from A Life for a Life
Oh, the comfort—
The inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person—
Having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words,
But pouring them all right out,
Just as they are,
Chaff and grain together;
Certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them,
Keep what is worth keeping,
And then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.
Dinah Maria Mulock Craik (1826-1887)
The love of parents is the most important thing that children experience in the womb, and it can overcome the negative effects of many stresses and trauma…”haptonomy”, the science of touch, teaches parents to make loving contact with their unborn child. A mother and father can communicate with a fetus by placing their hands on both sides of the womb. If they send their love especially through the hands on the right side of the womb, the child will begin to move over to the right side and curl up with its neck under those hands. If they then send their love through the hands on the left side of the womb, the child will move to the left side and curl up under those hands. In this way, the patients can carry on a loving dialogue with the child. They can do this beginning when the child is about four and a half months in the womb (or whenever it is large enough for the mother to feel movement) and until about seven months (or whenever it is too large to be able to move freely). If the parents communicate with their child in this way each day at the same time and then miss their “appointment” with the child one day, the child will begin to kick, as if protesting even this momentary loss of loving communication which it has learned to expect. –Healing the Eight Stages of Life.
Time travel prayer.
Lord please go back,
Transgress and transform,
Within eternity return to my creation and growth in the womb,
Within infinity grace a finite point,
Caress and enter my little heart and mind,
Beating anew, beating alive,
Usurp the slightest consternation with your love,
For the glory of God and salvation of souls,
Place one of your hands upon my mother’s belly,
Place your arm around my father’s shoulder,
My birth, a trinity in replication, an image and likeness,
All things created are good,
Heal my memories Lord,
Embolden the imperfect love of my parents with your perfect love,
Heal all things in need of healing,
Original sin divesting,
Satiate the burning thirst at conception,
Our Lady Undoer of Knots wrap your mantle snuggly around my mother,
Drawing her tighter into my father’s love,
The freshness of an infant before birth,
Alive, a life, a celestial creation, a son to my mother and father,
God of order,
God of might,
Omnipotent and omnipresent,
Kiss me upon the lips breathing under water within my mother’s womb,
Heal my memories Lord on into the earliest stage.
Immaculate Conception, before dogma, for the Carmelites shortly after St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, painted by 17th century Spanish artist Diego Velazquez.
We can see the way to cleanness of heart…if we look at the Church’s liturgy, for indeed if its first and supreme purpose is to give worship to God, it has the additional purpose of cleansing the mind, heart, and the whole personality. We should see that its purpose is to cleanse the personality so that then we may be able to offer God a more adequate sharing in the worship of Christ. The liturgy is art; but its essential material is man himself. The various arts of man, all the creatures of the earth, the sun, the moon, and stars are brought into the act of worship. However it is first and foremost, the total man (in Christ) who is self-offered, the total man who is articulated, the total man who is cleansed, who expresses the most powerful manifestation of worship. –Father Gerald Vann ‘The Divine Pity’
Father Gerald Vann
…..
Time’s beating wing subsided, and the winds
Caught up their breathing, and the world’s great pulse
Stayed in mid-throb, and the wild train of life
Reeled by, and left us stranded on a hush.
This moment is a statue unto Love
Carved from a fair white silence.
Lo, He stands
Within us–are we not one now, one, one roof,
His roof, and the partition of weak flesh
Gone down before Him, and no more, for ever?–
Stands like a bird new-lit, and as He lit,
Poised in our quiet being; only, only
Within our shaken hearts the air of passion,
Cleft by His sudden coming, eddies still
And whirs round his enchanted motionlessness.
…..
Francis Thompson
Love is patient and kind;
Love is not jealous or boastful;
Love is not arrogant or rude.
Love does not insist on its own way;
Love is not irritable or resentful;
Love does not rejoice at wrong,
Love rejoices in the right.
Love bears all things,
Love believes all things,
Love hopes all things,
Love endures all things.
Love never ends;
As for prophecies, they will pass away;
As for tongues, they will cease;
As for knowledge, it will pass away.
For our knowledge is imperfect
And our prophecy is imperfect;
But when the perfect comes,
The imperfect will pass away.
When I was a child,
I spoke like a child,
I thought like a child,
I reasoned like a child;
When I became a man,
I gave up childish ways.
For now we see in a mirror dimly,
But then face to face.
Now I know in part;
Then I shall understand fully,
Even as I have been fully understood.
So faith, hope, love abide,
These three!
The greatest of these is love.
There is the sin of ingratitude, and taking other people’s devotion or self-sacrifice for granted as our due. There is a sort of isolation which is reserved gone mad: you may be kindly enough disposed inside yourself, but your manner is such that people hesitate a long time before appealing to you for help, because you give the impression that you will not want to be disturbed or put out. This is akin to the voice of the “incuriosity” of which Saint Thomas treats: and which implies a sort of mental stagnation as far as social life is concerned, a lack of zest and interest which is also a lack of charity and responsibility, and denotes a lost childhood–the soul grown old and stale. You cannot be living in love and piety if nothing outside yourself has interest for you. On the other hand there is the vice of curiosity, which is the wrong sort of desire for information. It may be wrong because it is proud you want to know all about people and things because it feeds your sense of power it may be wrong because it is dissipated, distracting you from more important things or because it is a form of trespassing, that ruthless inquisitiveness to which nothing is sacred–people sometimes need to be reminded that to read letters not addressed to them may well be a grave sin; it may be wrong because it is directed to scandal-mongering and gossip; it will be wrong if in any way it is the expression not of a loving interest in others lives but of an anti-social inability to mind one’s own business. You must preserve or recapture the childlike quality of concern for the family but always distinguish it from the insatiable flutter-pated inquisitiveness which can never bear to be unacquainted with whatever is going on, however unimportant or however private. –Father Gerald Vann ‘The Divine Pity’
Father Gerald Vann
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