BEAUTY, FRIENDSHIP, & LOSS

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The whole world is either symbolic (images & ideas that are throwing life together) or diabolic (pulling life apart). 

It is the color of what we trust most, love most, focus our gaze on most that dyes our soul. The dye of our soul colors our world.

If you could be one of the two, what would you rather be at the end of your life: proud of what you've done or grateful for what you have been given?

Reality is a cosmic drama of divine revelation and human response. 

We need to accept ourselves as revelations of God to us. 

All of reality is either a temple or a tomb.

I know the music I like.
You like the music you know.

The enjoyment of every created good is an enjoyment of heaven.

God is always speaking to us.
Reality is sacred, always speaking to us.

If you receive something as a gift, you trust and hope and live in the one who gave it to you.

Joy is the response to the possession of the good.

The Bible gives us a reason to do things with a creative endeavor because all these things are sacred.

Comments from Fr. Vince, S.J. at a retreat at Sacred Heart Jesuit Retreat Home.

YOUR PARISH IS A RELATIONAL MICROCOSM

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Your parish is a relational microcosm that helps bring many cause-and-effect relationships back together again. Being in collaborative relationships in real life where you live, work and play awakens you to the effects of your actions both on people and on the place itself.

It creates a context where your church can see whether its faith is more than just talk. The local place becomes the testing ground, revealing whether you have learned to love each other and the larger community around you. In essence, the parish is a dare to your faith.

Jason Janz

LINNEA GABRIELLA SPRANSY

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Artist Statement:

Using strict rules, I construct images on the belief that limits have an eerie capacity to generate surprise … even freedom. Chaos and emergent system theory tell us that these limits need not be elaborate, or even obviously visible; in fact, it is often the most humble and self-evident limits, which, in time, behave in the most sophisticated ways. They form bizarre chandeliers of crystal, guide the catacomb construction of ant colonies, the spread of cities, and the swoop of flocks. All, often, with eerie similarity. Awareness of these limits does not guarantee predictive power, or the ennui of omniscience.

This is good, and fascinating.

And it is through this means that I make my work: every piece is the manifestation of a predetermined scheme – a system of small limits with a clear beginning and end. Using abstract symbol (what I call ‘modules’, much like number and letter forms) in a mode of familiar, naturalistic construction, these pieces of visual script are allowed to accrue and to display their peculiar surprises. In this way, an unlikely path of discovery is opened in the midst of certainty- though every step is predetermined and the end known from the beginning, the final form remains enigmatic. Though I have accumulated an extensive archive of ‘research drawings’, end results are stubbornly, delightfully immune to absolute prediction.

Add to these systems environmental pressures (in this case, cataclysmic spills of paint flung over fully realized systems) and the flexibility and regenerative capacity of a given set of rules is tested even further. The system must then respond and rebuild using fragments of surviving information. Images generated this way hover near familiarity but are unable to declare themselves. They occupy both the micro and macroscopic view. They are both geologically slow and disastrously swift.

Working this way, I have become convinced that intelligence can be essentially understood as the ability to create or recognize pattern; perhaps patterns themselves are a form of intelligence – intelligence capable of surprise, without breaking a single rule. Which, in the end, is a satisfying contradiction, an energetic tension of philosophical forces hospitable to constrained freedom and consistent astonishment.

THREE SENTENCES

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Can you state what your business does in one sentence? 
Can you describe how your business does what you do in a sentence? 
Can you say why your company exists in a single sentence? 

Articulating these three sentences can alter your company in remarkable ways. Knowing what you do is one thing. Being able to say it succinctly is another. Knowing how you do it and being able to state it clearly are often elusive. Knowing why you do it and being able to tell your employees and your customers will set you apart. 

To begin, start with a three-minute exercise: 
1. Take one minute to write down what your company does in one sentence. Don’t over think it. Don’t worry about the wording.
2. Take the second minute to write down how you do it in one sentence. Again, no over-thinking. 
3. Take the third minute and write down why you think your business exists. If you don’t know why it exists, write down why you work there. 

The benefits of this work is simple: congruence. A business that is in alignment has a more effective and committed workforce; it has a more loyal customer base. Congruence is a key ingredient to building a business with thriving culture.  

“People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it.”  Simon Sinek

THE CHURCH

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The visible church is all the people who get together from time to time in God's name. Anybody can find out who they are by going to church to look.

The invisible church is all the people God uses for his hands and feet in this world. Nobody can find out who they are except God.

Think of them as two circles. The optimist says they are concentric. The cynic says they don't even touch. The realist says they occasionally overlap.

Frederick Buechner

FOR THE DYING

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May death come gently toward you,
Leaving you time to make your way
Through the cold embrace of fear
To the place of inner tranquillity.

May death arrive only after a long life
To find you at home among your own
With every comfort and care you require.

May your leave-taking be gracious,
Enabling you to hold dignity
Through awkwardness and illness.

May you see the reflection
Of your life's kindness and beauty
In all the tears that fall for you.

As your eyes focus on each face,
May your soul take its imprint,
Drawing each image within
As companions for the journey.

May you find for each one you love
A different locket of jeweled words
To be worn around the heart
To warm your absence.

May someone who knows and loves
The complex village of your heart
Be there to echo you back to yourself
And create a sure word-raft
To carry you to the further shore.

May your spirit feel
The surge of true delight
When the veil of the visible
Is raised, and you glimpse again
The living faces
Of departed family and friends.

May there be some beautiful surprise
Waiting for you inside death,
Something you never knew or felt,
Which with one simple touch,

Absolves you of all loneliness and loss,
As you quicken within the embrace
For which your soul was eternally made.

May your heart be speechless
At the sight of the truth
Of all belief had hoped,
Your heart breathless
In the light and lightness
Where each and everything
Is at last its true self

Within that serene belonging
That dwells beside us
On the other side
Of what we see.

John O’Donohue

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO SIT OUTSIDE IN THE DARK

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You do not have to do these things; not at all. God does not, I regret to report, give a hoot. You do not have to do these things - unless you want to know God. They work on you, not on him. You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require it nor demand it.

Annie Dillard

GOD'S PRESENCE | A CANDLE

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A friend is in an Ignatian prayer group. When they first gathered for prayer they lit a candle. They then gave individual candles to each member of the group with simple instructions.

”Light this candle anytime you're aware of God's presence.”
“Light this candle anytime you need to be reminded of God's presence.'“

For my friend, it has been a simple, helpful, and beautiful practice. He is on his fourth candle.

Whether we feel it or not, trust it or not, God is as close to us as the air is to the flame.
A candle. A tangible practice of God’s presence.

THE CALLING VOICE

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The voice we should listen to most as we choose a vocation is the voice that we might think we should listen to least, and that's the voice of our own gladness.

What can we do that makes us the gladdest, what can we do that leaves us with the strongest sense of sailing true north and of peace, which is much of what gladness is?

Is it making things with our hands out of wood or stone or paint or canvas? Or is it making something we hope like truth out of words? Or is it making people laugh or weep in a way that cleanses their spirit?

I believe that if it is a thing that makes us truly glad, then it is a good thing and it is our thing and it is the calling voice that we were made to answer with our lives.

Frederick Buechner