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Tag: elders
Gathered Wisdom, May 23, 2023
A weekly curated collection of essays, poetry, and reflections for your spiritual journey. From The Wisdom Years.
During Ascensiontide, we behold the glory and grandeur of God – not by gazing at feet dangling out of clouds, but by pondering the very heart of mystery. We too are clothed in glory, even now.
Br. James Koester, SSJE
SAVE THE DATE
For “CLAIMING MY NOW”
A workshop for older adults.
From The Wisdom Years
July 15, 9 am To 12:30 pm
$20
A morning for digging into the joys and challenges of the later years.
In-person at the Bishop Jones Center in San Antonio
And hybrid by Zoom
To indicate interest, email to marjoriegeorge62@gmail.com.
Registration opens in early June.
The Divine Dimension of Life
James Finley, Center for Action and Contemplation teacher and psychotherapist, provides a helpful image about how our lives and struggles intersect with the ever-present love of God. The image help us remember we are not alone. Finley uses the technique with his patients, but we need not be clinically depressed to appreciate the image.
Graphic from Center for Action and Contemplation.
I Will Not Leave You Orphaned
The night before he was crucified, Jesus gave a comforting message to his friends. “I will not leave you orphaned,” he said to the gathered disciples. He was telling them that Holy Spirit would walk with them. This Sunday, May 28, we celebrate Pentecost – the day of the coming of the Holy Spirit – not just to the first disciples but to all of us.
Cataclysms of the Heart
When our world falls apart, when we enter that “dark night of the soul,” we must remember that God does not desert us. Why does this “dark night” happen? It is like a honeymoon, says Fr. Ron Rolheiser. Honeymoons are wonderful, but, on a honeymoon, generally we are more in love with being in love and all the wonderful energy this creates than we are in love with the person behind all those feelings.
From the blog of Ron Rolheiser.
Earth Turns to Gold
In this short film from Green Renaissance, Shalav Israel says that “When we begin to share our stories, our experiences, then we are slowly peeling away on these ideas that separate us and create more pain and suffering. More and more, people are beginning to realize that it is not my skin color that defines me, it’s the concern that I have for the next person.”
Posted on the Grateful Living Network.
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, May 16, 2023
A weekly curated collection of essays, poetry, and reflections for your spiritual journey. From The Wisdom Years.
In prayer today, we might ask God to reveal to us the opportunities that are before us at this moment. Perhaps there is a window of opportunity in which we can express our love and gratitude to someone. Perhaps the soil is just right for planting some new seeds. Do not delay. Do not lose this opportunity. Take full advantage of this moment in your life’s history.
Br. David Vryhof, SSJE
A Lesson in Aging
Aging is a gift, even if unwanted, says Fr. Ron Rolheiser. Aging, he says, “forces us, mostly against our will, to listen to our soul more deeply and more honestly so as to draw from its deeper wells and begin to make peace with its complexity, its shadow, and its deepest proclivities.”
rom the blog of Ron Rolheiser.
An Open Empty Space
Richard Foster, author of Celebration of Discipline, insists that regularly-scheduled private retreats are essential for spiritual growth. In this, we follow our leader, Jesus, who often went away to a lonely place for prayer and refreshment.
From Renovare.
Making It Real
We are limited, fallible, frail creatures, says Br. Lain Wilson of the Society of St. John the Evangelist. So when Jesus says to us, “Do not let your hearts be troubled” (Jn 14:1). Do we believe him? God is always speaking to us—in word and image, relationship and experience, memory and imagination. God is always speaking to us, and it’s up to us to learn how to listen.
From SSJE.
See The Universe In A Sunflower
Just because we can’t see something right now doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It’s just a matter of time and latent conditions says Thich Nhat Hanh.
From Awakin.
Trusting God
Even when we feel out of control, the psalmist teaches us to recall God’s past faithfulness and look toward to the future with trust.
Find the materials for week 5 of The Wisdom Years psalms study, “God’s People Speak to God.”
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, May 9, 2023
A weekly curated collection of essays, poetry, and reflections for your spiritual journey. From The Wisdom Years.
There is a journey you must take. It is a journey without a destination. There is no map. Your soul will lead you.
-Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart by Jon Sweeny and Mark Burrows
From Well for the Journey
Peace I leave with You
Holy Week and the events of Easter gave us a definite timeline and focus for our spiritual journey. But now the timeline seems a little harder to track. What keeps us coming back?
Fly Loose
If the airplane pilot grips the yoke too tightly during turbulence, it actually makes the plane less steady. When the going gets tough, we need to remember to fly loose.
Thirsty for Wonder
If you live as a contemplative person, you are likely to see God in unexpected moments. “The more you intentionally turn inward, the more available the sacred becomes,” says Mirabai Starr.”
From Daily Good.
End Of the World
If the world as we know it is ending, it is up to us now to give it a good send off – “To let it hand on its gifts and teach the lessons that may only become apparent as the end approaches,” says Douglad Hine.
From Awakin.
A Love So Wide and Deep
As we engage the psalms this week, we learn a new word: hesed. The word tries to capture what is unexplainable – God’s love. In week 4 of “God’s People Speak to God,” we look at the psalms of penitence and apply hesed.
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, Feb 28, 2023
A weekly curated collection of essays, poetry, and reflections for your spiritual journey. From The Wisdom Years.
Lent is a time to take stock of the dualities in our lives. Listen and discern where God is giving you life, where God is speaking life into your life. Yet also, where has this life been robbed from you? Where does God invite you to lay aside the worship of other gods? Where does God invite you to walk back into larger life that Jesus shows us?
Br. Sean Glenn, SSJE
Read More and Comment >
The Way of Sabbath
“In the tempestuous ocean of time and toil, there are islands of stillness where man may enter a harbor and reclaim his dignity,” says Abraham Joshua Heschel in his book The Sabbath. The Wisdom Years five-week study of Sabbath is now online for individual or small group study.
I Have What You Need
What do we need? And do we really need it, whatever “it” is? The world tells us we need more, we deserve more, but what the world offers doesn’t satisfy.
From Awakin.
Keep Changing
Why is it so hard to change? Maybe because we are in love with ourselves. We’re in love with “our way of thinking, our way of explaining, our way of doing,” says Richard Rohr. But Jesus calls us, from the very beginning of his preaching, to change, to turn, to repent.
You Don’t Have to Know: Our Dark Materials
There will be dark times in our lives. There will be illness and suffering and death. We have to live it, we have to acknowledge it, but there is always a light for the way.
Found on Tarrantworks.
The Prayer of Charity
There is a longstanding Christian dictum that nobody makes progress in the spiritual life unless he or she prays, alone and in silence, for an hour a day, says Fr. Ron Rolheiser. The problem is, few of us – good Christians and all – find the time to do it. Or is it make the time? Maybe there is another way to pray.
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, Feb. 21, 2023
A weekly curated collection of essays, poetry, and reflections for your spiritual journey. From The Wisdom Years.
Dreams give your soul wings. And images from dreams are the exquisite patterns on the wings. Hold your dream images as you would hold a butterfly — in your open, quiet palms, … gently enough so that they still can fly.
-Jill Mellick, The Art of Dreaming: Tools for Creative Dream Work
The Way of Sabbath
What if we thought of the fourth commandment as an invitation rather than a command? Would that change how we celebrate Sabbath? In The Sabbath, Abraham Joshua Heschel teaches that Sabbath is a sanctification of time, not place.
Join us for our study.
The Way of Sabbath starts February 23.
What I Regret Most Are Failures of Kindness
What does American writer George Saunders regret the most about his life? Being unkind to a little girl in the seventh grade, as he tells a graduating class.
Mercy, Justice, and Walking Humbly
What does God require of us? He tells us through His prophet Micah: “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). Scholar and retreat leader Megan McKenna unpacks what that means in her reflection.
From the Center for Action and Contemplation.
God’s Quiet Presence in Our Lives
Most of the time, God’s presence within us and in our world is not dramatic. We mistake that for God’s absence. However, says Fr. Ron Rolheiser, “God lies inside us as an invitation that fully respects our freedom, never overpowers us; but also never goes away.”
From the blog of Ron Rolheiser.
Being Nice Isn’t The Same As Being Kind
Being kind means caring. It means making an effort, says Donna Cameron. It is different from being nice. You can be nice but still reserved. You can be helpful but not warm and welcoming.
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, Feb 7, 2023
A weekly curated collection of essays, poetry, and reflections for your spiritual journey. From The Wisdom Years.
Taking a moment
to figure out
how you really feel
instead of letting
old patterns decide for you
is one of the most
authentic things you can do
-Yung Pueblo, Clarity & Connection
From Well for the Journey
Visio Divina
Praying with our eyes is how Vivianne David describes visio divina. Traditionally, we take that to mean looking at art, but actually we do it all the time. Sitting in nature and allowing it to draw us to the God of creation is an act of visio divina.
Listen to the podcast (30 min)
From Renovare.
#heartivism: Gently Shaking The World
Activism so often includes anger and acts of violence. I am right, so you must be wrong. But Nipun Mehta, founder of Service Space, preaches “heartivism” – a third way between two “right” positions. This article is long but worth the read.
Read Mehta’s talk delivered in January 2023 for the 20th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Symposium at University of Pennsylvania.
Found in Daily Good.
Musings About Valentine’s Day
Joyce Rupp intends to approach Valentine’s Day this year “as a time to observe and affirm the relationships that influence our lives in constructive and satisfying ways.” The lovers, friends, relatives, and colleagues who “enrich us with their acceptance, guidance, and valuable encouragement.”
God Hole
“Each of us has a hole in our mind, our heart, and our body that only God can fill,” writes Joanna Seibert. “So instead, we try to fill it with relationships, food, alcohol, drugs, shopping, sports, work, power . . .” But God calls us to help each other find that God hole and fill it with “the best unconditional love we can muster.”
From Joanna Seibert.
Our Longing for God’s Justice
For Isaiah it was not enough that God would someday shower righteous people with blessings. There must also be punishment for the unrighteous – a “day of vengeance” (Is. 61:2). We are not so far from calling for vengeance ourselves. Like the older brother of the prodigal son, we might be doing a lot of things right, but lack warmth for others in our hearts.
From Fr 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.
The Way of Sabbath
On Our Website starting February 23
and Gathering by Zoom
Thursdays, 4 to 5:15 pm (Central time)
February 23 to March 23
Pulling from the wisdom of The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel, we will look at Sabbath not as a set of rules for one day of the week, but as a model for living all the days of the week.
Our time with friends and family on the Sabbath can make us more sensitive to the needs of other human beings. Celebrating the grandeur and beauty of nature on Sabbath, we are made more sensitive to the needs of the earth and reminded that God calls us to serve as co-creators of a just and compassionate world. Time for silence on the Sabbath shows us the value of solitude and silence every day. As we celebrate Sabbath, we can carry with us something of the sabbath through the rest of the week.
Sabbath, says Abraham Heschel, is not only a day of detachment from material things. “It is a day of attachment to the spirit.”
Together we will read The Sabbath by Heschel, then gather on Thursdays from 4 to 5:15 (Central time) for conversation by Zoom.
The study material will also be posted on the Wisdom Years website for use by congregations, small groups, or individual study.
There is no cost for the study. Participants will need to buy their own book: The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel, publishers Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
To indicate your interest in this offering or if you have questions, please send an email to Marjorie George at marjoriegeorge62@gmail.com or to wisdomyears2020@gmail.com.
To support independent book sellers, order from St. Mark’s Bookstore at https://www.stmarksbookstore.com
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Gathered Wisdom, Jan 31, 2023
A weekly curated collection of essays, poetry, and reflections for your spiritual journey. From The Wisdom Years.
If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it. This is the most basic kind of peace work.
-Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace
Found at Well for the Journey
Reclaim Your Chicken
| Writer Jon Bernie says that connectedness comes when we practice awareness without effort. No trying, no doing, no defensiveness, no chicken with its head cut off. Just gazing and seeing without resistance. “This is what it means to understand profoundly—not personally—what responsibility really is: the realization that we are interwoven with everything and everyone.” Read the reflection. From Awakin. |
Crowd Solidarity
Sometimes, says Diana Butler Bass, our prideful knowledge of scripture keeps us from clearly hearing the truth of the biblical message. The crowd that heard Jesus utter the Beatitudes might have been far different from us and so heard those words in a far different way than we do.
The Unchosen One
What happens when a child actor is overlooked for the part of Anakin Skywalker for a Star Wars movie? It depends on how you tell your story, says Devon Michael, who tells his own story in this Karma video.
From Karmatube.
Unexpected Grace and Gratitude in Prison
Artist Brooke Rothshank went to Elkhart County Jail in Indiana to teach a class to the prisoners not knowing what to expect. But, she says, “When I left that first day I felt as if I had discovered a room full of goodness that was hidden away. I know these men made mistakes. I know I’ve made mistakes. We didn’t know each other’s past, so all we could do was start right there in the present.”
From Grateful Living.
Today’s To-Do: Reach Out to an Older Relative
We often connect with the older adults in our lives only at family gatherings and holidays. But talking to older adults can be interesting and good for everyone. An article to pass on to your younger family and friends.
From The Upside.
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, Jan. 24, 2023
A weekly curated collection of essays, poetry, and reflections for your spiritual journey. From The Wisdom Years.
If you sat down and made a timeline of the growth spurts in your life, you would likely see a distinct pattern emerge—of setbacks, consistently setting you up for breakthroughs, “failures” leading you towards opportunities, challenges leading you toward growth, feeling lost eventually toward “finding yourself.”
-Gregg Levoy, Psychology Today, November 3, 2022
Found at Well for the Journey.
Waiting for the Thaw
“It is in that place between despair and hope that we find the beauty of the thaw,” writes Virgina May Drotar. It is in the spring thaw that new life and God are most potent. The old is dying off but the new has not yet arrived. It is the season that teaches us to be patient.
From Daily Good.
Being Part of the Symphony
We spend most of our lives as part of the entire orchestra, contributing to the music with our particular talent and instrument. But sometimes we are called on to do a solo, and then we must always keep our eyes on the conductor.
From Joanna Seibert.
Commitment to What Makes Life Worthwhile
Endurance is staying with a task that matters, regardless of how difficult it may be. But, says Joan Chittister, “The notion of endurance takes on negative overtones, when I fail to realize that it is meant to bring out the best in me, not the worst. Endurance is not misery, not martyrdom, not spiritual masochism. Endurance means that I intend to survive the worst, singing as I go.”
Mosquito Bites
W.H. Auden once said that when grace enters, we must dance. But what are the little irritations that often prevent us from seeing the presence of grace – like mosquitos at a picnic? The challenge for us is not to let the minor difficulties impair our ability to see the grace that always surrounds us.
From Fr. Ron Rolheiser.
Still Following the Epiphany Light
How do we respond when we sense God is calling us into a new relationship with Him, either by our own choice or the circumstances life has brought us? What thresholds will we need to cross, and what opportunities and challenges will we encounter along the way? How do we begin again, incorporating all that life has taught us this far?
Our online study “Following the Epiphany Light” ends this week, but the material will remain on our website. It is ideal for personal use or for small groups in your congregation.
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.
The Wisdom Years 