Week of June 3 reflections

Sunday June 3- Ps. 139 speaks of the thoughts of God (vv17-18).  What thoughts of the divine can we grasp? What seem beyond our reach? What sort of religious sense does this inspire within you?

Monday-“The monastic cell is a central concept in the spirituality of the desert fathers and mothers.  This outer cell, which is the room where the monk lives, is a metaphor for the inner cell, a symbol of the deep soul work we are called to do to become fully awake. It is the place where we come into full presence with ourselves and all our inner voices, emotions, and challenges, where we strive to not abandon this soul work through distraction or numbing. It is also the place where we encounter God deep in our hearts.” -- Christine Valters Paintner

Tuesday… a sense of the immense sweep of creation, of the evolutionary process in everything, of how incomprehensible God must necessarily be to be the God of heaven and earth. You can’t fit the Almighty into your intellectual categories. Flannery O’Connor

Wednesday-"Humility invites us to let go of our hold on productivity as the measure of our worth and discover the deeper value of who we are." -- Christine Valters Paintner,

Thursday-Simone Weil-We have to cross the infinite thickness of time and space – and God has to do it first, because he comes to us first. Of the links between God and man, love is the greatest. It is as great as the distance to be crossed. So that the love may be as great as possible, the distance is as great as possible. That is why evil can extend to the extreme limit beyond which the very possibility of good disappears. Evil is permitted to touch this limit. It sometimes seems as though it overpassed it.

Friday-"What is serious to men is often very trivial in the sight of God. What in God might appear to us as 'play' is perhaps what He Himself takes most seriously. At any rate the Lord plays and diverts Himself in the garden of His creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in His mysterious, cosmic dance." ~ Thomas Merton,

Saturday-“In cultivating photography as a contemplative practice, the camera becomes a tool to develop our ability to see more deeply, clearly, and truly, beneath the surface realities of the world around us and into the sacred presence shimmering in the world.”
 -- Christine Valters Paintner,