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STILL POINT

12/28/2016

How beautiful is the Church here in North Carolina where I am visiting Carla and family for Christmas with the wonderful decorations and the solemn Masses of Fr. Ken, the pastor.
Here is what Fr. Ken told me yesterday about trying to be in the presence of Jesus all day. “It is not so much a matter of willing it every moment, but rather spending more time with God, which will gradually form you.” I thought the way eating food gives us strength without us thinking about it when we are not eating. Fr. Ken said it was more a matter of surrender than of thinking and willing. More a flow, like with those we love where our conversation flows.

An image I got in the night before leaving Corpus Christi for Christmas:
Jim Ridley’s Soul
Day and night
you swim through
myriads of images.
At the hour of Mass
the blinding
light of Christ
brings you
“To the still point
of the turning world.”

New Project – readers of this blog can help with!
I have a plan to write a new book along these lines:
9 Toes in Eternity
Images of Grace
365 One-Liners
(especially for those over 65 years old)
Assembled by Ronda Chervin
Illustrated by Diana Chervin Jump

Diana makes wonderful cartoon figure cats and birds, etc.

This would be a kind of coffee-table book for the elderly
with these one-liners to meditate on one a day.
Some of these samples you are already familiar with from my blog.
But you, my dear readers, could just send me anything you like along the lines of edifying, sometimes humorous, one-liners, either of your own composition or quotes from others. They can be from the saints, but I am not putting in Scriptures because my readers would be reading Scripture as part of their daily prayer-life anyhow.
If you come up with any, e-mail them to me at [email protected] putting after each one “__________________________” from Joe Jones, or from Shakespeare, or, from the Holy Spirit.

Some samples:

When you lose family members who moved away from your location or from the earth, you come to realize that the absence of annoyance is not joy! (Ronda Chervin)
Fly low, fly slow. (Al Hughes)
“Even a blind squirrel sometimes finds an acorn.” (Dan Looper)
“If you can’t say something kind, don’t say anything.” (Pat Looper)
“Thou shalt love thy crooked neighbor with thy crooked heart.” (Auden)
“Be in the present in the Presence.” (Anon)

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Home on the range

12/18/2016

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May you all have a blessed Christmas.
May the thought of the baby Jesus, our savior, overcome all other thoughts on the negative side!
I happened to read this from St. Augustine in the Office of Readings. I thought it was amazing, even though I must have read it many times without noticing it!In case you don’t know it, here it is:
St. Augustine Office of Readings, Friday of 3rd Week of Advent
St Augustine on Psalm 37(38)
Your very desire is your prayer
I have roared out with the groaning of my heart. There is a secret groaning, which is not heard by man: yet if the thought of some strong desire has taken so strong hold of the heart, that the wound of the inner man finds expression in some uttered exclamation, everyone wonders why. A man says to himself, “Perhaps this is the cause of his groaning? Perhaps this thing or that thing has happened to him?” But who can know the answer except the one before whose eyes and ears he groaned? So the psalmist says I roared out with the groaning of my heart because if men ever hear a man’s groanings they hear only the groaning of the flesh; the groans within the heart are silent.
  And who observed and noticed the cause of his groaning? All my desire is in front of you. It cannot be before men because they cannot see the heart, but still the psalm says all my desire is in front of you. If your desire is laid before him then the Father, who sees in secret, will grant it to you.
  For that very desire of your heart is your prayer; and if your desire continues uninterrupted, then so does your prayer. It was not in vain that the Apostle said Pray without ceasing. Can we be always bending the knee, prostrating the body, or lifting up our hands, that he says Pray without ceasing? If that is what prayer means then I say that we cannot do it without ceasing.
  There is another inward kind of prayer without ceasing, which is the desire of the heart. Whatever activity you happen to be engaged in, if you only long for that Sabbath then you do not cease to pray. If you do not want to pause in prayer then never pause in your longing.
  Your continuous desire is your continuous prayer. If you cease to desire than you will have fallen silent in your prayer. Who are those who have fallen silent? Those of whom it is said Because iniquity will abound, the love of many will grow cold.
  The freezing of love is the silence of the heart; the burning of love is the cry of the heart. If love continues then you are still lifting up your voice; if you are always lifting up your voice, you are always longing after something; if you are always longing, it is the Sabbath rest you are thinking of.
  And all my desire is before Thee. How can we suppose that our desire is before him, but our very “groaning” is not before him? How can that be, since our desire itself finds its expression in “groaning”?
  And so comes the line And my groaning is not hidden from you. From you indeed it is not hidden; but it is hidden from many men. The servant of God sometimes seems to be saying in humility, And my groaning is not hidden from you. Sometimes also he seems to smile. Is then that longing dead in his heart? If however there is the desire within, there is the “groaning” also. It does not always find its way to the ears of man; but it never ceases to sound in the ears of God.

I am now settled into my new abode in Corpus Christi.

I am enjoying being in a parish I love. It is Our Lady of Guadalupe. It is in a hispanic area that is considered dangerous. I plan to go door to door evangelizing. I told the parish secretary that I am not afraid because I come from NYC where we heard police sirens through the night. But you can pray “cover” for me, just the same if you wish!
The pastor, who speaks Spanish perfectly, from previously being a priest in Mexico, though he is Italian origin from the East Coast of the US, is doing something wonderful. He set up a foundation of wealthy good Catholics to contribute to renovating the whole neighborhood around the Church. For starters, last summer, he had all the single-parent kids who would be out on the street at the parish parking lots playing sports and getting catechism, and a free lunch, supplied by the parish and supervised by many teen parishioners and others.
At the posada I went to, he told me that this Sunday before Christmas, all the local kids from the streets will come for a Christmas dinner with their parents; and someone has donated tons of free bicycles for the kids. This will be on local TV, so many will see what a great parish it is to return to if they are lapsed Catholics, which most local Hispanics are!
I figure I know enough Spanish to go around with a hispanic missionary couple door to door and try to bring them back. For those of you who know a little Spanish, it seems to me that a gringa anciana might intrigue them.

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My Winter Migration

12/12/2016

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What a week since my last blog!
For various reasons I decided to retire from formal teaching at Holy Apostles in Connecticut at put all my hopes into life in Corpus Christi, with lots of time for prayer and other less pressure ministries.
The send-off at the seminary was so incredibly moving. The President of the Seminarians arranged for each national group choir to sing a thank you song in their own language, and the Rector was very heartfelt in his tribute and then everyone in the cafeteria came up and gave me a hug after all the priests present gave me a blessing.
I had a beautiful welcome in Corpus Christi. Unfortunately it happened to be one of the coldest days ever when I arrived, so I am not basking in the sun, but expect to be come this Sunday when the usual 70 degree winter resumes!
It will be the same e-mail address – [email protected] but only the cell phone 860-759-4521.
Please pray that it may truly be a deep, contemplative, part of my life with “9 toes in eternity” as I like to joke, and also less of my vices of ego-centric exhibitionism and garrulousness that victimize friends and acquaintances!

Left over from the last blog is this stupendous, additional poem by Theodore Maynard
Faith, Hope and Charity
….
Since faith is lost among bewildered minds
Of all things credulous except her vision,
What tall, fantastic turrets must we build
To pierce the desolate reaches of the sky
How deeply plumb belief’s abysmal waters
Before we each the sunken floor of truth!

I (skeptical where nearly all are sure,
And even cynical of their (the ideas of the bewildered) starched assurance
Turn from their fallible rationalities
Their proofs of a too superstitious science –
Being least positive with the positivist –
….Believing passionately where others doubt.

For still I hold that truth alone can be
The final food and clothing of the mind,
That satisfaction of its burning thirst,
The end to which the mind at last will turn –
A tenuous foothold for a world of shadows!
Loud, loud, my God, let Thy confounding trumpet
Startle and shake the drifting universe!...

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Fish Song

12/3/2016

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Carla, my daughter’s writing 10 years ago, but on Facebook on November 23, 2016

A SONG SUNG BY A FISH
There are those things that can’t be said simply. I think it’s possible that nobody is born. We wheel around inside our mothers and only vaguely find one another, all of us twisting like a swarm of Jonah’s, turning this way and that in the skin of what either swallows us whole or becomes an ark. But a Noah is also terrified, anxiously watching the waters recede a little more every day, white-knuckled patriarch perched on the precipice of a vanishing oblivion.
Whatever I write here is wholly a preamble, a song sung by a fish. If she were to die, this might write itself as finished, but it can’t be done now: nothing that breathes will allow itself to be summed up while still puffing: every exhalation is a new letter in the alphabet of a life.
For some period of time, I lived inside my mother wearing the face of a wish. I remember the hushed sanctuary of a thousand churches, the round braille of rosary beads passing one by ten through your fingers as Mysteries, back and forth soft Latin waves of devotion: the Lord be with you, and also with you: a thousand times a thousand times forever.
In certain dreams, my mother wears a casual cloak of rainbows and has made a covenant. Her world will never be destroyed by water: by proxy, I am safe. I am not safe. My realm is forged from water. I see her in fragments stitched loosely at the surface. I do not notice that those who walk on water keep their arms flung out wide; that they move in the shape of a cross.
In other dreams, we face each other, so in those dreams, I have risen. I am a raven then, tight and black with eyes on fire. I am getting ready to fly to and fro, to and fro, hunting for branches. I think I am a bird but I am still a fish. My mother is a frightened dove. A thousand loaves later, my flesh will part and route into pieces and pathways, some of whom will face me and I will remember. I am a crucifix swinging below my mother’s breasts. It has been her hope to save me.
In some now, I am myself again. I think it’s possible that everyone is born and born and born exactly, into each moment. Everything else is a dream. Everything else is a wish. Everything else writes a sharp black cross on the sky with a raven’s wide wings and empty claws. We are looking for a nest we left behind but it is all around us. We look up towards a tunnel : the light scatters and we are once again fish: small and silver, fleet with opportunity.
This is a preamble: the sound things make before they break, a rumbled warning before the earth quakes toward another eternal effort to swallow itself. We are born in the water, borne by the water, slight boats on the crest of a flood. We carry our mothers inside us when they die, whole in the way of what has finished singing and can finally be named.
There are those things that can be simply said.

Alleged message from Mother Mary to me:
Mary: Don’t you see, with less formal work, you have more time when we send people to you and then we can send love and truth through you to them.
May it be, I replied.

Random thought:
Michael O'Brien, the Canadian's writing is deep and elegant; whereas Dean Koontz the American's writing is blunt, pithy and sock it to 'ya' - a reflection not only of 2 cultures but also of older and younger generations in the Church?

In BROTHER ODD by Dean Koontz, the protagonist, Odd Thomas is taking refuge at
a Benedictine monastery. There are separate facilities for both monks and nuns.
Here are some excerpts from the book:
“These sisters wear old-style habits that can make them seem as formidable as warriors in armor.”
“Living in a monastery, even as a guest rather than a monk, you have more opportunities than you might have elsewhere to see the world as it is, instead of through the shadow that you cast upon it.”
“The most constant darkness that is with us every day, at all hours of every day, is the darkness of the mind, the pettiness and meanness and hatred, which we have invited into ourselves, and which we pay out with generous interest.”
“The best of all things we can do for one another: Make the dark small.”

Perhaps because I am leaving here, Holy Apostles in Connecticut, at least for 8 months, many people are showering me with loving affection. Of these some I count as fans. I love my fans because they persuade me that if people love me in spite of my glaring vices of anger and unending garrulous speaking, then I figure I probably will get to purgatory some day.

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STILL POINT

Home on the range

My Winter Migration

Fish Song

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STILL POINT

Home on the range

My Winter Migration

﻿Fish Song

Author

Archives

Categories

Fish Song