Thoughts for Meditation

Gaze of Love

Jesus looks at each one of us with the gaze of love…a love full of compassion and understanding…a love of kindness and great caring…a love of acceptance and respect. This is the gaze we are all asked to share with one another.

Summer Gazing

As I painted these sunflowers with a grasshopper perched on a leaf, I had in mind a wonderful poem by Mary Oliver entitled “Tell Me” from “The Summer Day”. “Tell me”, she asks, “who made the world? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean”. Her poem continues … although she doesn’t know exactly what a prayer is, she does know how to pay attention, how to be idle and be blessed, how to stroll through the fields. In this contemplative setting of gazing at the wonders of summer … flowers, insects, and here on Long Island, seashores … she asks each of us this question: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Yes, our lives are precious, and this summer I invite you to take the time to experience this awareness in the beauty that surrounds us. Have a peace-filed summer, a wild and precious one!

Sr. Mary Anna Euring, OP

Spring Songbirds

Spring! Glorious spring! After a long, cold and dreary winter, once again you come to awaken me to new life and growth. As I meandered outside on this warm spring day… gazed at the red, pink and purple azaleas, breathed-in the fragrance of purple lilacs, touched the soft, delicate unfurling new leaves on the Japanese Maple and listened to the songs of returning birds, these words from Mary Oliver’s poem came to me: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”. Such is the joy and challenge of an Awakening Spring! Afterwards, I was inspired to capture this joy in my Asian Brush Painting entitled “Spring Songbirds”. We are ALL like songbirds! When we give voice to our true nature, it is contagious and others soon give voice as well. May you also be inspired to express your call to a new and deeper life. As St. John Paul II wrote in his “Letter to Artists”: “Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet, as Genesis has it, all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece. This spring, I invite you to be aware of your daily life as a masterpiece in the making!