Better than hoping for anything from the Lord, besides His love, let us place all our hope in His love itself. This hope is as sure as God Himself. It can never be confounded.
— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island, Sentences on Hope
It doesn’t matter what we do,
you and I,
as long as we are together.No need for lavish blessings
or miraculous signs;
just You hovering near me will do.dw
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The name of the room is Remember — the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived…
So much has happened to us all over the years. So much has happened within us and through us. We are to take time to remember what we can about it and what we dare. That’s what entering the room means, I think. It means taking time to remember on purpose. It means not picking up a book for once or turning on the radio, but letting the mind journey gravely, deliberately, back through the years that have gone by but are not gone. It means a deeper, slower kind of remembering; it means remembering as a searching and finding. The room is there for all of us to enter if we choose to, and the process of entering it is not unlike the process of praying, because praying too is a slow, grave journey — a search to find the truth of our own lives at their deepest and dearest, a search to understand, to hear and be heard.
The room called Remember…is a room we can enter whenever we like so that the power of remembering becomes our own power…[it] is a room where all emotions are caught up in and transcended by an extraordinary sense of well-being. It is the room of all rooms where we feel at home and at peace.
Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, “A Room Called Remember”
This is from another of Buechner’s sermons that has captured my imagination and is still capturing my heart. I don’t enter this room often enough, but the times I do I am blessed, refreshed, and am often given a new perspective that allows me to heal.
I’m posting this today because it resonates with a short-but-moving sermon I heard this morning about the importance of remembering our journeys and God’s faithfulness all along the way.
Grace and peace to you…
dw
It’s Holy Week. I’d like to share some music with you, a setting of Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) I wrote a couple of years back.
John the Baptist said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.”
Over the last several years, I’ve found myself composing prayers. It’s not something I ever set out to do; it just came along on its own. Here’s a prayer that came along a couple of weeks ago (I’m still working on memorizing it).
Grace and peace to you…
dw
According to Scripture, it is the heart that prays. If our heart is far from God, the words of prayer are in vain.
“For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy.”
— St. Thérèse of Lisieux, as quoted in paragraph 2558
— Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 2562, 2558
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