Discover Hope With Us The Color and Melody of Prayer

Discover Hope With Us The Color and Melody of Prayer

Hello MICHELE KEARNEY,

The other day I was meditating on the Gospel of the Transfiguration, that moment of deep prayer and presence, mystery and clarity, when the Lord appeared in his humanity radiant with the glory of his divinity. It made me think this is the way life is for a Christian. What a blessing that we have the grace to know it! Fragile, weak, simple, plain vessels that we are in our humanity, yet, because of the glory and mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, we are radiant with the mystery of being sons and daughters of God, claimed by the Father as his own, streaming with the confident hope that we will never be alone, that the Creator of us all yet even now holds us in his hands and will never let us go because we are his.  Everything in us, around us, and in the world at large is woven into the sacred history of how Jesus has saved us and has swooped us up, as it were, to take us with him, in him, in his great return to the Father. Everything is, thus, in a mysterious way, a window to the sacred. Make sure you read Jeannettes' article below as she makes this more concrete for us all. We are excited about the number of people who signed up to walk this journey with us during Lent in a prayerful discussion of the book Pray to Your Father in Secret. But we know there are many more people who'd like to take advantage of the Lenten weeks to discover in a new way the power and beauty of prayer in their own lives. So we thought to offer a version of the Book Club that was blog based. You can still get the book at a discount. We'll notify you by email when we place information on a blog post for you each week, and we'll share with you the weekly video meditation. You're welcome to participate in commenting and you're just as welcome to follow along in a more "quiet contemplative participation" without commenting or print it out and share it with a friend. If this sounds like something you'd like, just click here to find out more about it. And for all of us readers at Discover Hope With Us, you are in our prayers! Sr. Kathryn J Hermes, FSP

Anything that has been steeped in prayer takes on an aspect that wasn’t there before. Churches, for example, are just buildings… until the liturgy, music, prayer and people inhabit the space—and sanctify it. Rosary beads are pretty things until they have been blessed and have slipped through the fingers of the person praying them. Objects, we might say, are transformed through prayer. And not just objects. Everyone’s been transported through beautiful music, but even the most exquisite of secular music is missing something that’s present in sacred music. When what we do is an offering to God, no matter what it is, the thing or activity is transformed. That is certainly true of the illuminated texts that have survived from the era of their creation up to our time. The monks—and, sometimes, nuns—who spent their lives bent over these manuscripts were not only painters, they were people of prayer, and that prayer was infused into the work that they did. One of the criticisms leveled at the medieval Church was that there was too much richness on the altar and not enough in the lives of the faithful. How can there be gold chalices when there are people without enough to eat? Illuminated manuscripts were expensive on every level: they required the skins of many animals, they employed paints that were difficult to source, they used real gold and silver in their embellishment, and they obliged people to give their lives to create them. Could those resources have been better spent? Yet an offering to God must be made with all the resources that one has. Should we not give our very best to the proclamation of God’s Word and the celebration of his Eucharist? The prayer that infused these manuscripts is still alive for us today, and that gold embellishment was, and is, a right and just offering to God. Save 20% on Scripture Illuminated Coloring Book for Prayer and Meditation Illuminated manuscripts were not the only enduring gift we have from the faith of the Middle Ages. The period opened with Gregorian chant, possibly the most spiritually moving and profound music in Western culture. Guillaume de Machaut created a polyphonic setting to the Ordinary of the Mass that paved the way for the flowering of choral music in the fourteenth century. The Notre Dame School of polyphony soared along with the cathedrals it inhabited. Like art, music that is dedicated to God is music that is more than simply the sum of its notes or the smoothness of its performance; quite simply, it becomes prayer.... Continue Reading ›

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