiser’s blog.

Gathered Wisdom is an offering of The Wisdom Years, a ministry devoted to the spiritual journey of the last third of our lives.

If this post was forwarded to you, sign up to receive Gathered Wisdom in your email by subscribing at wisdomyears.org.

To learn more visit our website.

Gathered Wisdom, Nov 28, 2023

November 27, 2023Marjorie George

A weekly curated collection of essays, poetry, and reflections for your spiritual journey. From The Wisdom Years.

I want to stand by the river…I want to sing, strong and hard, and stomp my feet with a hundred others so that the waters hum with our happiness. I want to dance for the renewal of the world.

-Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
Found in Well for the Journey

Preparing For Advent: Watch For The Light

Deacon Joanna Seibert recommends a book she returns to every Advent, re-reading with joy her previously underlined passages. The editors, in their introduction, remark that the main purpose of the book is “to encourage the rediscovery of Advent as a season of inward preparation.”

Read Seibert’s reflection.

From Joanna Seibert’s Daily Something.

Advent Resources

Even in the darkness we wait, for we have been promised a light that will shine in the darkness, and the darkness will never be able to overcome it (Jn 1:5).

From our website for your Advent journey:

A collection of daily meditations and and inspirations for Advent for you to choose from. And a reading list of Advent books.

And our Advent book study of All Creation Waits.

Advent begins Dec. 3.

Real and False Humility

Humility, says Fr. Ron Rolheiser, does not consist of “self-effacement, self-deprecation, never blowing our own horn.” Humility is recognizing the gifts God has placed in us and offering them to God for the furthering of God’s kingdom.

Read the reflection.

Gathered Wisdom, Nov 21, 2023

November 21, 2023Marjorie George

A weekly curated collection of essays, poetry, and reflections for your spiritual journey. From The Wisdom Years.

Lord, teach us to offer you hearts of thanksgiving and praise in all our daily experiences of life. Teach us to be joyful always, to pray continually, and to give thanks in all circumstances. Amen.

Gathered Wisdom is taking a Thanksgiving break. Among our many blessings, we count you who follow and support our ministry to older adults. Be blessed.

Gathered Wisdom is an offering of The Wisdom Years, a ministry devoted to the spiritual journey of the last third of our lives.

If this post was forwarded to you, sign up to receive Gathered Wisdom in your email by subscribing at wisdomyears.org.

To learn more visit our website.

Gathered Wisdom, Nov 14, 2023

November 14, 2023Marjorie George

A weekly curated collection of essays, poetry, and reflections for your spiritual journey. From The Wisdom Years.

We’re here for a little window. And to use that time to catch and share shards of light and laughter and grace seems to me the great story.

-Brian Doyle, One Long River of Song
From Well for the Journey

Advent Resources

Even in the darkness we wait, for we have been promised a light that will shine in the darkness, and the darkness will never be able to overcome it (Jn 1:5)

From our website for your Advent journey:

A collection of daily meditations and and inspirations for Advent for you to choose from.
Plus our own Advent Quiet Day on Nov 30.
And our Advent book study of All Creation Waits.

Advent begins Dec. 3.

The True You

Renovare offers three meditations that focus on remembering how much God loves us just as we are. With reflection questions and the opportunity to respond.

Read the meditations.

From Renovare.

What is it Like Being You?

We get labeled and categorized right from our birth. What if this causes us to never look deeply into who we are, and who are the people we think are so different from us? God’s creation is full of diversity, and God invites us to take pleasure in that.

Read the reflection.

From Society of St. John the Evangelist.

A Breakthrough in Consciousness

“Aging can be either a life of nostalgia or a wholehearted engagement with the future,” says Franciscan Sister Ilia Delio in a meditation for Center for Action and Contemplation. When we live in what she calls “integrated consciousness” we live in moments of failure or disruption “with a lightness of spirit, a sense of openness to divine love.”

Read the reflection.

From Center for Action and Contemplation.

Affective Prayer

Too often, says Fr. Ron Rolheiser, our prayers are from our intellect instead of our heart. “What is common in prayer,” he says, “is the tendency to talk to ourselves rather than to God.” What we most need in prayer is to hear God say that he loves us. We need to hear this in our hearts, not our minds.

Read the reflection.

From Ron Rolheiser.

Gathered Wisdom is an offering of The Wisdom Years, a ministry devoted to the spiritual journey of the last third of our lives.

If this post was forwarded to you, sign up to receive Gathered Wisdom in your email by subscribing at wisdomyears.org.

To learn more visit our website.

Gathered Wisdom, Nov 7, 2023

November 8, 2023Marjorie George

A weekly curated collection of essays, poetry, and reflections for your spiritual journey. From The Wisdom Years.

Blessed are we who want to be a part of the wild and beautiful experiment to find a common humanity…Blessed are we, willing to stay in the gap, in the contradictions of what we can’t understand.

-Kate Bowler & Jessica Richie, The Lives We Actually Have: 100 Blessings for Imperfect Days

From Well for the Journey

Wrapping Ourselves in Nature this Fall

Two offerings from The Wisdom Years – a fall Quiet Day and an Advent book study – will draw us into the bounties and blessings of nature this fall. Our fall Quiet Day, actually a morning, will offer opportunity to wander the beautiful grounds of Cathedral Park in San Antonio on Nov. 30. Click here for the details.

Our Advent study will embrace daily meditations from the animals using Gayle Boss’s All Creation Waits. We gather on Thursdays Dec. 7, 14, and 21 on Zoom for conversation. Click here for details.

We Belong to Each Other

A child is shot on the streets of Sarajevo. A man leans down to comfort her and to get her to a hospital. She dies anyway. Is she your child? a reporter asks. “No,” says the man. “But aren’t they all our children?”

Read the story.

From Terry Hershey’s Sabbath Moment.

In Praise of Silence

We all need silence in our lives, but it is not that simple. We also need public life. Spiritual writers in the past have often given the “too-simple impression that God and spiritual depth were only found in silence,” says Fr. Ron Rolheiser “as if the joys of human work, conversation, celebration, family, and community were somehow opposed to spiritual growth.”

Read the reflection.

From Ron Rolheiser.

The Practice Before The Practice

“A life of spirit, regardless of the path we choose, begins with a person’s acceptance that they are part of something larger than themselves,” says Mark Nepo in this essay. “We want to know who we really are and to know the truth of our existence and our connection to a living Universe.”

Read the reflection.

From Awakin.

The Yellow Umbrella

A little girl goes with her mother to take used toys to an orphanage. But it is her yellow umbrella that recalls memories for one little boy.

Watch this short animated video.

From Karmatube.

Gathered Wisdom is an offering of The Wisdom Years, a ministry devoted to the spiritual journey of the last third of our lives.

If this post was forwarded to you, sign up to receive Gathered Wisdom in your email by subscribing at wisdomyears.org.

To learn more visit our website.

Gathered Wisdom, Oct 31, 2023

October 31, 2023Marjorie George

A weekly curated collection of essays, poetry, and reflections for your spiritual journey. From The Wisdom Years.

What could you possibly lose by seeking the peace of another person — by literally making another’s peace your goal?
-Hugh Prather, How To Live in the World and Still Be Happy

From Well for the Journey

Wrapping Ourselves in Nature this Fall

Our Advent study will embrace daily meditations from the animals using Gayle Boss’s All Creation Waits. We gather on Thursdays Dec. 7, 14, and 21 on Zoom for conversation. Click here for details.

Kintsugi: The Golden Joinery of Love

This from a woman who learned how to overcome pain and scars through the ancient Japanese process of repairing broken pottery. It is long but a must-read.

Read the story.

Found in Daily Good.

When Winnie The Pooh Was Scared

Who does not love the oh-so-lovable Winnie the Pooh? But that gentle, mellow bear also gets scared sometimes. Read the response from his little friend Piglet.

Read the reflection.

From Awakin.

Encouragement: Heart Therapy

If we live in the northern climates, we can watch – and learn from – the geese as they fly south. But even if we do not see them, we can imagine what Brother Curtis Almquist describes. We see the lesson of encouragement in the sky.

Read or listen to the sermon.

From Society of St. John the Evangelist.

God’s Risk, Our Freedom

Why is God so elusive? Why doesn’t God just rise up and demonstrate for once and for all that God is good and just and powerful? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does evil get away with it? Read Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s response.

Read the reflection.

More about Ron Rolheiser.

Gathered Wisdom is an offering of The Wisdom Years, a ministry devoted to the spiritual journey of the last third of our lives.

If this post was forwarded to you, sign up to receive Gathered Wisdom in your email by subscribing at wisdomyears.org.

To learn more visit our website.

Gathered Wisdom, Oct. 24, 2023

October 25, 2023Marjorie George

A weekly curated collection of essays, poetry, and reflections for your spiritual journey. From The Wisdom Years.

When the currents of our life change, drowning us in demands, expectations, and information, that’s when we need something to hold on to that will help us focus and draw back to what is most important in our lives.

-Martin Lonnebo, Pearls of Life For the Personal Spiritual Journey

From Well for the Journey

Save the date for our Fall Quiet Day
November 30, 9 a.m. to noon
In person At the Bishop Jones Center
In San Antonio

And online by Zoom

Registration opens Nov. 1

Cost of $10
For more info: marjoriegeorge62@gmail.com

Waiting with All Creation

For Advent, the Wisdom Years community will read All Creation Waits by Gayle Boss. it is a gentle read in which we learn from the animals what it means to wait in darkness for the new creation that is coming to us in the incarnation of God’s self.

For the details, click here.

In the Face of War

It’s a hard time to stay faithful, says Tiffany Clark. it is hard to look with one eye at Christ’s perfect reign in the kingdom of heaven and with the other eye at the mess that comes when humans reject and oppose that kingdom. She offers some suggestions for how to stay faithful and maintain hope.

Read the article.

Found at Renovare.

Our Most Common Sin

We operate, says Fr. Ron Rolheiser, too often out of anger, an anger that parades itself as Godly-virtue, as righteousness, as prophecy, as a healthy, divinely-inspired militancy for truth, for cause, for virtue, for God. The prophets operated always out of love, not out of anger.

Read the reflection.

From Ron Rolheiser’s blog.

The Soul of Sound and Silence

It takes both the notes and the silence between the notes to make a beautiful piece of music. We remember that Elijah did not find God in the cataclysms of nature but in the silence that followed them. In the silence we realize that God is always with us but we do not always hear it.

Read or listen to the sermon.

From Society of St. John the Evangelist.

En-Lightening

A poem by Tash Shadman

And as I want for
Words to come,
Ideas to flow,
Pain to go,
I suffer my judgment of what is so.

Read the rest of the poem.

From Awakin.

Gathered Wisdom is an offering of The Wisdom Years, a ministry devoted to the spiritual journey of the last third of our lives.

If this post was forwarded to you, sign up to receive Gathered Wisdom in your email by subscribing at wisdomyears.org.

To learn more visit our website.

Gathered Wisdom, Oct 17, 2023

October 17, 2023Marjorie George

A weekly curated collection of essays, poetry, and reflections for your spiritual journey. From The Wisdom Years.

Be the radiator of peace. Go to the center of your inner being and radiate peace in every direction.
Our wings may be small but the ripples of the heart are infinite.

-Amit Ray, Compassion
From Well for the Journey Daily Reflection

In a Divided World, We Need to Choose Empathy

Jamil Zaki writes about losing a friendship over differing values but realizes that using empathy can restore relationships. Empathy unites individuals, relationships, and teams, says Zaki, but it also can be very fragile. Fortunately there are ways to reignite it.

Read the essay.

From Greater Good Magazine.

Blood and Water Poured Out

“Sometimes the very thing that breaks your heart is also the thing that opens it to warmth and gratitude,” says Ron Rolheiser in this essay about dying. This happens in death, says Fr. Ron. “Our task, in the end, is to do what this man did, die in such a way that our going away is our final gift to those whom we love.”

Read the reflection.

More about Ron Rolheiser.

Choosing the Lowest Place

Jesus shows us the beauty of the downward path, “a path that leads to life and peace and to true greatness,” says Br. David Vryhof of the Society of St. John the Evangelist. Jesus lives a life of humility and teaches us how to do so. Humility is about acknowledging that all we have and all we possess proceeds solely from God’s generous love.

Read the sermon.

From Society of St. John the Evangelist.

Gratitude And Acceptance

We can spend all of our time and energy obsessing over past mistakes or fearing what the future will bring. But neither of these option is good for us or for our world. Better to live consciously, moment by moment, giving thanks for each day’s gifts.

Read the short meditation.

From Joanna Seibert.

Appreciation is Generative

When you tend what you value, what you value thrives. Appreciation allows you to become more intimate with what is. And it also changes what is.

Listen to the 3-minute meditation.

From Grateful Living.

Gathered Wisdom is an offering of The Wisdom Years, a ministry devoted to the spiritual journey of the last third of our lives.

If this post was forwarded to you, sign up to receive Gathered Wisdom in your email by subscribing at wisdomyears.org.

To learn more visit our website.

Gathered Wisdom, Oct 10, 2023

October 10, 2023Marjorie George

A weekly curated collection of essays, poetry, and reflections for your spiritual journey. From The Wisdom Years.

Blessed are the uncertain …,
for their minds are still open.

Blessed are the wonderers,
for they shall find what is wonderful.

Blessed are those who question their answers,
for their horizons will expand forever.

-Brian D. McLaren, Faith After Doubt
Found at Well for the Journey

True Realism

Richard Rohr reminds us that in times of pain and suffering, the biblical prophets offer hope. “Isaiah says that injustice and evil are not the final reality,” says Rohr. Instead, the final reality is the comfort and compassion of God. “The prophet stands in that place of trust.” We need to remember this in these difficult times.

Read the reflection.

From Center for Action and Contemplation.

Coddiwomple

Here is a great word: Coddiwomple. It means to travel purposefully towards an as-yet-unknown destination. When we are coddiwomplers, we are willing to accept unexpected discoveries along the way.

Read the short essay.

From Awakin.

Compassion is real

What is to be our response to a world of hate and killing and suffering? Compassion, says Terry Hershey. “Just assume the answer to every question is compassion.”

Read the reflection.

From Terry Hershey’s Sabbath Moment.

To the Joyous Ones

In one of the collects from Compline in The Book of Common Prayer, we ask God to “shield the joyous” (pg 134). Joanna Seibert reflects on the joyous people she finds throughout her life, especially those at the church food pantry.

Read the short reflection.

From Joanna Seibert’s blog.

The Pearl of Great Price and Its Cost

Each time we choose something, we eliminate other choices, says Fr. Ron Rolheiser. That is why we struggle so painfully to make clear choices. We want the right things, but we want other things too.

Read the reflection.

From Ron Rolheiser’s blog.

Gathered Wisdom is an offering of The Wisdom Years, a ministry devoted to the spiritual journey of the last third of our lives.

If this post was forwarded to you, sign up to receive Gathered Wisdom in your email by subscribing at wisdomyears.org.

To learn more visit our website.