The Stained Glass Buffalo: Modern Labyrinth

27 July 2008

Modern Labyrinth

(A newly acquired piece at Buffalo's Albright Knox Art Gallery. The bar in the middle of it moves slowly in the circle, creating the grooves at one end and erasing them at the other, continuously. See a quick video clip of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjeGQXdt6bI) h/t BDP

Prayerfulness of heart has much to do with finding the Center then living out of that Center in everyday centeredness. Space and time for God are necessary for that centeredness that becomes habitual - the very baseline of one's personal melody in the Spirit.

I once ventured to ask a markedly prayerful married woman how she prayed. She gave a surprising answer: I just putter. She worked and accomplished tasks, but with a free interior heart - free for God, free for holy musings, and free for praying for others.

Puttering is rather right-brained; it is not highly focused, not agenda-oriented, and not a charge up a mountain. Artists, poets, writers - creative and spiritual people - need non-agenda time in which to putter and live in 'interior space' where inspiration can happen. They need to cultivate the vessel of the heart: open, empty, and ready for inspiration - gift of the Spirit.

Sr. Donald Corcoran, OSB Cam.
The Privilege of Love: Camaldolese Benedictine Spirituality

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It is Jesus

“It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.

It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”
--Pope John Paul II

Carlo Carretto:

How much I must criticize you, my church, and yet how much I love you! You have made me suffer more than anyone and yet I owe more to you than to anyone. I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence. You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness. Never in this world have I seen anything more compromised, more false, yet never have I touched anything more pure, more generous or more beautiful. Countless times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face - and yet, every night, I have prayed that I might die in your sure arms! No, I cannot be free of you, for I am one with you, even if not completely you. Then too - where would I go? To build another church? But I could not build one without the same defects, for they are my defects. And again, if I were to build another church, it would be my church, not Christ's church. No, I am old enough, I know better.