Easter Exultet

Shake out your qualms. 

Shake up your dreams. 

Deepen your roots. 

Extend your branches. 

Trust deep water 

and head for the open, 

even if your vision 

shipwrecks you.

Quit your addiction 

to sneer and complain. 

Open a lookout. 

Dance on a brink. 

Run with your wildfire. 

You are closer to glory 

leaping an abyss

than upholstering a rut. 

Not dawdling. 

Not doubting. 

Intrepid all the way 

Walk toward clarity. 

At every crossroad 

Be prepared 

to bump into wonder. 

Only love prevails. 

En route to disaster 

insist on canticles. 

Lift your ineffable 

out of the mundane. 

Nothing perishes; 

nothing survives; 

everything transforms! 

Honeymoon with Big Joy! 

-- James Broughton

Service Was Joy

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. 

I awoke and saw that life was service. 

I acted and behold, service was joy.

--Rabindranath Tagore

[Photo of Interact Club service project]

On the Necessity of Snow Angels for the Well-Being of the World

Wherever there is snow, I go, 

making angels along the way. 

Luckily angels have no gender 

and are easier to make 

than you might think. 

 

All you have to do is let go, 

fall on your back, 

look up at the sky as if in prayer. 

Move your arms like wings. 

Move your legs to make a robe. 

Rise carefully so as to do no harm, 

and walk away. 

 

All the angels along the path behind you 

will sparkle in sunlight, gleam under the stars. 

In spring the angels will be invisible 

but really they are still there, 

their outlines remain on the earth 

where you put them, waiting 

for you and the snow to return. 

 

Keep walking, 

towards the next beautiful thing 

you will do. 

-- Grace Butcher

The Voice of Your Own Soul

When you take the time to draw on your listening-imagination, you will begin to hear this gentle voice at the heart of your life. It is deeper and surer than all the other voices of disappointment, unease, self-criticism and bleakness. All holiness is about learning to hear the voice of your own soul. It is always there and the more deeply you learn to listen, the greater surprises and discoveries that will unfold. To enter into the gentleness of your own soul changes the tone and quality of your life. Your life is no longer consumed by hunger for the next event, experience or achievement. You learn to come down from the treadmill and walk on the earth. You gain a new respect for yourself and others and you learn to see how wonderfully precious this one life is. You begin to see through the enchanting veils of illusion that you had taken for reality. You no longer squander yourself on things and situations that deplete your essence. You know now that your true source is not outside you. Your soul is your true source and a new energy and passion awakens in you.

--John O'Donohue

[Photo from the monastery of Clonmacnoise in County Offaly, Ireland]

Do Not be Dismayed

Do not be dismayed by the
brokenness of the world.
All things break,
and all things can be mended.
Not with time, as they say,
but with intention.
So go. Love intentionally,
extravagantly, unconditionally.
The broken world waits in darkness
for the light that is you.

-– L.R. Knost

No Feeling is Final

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

--Rainer Maria Rilke

[Photo from Clifden, Ireland]

The Kingdom of Memory

As we journey onwards in life, more and more spaces within us fill with absence. We begin to have more and more friends among the dead. Every person suffers the absence of their past. It is utterly astonishing how the force and fiber of each day unravel into the vacant air of yesterday. You look behind you and you see nothing of your days here. Our vanished days increase our experience of absence. Yet our past does not deconstruct as if it never was. Memory is the place where our vanished days secretly gather. Memory rescues experience from total disappearance. The kingdom of memory is full of the ruins of presence. It is astonishing how faithful experience actually is; how it never vanishes completely. Experience leaves deep traces in us. It is surprising that years after something has happened to you the needle of thought can hit some groove in the mind and the music of a long vanished event can rise in your soul as fresh and vital as the evening it happened.

--John O'Donohue