“We often struggle with the question of our own life:does it have a purpose? Is there meaning to it? All through our life Christ is calling us. God works through our natural faculties and circumstances of life. If our course of life is to be changed, it must be from within.”-John Henry Newman
“The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way — an honorable way — in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “‘The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory’.”
-Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Into the woods
trees, strong, young and old
trees breaking, leaning to another
branches gathered to grace a curve
under a tree I bow to pass
or skirt around an uprooted one
Into the woods
a liminal space
to rest and pray
a contemplative mind to see
a fallen tree gives life
new saplings rising
I hear an echo, a voice:
“your life is not about you
but about God,
about the people you have to love,
about the people you have to serve”
-hidden spring.
photos: Windmill Trail, one of the trails on the grounds at San Damiano Retreat House, Danville,CA
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