Sighting Blessings

If I’m very good (which can be very, very hard for me) and if I’m very, very patient (which also can be very, very hard for me) and if I look very, very closely in the right direction, sometimes I can get a glimpse of the most amazing life. True blessedness comes, not in what counts as gained, but in the Intimacy and Truest Love known only in the solitude of the heart.

Pray in Intimacy and Love

Psalm 103:1

Bless the LORD, O my soul,

and all that is within me,

bless his holy name.

“Considering that the blessed life we so long for consists in an intimate and true love of God Our Creator and Lord, which binds and obliges us all to a sincere love.”

Ignatius Loyola

Let us bring our blessed hearts in prayer this week. Let them pray from our deepest longings for their most intimate and truest Love. Let them pray there, then, from the sincerity and obligations which bind them at their Source, in deepest amity, with all other hearts blessed in their longings for the intimacy of their truest Love. Amen.

Pray to Know the Heart of God in Yours

"In the Mist," Elizabeth Chapman

Psalm 139

O Lord, you have searched me and known me.

2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up;

you discern my thoughts from far away.

3 You search out my path and my lying down,

and are acquainted with all my ways.

4 Even before a word is on my tongue,

O Lord, you know it completely.

5 You hem me in, behind and before,

and lay your hand upon me.

6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;

it is so high that I cannot attain it.

“God sustains every soul and dwells in it substantially, even though it be that of the greatest sinner in the world, and this union is natural.”

St. John of the Cross.

Let us come in prayer. Let us come asking that our hearts be opened to their most intrinsic truth, that their truest nature is in most merciful and tenderly intimacy with the Indweller whose knowledge of them exists far beyond any they might claim for themselves. Let us pray to know these hearts of ours, as woeful and wanting, as distant and deceiving as they are. Pray to search them with tender mercy, and know them in such intimacy of compassion as they are already known; pray for the grace of coming to know them in that blessed Union which sustains and in which they dwell. Finally, let us pray to come to know all other hearts as we are praying to know our own. Amen.