Sunday, 11 October 2015

Divine Will Prayers with the Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta

    
 Divine Will Prayers with the Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta     


Songs and Poems of Luisa  

      ... below the Poems inscribe of the Book of Heaven. Volume 10. To view the Website Catholic Divine Will

   http://catholicdivinewill.blogspot.co.uk/2008/06/divine-will-volume-thirty-six.html 
Table of Contents

Voulme 10 – November 28, 1910

Lack of love has cast the world into a net of vices.

Vm
P
d

In every moment, in every hour,

I want to love You with all my heart.

In every breath of my life,

while breathing, I will love You.

In every beat of my heart,

Love, love, I will repeat.

In every drop of my blood,

Love, love, I will cry out.

In every movement of my body,

Love alone I will embrace.

Of love alone I want to speak,

at love alone I want to look,

to love alone I want to listen,

always of love I want to think.

With love alone I want to burn,

with love alone I want to be consumed,

only love I want to enjoy,

only love I want to content.

From love alone I want to live,

And within love I want to die.

In every instant, in every hour,

I want to call everyone to love.

Only and always together with Jesus

and in Jesus I shall live,

into His Heart I will plunge myself,

and together with Jesus, and with His Heart,

Love, Love, I will love You.


 Volume 10 -February 8, 1911

Love renders Jesus happy. Luisa is the Paradise of Jesus on earth.

And here is what I would say about Love, and what Jesus would say.

I will say it with some nonsense and maybe also disconnected, because the mind does not adapt itself completely to words:

Vm
P
d

‘Oh! my Jesus, Love are You, You are all Love,

and Love do I want, Love I desire, for Love I long;

Love I supplicate, and Love I implore of You.

Love invites me, Love is my life,

Love kidnaps my heart

deep into the womb of my Lord.

With Love He inebriates me, with Love He delights me,

I, all alone, and only for You!

You, alone and only for me!

Now that we are alone, shall we speak about Love?

O please! let me comprehend how much You love me,

Because only in your Heart can one comprehend Love.’


“Do you want Me to speak to you of Love?

 Listen, my beloved daughter:

my Life is Love.

If I breathe, I love you;

if my Heart beats, my heartbeat says to you: Love, Love.

I am mad with Love for you.

If I move, I add Love for you,

with Love I inundate you, with Love I surround you,

with Love I caress you, with Love I dart through you.

With Love I flash through you, with Love I attract you,

with Love I nourish you,

and sharp arrows I send to your heart.”


‘Enough, oh my Jesus, for now – I already feel faint with Love;

sustain me in your arms, enclose me in your Heart,

and from within your Heart, let me too give vent to my Love;

otherwise I die of Love.

With Love I rave, with Love I burn,

with Love I make feast, with Love I languish,

with Love I am consumed;

Love kills me and makes me rise again more beautiful to new life.

My life escapes me, and I feel only the Life of Jesus, my Love,

and in Jesus, my Love, I feel immersed and I love everyone;

He wounds me with Love, He makes me ill with Love,

with Love He embellishes me, and makes me ever more rich.

I can say nothing more.

Oh! Love, You alone understand me,

You alone comprehend me,

my silence tells You even more.

In your beautiful Heart one says more by keeping silent than by speaking;

and by loving, one learns how to love.

Love, Love – speak, You alone,

because being Love, You know how to speak of Love.’


“Do you want to hear Love?

All Creation tells you Love.

If the stars twinkle, they tell you Love;

if the sun rises, it gilds you with Love.

If it shines with all of its light in its full day,

it sends arrows of Love to your heart;

if the sun sets, it tells you: ‘It is Jesus that dies of Love for you.’

In the thunders and lightnings, I send you Love,

and smacking kisses I give to your heart.

It is Love that runs upon the wings of the winds;

if the waters murmur, I extend my arms to you;

if the leaves move, I clasp you to my Heart;

if the flower gives out its fragrance, I cheer you with Love.

All Creation, in mute language, tells you, in chorus:

‘From you alone do I want life of Love’.

Love do I want, Love I desire, for Love I beg from within your heart.

I am only content if you give Me love.”


‘My Good, my All, insatiable Love,

if You want Love, then give me Love;

if You want me happy, then speak to Me of Love;

if You want me content, then render me Love.

Love invests me, Love makes me fly,

and brings me to the Throne of my Maker.

Love shows me the uncreated Wisdom,

It leads me into the Eternal Love,

and there do I set my home.

Life of Love, I will live in your Heart;

I will love You for all,

I will love You with all,

I will love You in all.

Jesus, seal me completely with Love inside your Heart;

empty my veins, and instead of blood, let Love flow in them;

take away my breath, and let me breathe air of Love;

burn my bones and flesh, and weave me completely – completely with Love.

May Love transform me, may Love conform me,

may Love teach me how to suffer with You;

may Love crucify me,

and make me all similar to You.’


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The Photography of Thomas Merton - photography from 1965 through 1968





Thomas Merton’s photograph of God
Posted: May 13, 2011 | Author: roy hamric | Filed under: buddhism, people, photography | Leave a comment:
Thomas Merton named this photograph “The Sky Hook,” but he wrote, “It is the only known picture of God.” See my essayThomas Merton: Looking Through the Window in the On the Record listing.
the photography of thomas merton: seeing through the window
      The Hameric Journal. https://royhamric.wordpress.com/?s=Thomas+Merton         

Thomas Merton On An Image
   https://royhamric.wordpress.com/?s=Thomas+Merton   
Posted: May 13, 2015 | Author: roy hamric | Filed under: articles, buddhism, Buddhism Zen, states of mind, writing |Tags: Merton on photography, thomas merton in Asia | 1 Comment


Mount Kangchenjunga from Darjeeling
Mount Kangchenjunga from Darjeeling
Thomas Merton, during his Asian pilgrimage, waited for days to see and photograph Mount Kanchenjunga, but it was covered by clouds. His visual sense was acute. In Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, he wrote: “Nothing resembles substance less than its shadow [words, drawings…]. To convey the meaning of something substantial you have to use not a shadow but a sign, not the imitation but the image. The image is a new and different reality, and of course it does not convey an impression of some object, but the mind of the subject: and that is something else again.” I discuss his pilgrimage and his photography in an essay under “On the Record,” which is listed in the column on the right. Merton died in Bangkok in December 1968.
Thomas Merton’s photograph of God
Posted: May 13, 2011 | Author: roy hamric | Filed under: buddhism, people, photography | Leave a       
          Thomas Merton named this photograph “The Sky Hook,” but he wrote, “It is the only known picture of God.” See my essayThomas Merton: Looking Through the Window in the On the Record listing.
the photography of thomas merton: seeing through the window
Posted: May 15, 2010 | Author: roy hamric | Filed under: articles, buddhism, people, photography | 1 Comment
This is an expanded version of an essay that appeared in The Kyoto Journal, issue No. 47 in 2001.
The Photography of Thomas Merton: Seeing Through the Window
By Roy Hamric
Trappist Monk Thomas Merton, in his twenty-seventh year at Gethsemani Monastery, wrote to his friend novelist John Howard Griffin, in 1968, shortly after he received the gift of a camera: “It is fabulous.  What a joy of a thing to work with.The camera is the most eager and helpful of all beings, all full of happy suggestions.  Reminding me of things I have overlooked and cooperating in the creation of new worlds.  So Simply. This is a Zen camera.”
merton with his Canon
And so, Merton’s life as an amateur photographer intensified. One of the most spiritual and literary men of our times, Merton had been taking photographs of his friends and the surroundings at Gethsemani, near Louisville, Kentucky, for several years. He enjoyed using the clear glass of the camera lens and the frame of the viewfinder as tools to help him see and to understand the world. The mirror-like view of the camera, recreating whatever it is pointed at, was perfect for Merton’s practical blend of spirituality.
His spiritual path had evolved over the years, as he began to explore the spiritual connections with Zen, largely through the writings of D.T. Suzuki. He longed to become more deeply involved in the “ordinary.”
       

merton in a baseball cap

Many of Merton’s earliest photographs are similar in style to early Chinese painter-calligraphers who tried to capture the direct essence of form. Merton wrote to his friend, John C. H. Wu, the translator of one of the best English versions of the Tao Te Ching, that he was uncomfortable with “mystical writings.” He expressed his desire to go to Asia “to seek at the sources some of the things I see to be so vitally important–the Zen ground of all the dimensions of expression and mystery in the brushwork of Chinese calligraphy- painting, poetry and so forth.”
“On the contrary,” he wrote, “it seems to me that mysticism flourishes most purely right in the middle of the ordinary.  And such mysticism, in order to flourish, must be quite prompt to renounce all apparent claim to be mystical at all.”
It is no surprise that a monk who lived a life sequestered from society should be attracted to the still, and silent, photographic image.  Within that visual stillness and exchange between the seer and the seen lies a mystery–perhaps some of the spiritual mystery of why one would become a monk in the first place.
During the sixities, as Merton began to explore Asian philosophy, he also began to experiment with calligraphy, creating striking images. In 1958, he wrote in his journal that he had bought a copy of “The Family of Man,” Edward Steichen’s landmark photography book which established the power of photography to evoke universal truths. Merton saw the images as a form of “writing” in which “no explanations are necessary!” “How scandalized some would be if I said that this whole book is to me a picture of Christ, and yet that is the Truth..” This reaction to the visual came in the same entry in his journal in which he recorded what was later to be described as his “Louisville epiphany,” wherein he wrote that he had experienced  an overwhelming sense of “oneness” with other people on a street corner.
John Howard Griffin, the author of the civil rights classic Black Like Me, was also an amateur photographer. In 1963, he wanted to build a photographic archive of Merton and his life at Gethsmeni. He wrote to Merton mentioning his desire, and he visited him a short while later. While there, he said, “Tom watched with interest and wanted an explanation of the cameras––a Leica and Alpha.” Merton told Griffin, “I don’t know anything about photography, but it fascinates me.”
Merton had begun his first serious exploration of photography when in January 1962, he visited a Shaker village near the monastery. He found “some marvelous subjects,” he wrote in his journal, and his description of what he saw and photographed signaled that his search for subjects was part of a highly developed visual acuity that unfolded in a charged contemplative state of mind : “Marvelous, silent, vast spaces around the old buildings.” he wrote in his journal. “Cold, pure light, and some grand trees…. How the blank side of a frame house can be so completely beautiful I cannot imagine. A completely miraculous achievement of forms.”
Merton and Griffin started a spiritual-literary friendship during a retreat Griffin made at Gethsemani. Griffin sensed that Merton’s mind innately took to the camera’s frame.  He served as a constant source of encouragement to Merton, volunteered to process Merton’s film and became a casual critic of his contact sheets.
They exchanged regular letters touching on Merton’s photography from 1965 through 1968–the year of Merton’s accidental death in Bangkok, following his epiphanic tour of Asia.  Merton’s Asian journal of his pilgrimage, and the inclusion of about 30 photographs that he took during the trip, were published as The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton–a work unlike Merton’s other books in its personal intensity. Upon finishing the book, you have a sense that Merton’s life was in a profound stage of evolution.
That revelation, for me, comes through most strongly in the journal entries chronicling the things he  photographed during his journey.  But his earlier photographs also offer tantalizing  clues to Merton’s spiritual journey in his final years.
By 1964, Merton had regular access to a camera and his reading of Zen books became an integral part of his life, no doubt stimulating his interest in the visual experience itself through its emphasis on “attention” and “experiencing the moment.” On September 24, Merton linked Zen and photography in another journal entry: “After dinner I was distracted by the dream camera, and instead of seriously reading the Zen anthology I got from the Louisville Library, kept seeing curious things to shoot, especially a window in the tool room of the woodshed. The whole place is full of fantastic and strange subjects––a mine of Zen photography.”
In the following years, he moved on to better cameras, eventually gaining  access to a Rollieflex owned by the monastery. When it malfunctioned in 1968, he immediately wrote to Griffin, who sent him a 35mm Canon FX with 50 mm and 100 mm lenses.
The new camera was the springboard to more sophisticated pictures, and Merton was soon comparing notes with Griffin on the ins-and-outs of photography. He never took any interest in developing his own film or printing his images, instead sending exposed rolls of film to Griffin, who with his son, Gregory, developed the film and sent back contact prints for Merton to select the images he wanted printed. Griffin recalls that he and his son were often frustrated that Merton seemingly skipped over “superlative” images and instead marked others that seemed ordinary to them.
“He went right on marking what he wanted rather than what we thought he should want,” recalled Griffin. “ Then, as he keep taking photographs, more and more often he would send a contact sheet with a frame marked and an excited notation: ‘At last––this is what I have been aiming for.”
Griffin soon began to appreciate Merton’s personal visual quest: “He focused on the images in his contemplation, as they were and not as he wanted them to be. He took his camera on his walks and, with his special way of seeing, photographed what moved or excited him––whatsoever responded to that inner orientation.”
Merton’s interest in painting and photography had taken a decisive turn in early 1965, after he read “The Tao of Painting” by Mai-Mai Sze, a work he called “deep and contemplative.” He began practicing Chinese brushstrokes in a freehand style, one of which he published on the cover of  Raids on the Unspeakable.  In August of that year, he moved to a cottage hermitage surrounded by woods on the grounds of Gethsemani where he found more solitude and where nature increased his awareness of flora and fauna. Writing in his journal of his early days at the hermitage, he said the hermitage lifestyle challenged him “to see the great seriousness of what I am about to do.”
“Contrary to all that is said about it,” he wrote, “I do not see how the really solitary life can tolerate illusion or self-deception.  It seems to me that solitude rips off all the masks and all the disguises.  It tolerates no lies. Everything but straight and direct affirmation, or silence, is mocked and judged by the silence of the forest.”
Merton’s  natural visual acuteness was intensified during his walks through the fields and woods at his monastery. As a band of deer appeared from out of the woods one day, he watched silently:
“I watched their beautiful running, their grazing,” he wrote in his journal. “Every movement was completely lovely, but there is a kind of gaucheness about them sometimes that makes them even lovelier, like girls. The thing that struck me most–when you look at them directly and in movement–you see what the primitive cave painters saw.  Something you never see in a photograph.  It is most awe-inspiring. The ‘spirit’ is shown in the running of the deer.  The deerness that sums up everything and is sacred and marvelous.”
Merton described such deep perceptions as “contemplative intuition, yet this is perfectly ordinary, everyday seeing–what everybody ought to see all the time.”
“The deer reveals to me something essential, not only in itself, but also in myself,” he wrote.  “Something beyond the trivialities of my everyday being, my individual existence.  Something profound. The face of that which is both in the deer and in myself.” 
  
thomas merton
Whenever Griffin visited Merton, the two men often took long walks in the woods and surrounding countryside looking for objects and scenes to photograph. A letter dated Dec. 12, 1966, refers to pictures Merton took of tree roots. “I signed them as you requested, and have sent back the ones you want,” he wrote to Griffin. “They are really splendid.  I find myself wondering if I took such pictures.”
His life at Gethsemani was isolated, yet he became friends with another most unusual photographer, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, who had photographed Merton and who lived in Louisville. Meatyard had already achieved great recognition as an exceptionally original and brilliant photographer. He was also interested in Zen, and he took many mysterious, haunting photographs of Merton. They exchanged 16 letters. Meatyard was not, unlike most people, awed by Merton’s reputation, and he seemed to see the man whole: “[I was] photographing a Kierkegaard who was a fan of Mad [magazine]; a Zen adept and hermit who droooled over hospital nurses with a cute behind…a man of accomplished self-descipline who sometimes acted like a 10 year old with an unlimited charge account at a candy store.”       
           One of Merton’s most personal photographs from that period is called “The Sky Hook.”  He wrote that the picture “is the only known photograph of God.” The picture’s composition is balanced between material and non-material space, cut through the center from the top by a steel hook, curled toward the sky–empty–holding nothing.    
     
   
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Friday, 9 October 2015

Night Office, St. Bernard - picture from Thomas Merton

 Monastic Lectionary of the Divine Office, 

'The only known photograph of God' Used with Permission of the Merton Legacy Trust and the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University. 
  Sent: Thursday, 8 October 2015, 18:41
Subject: Thomas Merton - his photograph & humour

Dear Father Donald,
Your seminar on Saturday - I omitted to mention the man behind the lens of so many of his atmospheric photos, and his humour (see attached!)
William.
COMMENT:

St. Bernard, passage below, rings the pendulum of ‘benevolent / malevolent’. Bernard keeps us often in suspense.

'They enjoyed the Lord's blessings but were utterly ignorant of the Lord of Hosts because he ruled all things so silently'.

'... the one who mightily but invisibly created the world, rules it wisely, and safeguards it benevolently'.

Tomorrow monks are attending the Celebration of Thomas Merton and workshop of photographs of Merton – in the mode....




TWENTY-SEVENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME
FRIDAY 9th October 2015.

First Reading    2 Kings 21:1-18.23 - 22:1
Responsory     Ps 52:1.2.5-7
Why do you boast of your wickedness, you champion of evil? You love evil more than good, falsehood more than truth. + For this God will destroy you, uproot you from the land of the living.
V. The just shall laugh and say: Here is the man who refused to make God his refuge. + For this God ...

Second Reading
From a sermon by Saint Bernard
Sermones in Canticle VI, 2-3: PL.183, 803-804.

Human beings experienced constant benefits but the bene­factor was hidden from them. He reached indeed from end to end mightily, arranging all things pleasantly, but humankind did not perceive him. They enjoyed the Lord's blessings but were utterly ignorant of the Lord of Hosts because he ruled all things so silently. They were from him but not with him; they had life through him but did not live for him; they had understanding from him but did not know him, for they were estranged, ungrateful, foolish. In the end they attributed exist­ence, life, and understanding not to the author of these but to nature or even, much more stupidly, to fortune; many also conceitedly claimed that much was the result of their own diligence and abilities. Think of all that seductive spirits arro­gated to themselves, and all that was attributed to sun and moon or earth and water or even things made by mortal hands! Deference was paid to plants and trees and the tiniest most contemptible seeds as to divinities.

Thus, alas, did men and women lose their true glory, exchanging him for the image of a bull that eats grass. But taking pity on them in their errors, God graciously came from his shaded, thickly wooded mountain and placed his tent in the sun. To those who knew only the flesh he offered his flesh that through it they might learn to perceive the spirit. For while in the flesh he did works through the flesh that were not of the flesh but of God: commanding nature, conquering fate, showing human wisdom to be folly, and vanquishing tyrannous demons. He openly showed himself to be the one through whom these things, whenever they occurred, had all been prepared at one and the same time. In the flesh and through the flesh he worked miracles openly and mightily, spoke a saving message, endured undeserved suffering, and made it clear that he is the one who mightily but invisibly created the world, rules it wisely, and safeguards it benevolently. Finally, when he preached the good news to the ungrateful, offered signs to unbelievers, and prayed for his crucifiers, did he not clearly show himself to be the one who with his Father daily makes his sun rise upon the good and the wicked and the rain fall on the just and the unjust? He himself said as much: If I do not do the works of my Father, do not believe me.

Responsory Ti    3:4; Mt 1:21
When the kindness and generosity of God our Saviour dawned upon the world, it was not because of any good deeds of ours but from compassion that + he saved us through the cleansing water of rebirth and the renewing power of the Holy Spirit which he generously poured out on us through Jesus Christ our Saviour.
V. You shall call him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. + He saved us ...


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John Henry Newman, Bl. Nunraw community Mass 8 October 2015

Blessed John Henry Newman beatified 19 September 19, 2010
Friday, 8 October 2015   

The Mission of My Life - John Henry Cardinal Newman

God has created me to do Him some definite service.He has committed some work to me
which He has not committed to another. 
 I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught. 
I shall do good;
I shall do His work.
I shall be an angel of peace,
a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it
if I do but keep His commandments.
Therefore, I will trust him, whatever I am,
I can never be thrown away.
If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him,
in perpelexity, my perplexity may serve Him.
If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him.
He does nothing in vain.
He knows what He is about.
He may take away my friends.
He may throw me among strangers.
He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me.
Still, He knows what He is about.
...
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 

Blessed John Henry Newman was a priest, theologian, writer and preacher. His life spanned most of the 19th century. He was an Anglican for the first half of his life and became a Catholic in the second half.
Born in London in 1801, Newman studied at Oxford's Trinity College, was a tutor at Oriel College and for 17 years vicar of the university church, St Mary the Virgin. He published eight volumes of Parochial and Plain Sermons as well as two novels. His poem, the Dream of Gerontius, was set to music by Sir Edward Elgar.
After 1833, Newman was a prominent member of the Oxford Movement, which emphasized the Church's debt to the Church Fathers and challenged any tendency to consider truth as completely subjective.
Historical research made Newman suspect that the Roman Catholic Church was in closest continuity with the Church that Jesus established. In 1845, he was received into full communion as a Catholic. Two years later he was ordained a Catholic priest in Rome and joined the Congregation of the Oratory, founded three centuries earlier by St Philip Neri. Returning to England, Newman founded Oratory houses in Birmingham and London and for seven years served as rector of the Catholic University of Ireland.
Before Newman, Catholic theology tended to ignore history, preferring instead to draw deductions from first principles. After Newman, the lived experience of believers was recognized as a key part of theological reflection.
Newman eventually wrote 40 books and 21,000 letters that survive. Most famous are his book-length Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (his spiritual autobiography up to 1864) and Essay on the Grammar of Assent. He accepted Vatican I's teaching on papal infallibility while noting its limits, which many people who favoured that definition were reluctant to do.
When Newman was named a cardinal in 1879, he took as his motto 'Cor ad cor loquitur' (Heart speaks to heart). Newman died in 1890. He was buried in Rednal (near Birmingham) 11 years later. After his grave was exhumed in 2008, a new tomb was prepared at the Oratory church in Birmingham.
Pope Benedict XVI beatified Newman on 19 September 19, 2010, at Crofton Park, near Birmingham. The Pope noted Newman's emphasis on the vital place of revealed religion in civilized society but also praised his pastoral zeal for the sick, the poor, the bereaved and those in prison.

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