Readings week of August 10th.

Readings from last week's Daily Contemplative Pauses

*All previous readings & reflections can be found here*

Monday, August 10th

Chant: When were you ever made less by dying? 

Tuesday, August 11th

Chant: Let the love that dwells in your hearts, shine forth in your deeds…

— Poor Clare’s of Arundel

Wednesday, August 12th

Chant: You the One, One in All, say I Am, I Am You 

— The Oriental Orthodox Order in the West

Thursday, August 13th

Reading: “But give me the strength that waits upon You in / silence and peace. Give me humility in which alone is rest, and deliver me from pride which is the heaviest of burdens. And possess my whole heart and soul with the simplicity of love. Occupy my whole life with the one thought and the one desire of love, that I may love not for the sake of merit, not for the sake of perfection, not for the sake of virtue, not for the sake of sanctity, but for You alone.” — Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 45

Friday, August 14th with LeMel

Reading: “We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become. If we love things, we become a thing. If we love nothing, we become nothing. Imitation is not a literal mimicking of Christ, rather it means becoming the image of the beloved, an image disclosed through transformation. This means we are to become vessels of God’s compassionate love for others.” — Saint Clare

“Place your mind before the mirror of eternity! Place your soul in the brilliance of glory! And transform your entire being into the image of the Godhead Itself through contemplation.” — Saint Clare 

Prayer After Santa Clara

I would love only what you love

Place my mind before the mirror

See what is truly within

Love all that is there

Until that Love so transforms 

That Love is all that remains

Until I see only You reflected back

Lover of my soul

Until it is only this that shines forth

— LeMel Firestone-Palerm

Chant:

Let the Love that dwells in your hearts, shine forth in your deeds.

Our labour here is brief, the reward eternal; thus what is bitter will be turned into sweetness.

— LeMel's Youtube and Substack (for daily readings and chants)

Saturday, August 15th

Reading: “This then is what it means to seek God perfectly: to withdraw from illusion and pleasure, from worldly anxieties and desires, from the works that God does not want, from a glory that is only human display; to keep my mind free from confusion in order that my liberty may be always at the disposal of [God’s] will; to entertain silence in my heart and listen for the voice of God; to cultivate an intellectual freedom from the images of created things in order to receive the secret contact of God in obscure love; to love all [humans] as myself; to rest in humility and to find peace in withdrawal from conflict and competition with other [humans]; to turn aside from controversy and put away heavy loads of judgment and censorship and criticism and the whole burden of opinions that I have no obligation to carry; to have a will that is always ready to fold back within itself and draw all the powers of the soul down from its deepest center to rest in silent expectancy for the coming of God, poised in tranquil and effortless concentration upon the point of my dependence on [God]; to gather all that I am, and have all that I can possibly suffer or do or be, and abandon them all to God in the resignation of a perfect love and blind faith and pure trust in God, to do [God’s] will.

And then to wait in peace and emptiness and oblivion of all things.

Bonum est praestolari cum silentio salutare Dei. ("It is good to wait in silence for the salvation of God.").” — Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 45-46

Sunday, August 16th  

Reading: Falling into Happiness by Letting Go

“Six months ago, I was in St. Louis, Missouri, giving a workshop. There was a priest there who came to see me. He said, "You know, I accept every single word you've said over these three days, every single word of it. And you know why? Not because I've done what you encouraged us to do to cut and rub and scrape and analyze. No, about three months ago 1 assisted an AIDS victim on his death-bed. And the man told me the following. He said, 'Father, six months ago the doctor told me I had six months to live." The man was dying, see.

“He said I had exactly six months to live, and I believed him. And you know something, Father? These have been the six happiest months of my whole misspent life. Happiest. In fact, I've never been happy till these six months. I discovered hap-piness.' He said, 'As soon as the doctor told me that, I dropped tension, pressure, anxiety, hope, and fell, not into despair, but into happiness at last." And the priest said, "You know, many is the time I've been reflecting on the words of that man. When I heard you this weekend, I thought, The guy's come alive again. You're saying exactly what he said." Here's a guy who had it. Here was a man who found it.

“The formula's here; you've got it right here. It can be found in Philippians: "For whatever the situation I find myself in, I have learned to be self-sufficient. I am experienced in being brought low, and I have known what it meant to have abundance. I have learned how to cope with every circumstance: how to eat well or to go hungry; to be well provided for, or to do without."

“That is, "I have learned to cope with every circumstance: how to eat well or to go hungry; to be well provided for, or to do without." A little ear-lier, Paul says, "Rejoice always. Rejoice in the Lord. Again I say it: Rejoice." I think of Ramchandra in Calcutta. I think of that AIDS victim in St. Louis. That's what Paul is talking about. I had read it all my life and had never understood it. I mean, it was staring me in the face. I didn't grasp it.”

— Anthony de Mello, Rediscovering Life, Awaken to Reality, p. 22-24

Chant: Whether I live, whether I die, I am the Lord’s

— Alana Levandoski

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