The Healing Waters

Today is the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes and is also considered World Day of the Sick because the waters at Lourdes are thought to have healing properties. In 1858, the Virgin Mary appeared there to a girl named St. Bernadette, and she desired that a chapel be built there. Due to the apparitions, the spring at Lourdes appeared, and countless people claim that, by visiting Lourdes, they have been healed of their ailments. If you want to know more, click here. 🙂 Anyway, I wrote a sijo to honor this day and Our Lady.

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Once thought to be a poor place, now a source of miracles,
Led to the healing waters, where many have been restored,
Lasting remembrance belongs to Lourdes, Heaven’s Lady, and her Lord.

Favorite Quote from Fulton Sheen

For One-Liner Wednesday, I can’t resist sharing another quotation from the great Archbishop Fulton Sheen with you! This is probably my favorite quote from him, and that’s saying a lot.

But when finally the scrolls of history are complete, down to the last word of time, the saddest line of all will be: “There was no room in the inn.” The inn was the gathering place of public opinion, the focal point of the world’s moods, the rendezvous of the worldly, the rallying place of the popular and the successful. But there’s no room in the place where the world gathers. The stable is a place for outcasts, the ignored and the forgotten.

— from the book The Wisdom of Fulton Sheen, emphasis added

A Special Memorial

Today’s stream-of-consciousness prompt was “me-” either by itself or as the beginning of another word. The first words I thought of were French — mentir [to lie], mensonge [lie] — also the words “mendacity” and “mendacious,” but as my blog is usually truthful to a fault, I did not want to write about those, either! I have a memory from this week 5 years ago of making a Funfetti cake in honor of my patron saint, whose special memorial feast day is today. Her name is Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, and she was a nun who lived and died near the end of the 19th century. She is often known as The Little Flower. 

She died at a mere 24 years of age but is considered a Doctor of the Church because of her teaching of the “Little Way.” I wrote a poem, meritorious or not, inspired by her today:

May the scent of roses guide
Through these darkened paths,
May all friends in Heaven pray
With strong love that lasts,
Send to me a heavenly rose
With aroma sweet,
Gentle guide with me always
Giving peace complete.

Anything Good?

Today is the feast of the apostle Saint Bartholomew / Nathaniel, which inspired me to write this haibun:

I sit crying due to unexplained yet expected emotional pain. It’s not a surprise, but there is little I can do to prepare. The only way out is through. The only way through is to believe that some greater good may, through grace, arise from this half-dead and deadly place. “Can these bones live?”* “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”** Faith gives an unequivocal assent, even if one must wait for it.

 

greater things to see:
angels descending, ascending
as the journey goes

   * Ezekiel 37
   ** John 1:45-51

image found here

Books are Friends

Another quotation from the amazing Archbishop Fulton Sheen for One-Liner Wednesday! 

Books are the most wonderful friends in the world. When you meet them and pick them up, they are always ready to give you a few ideas. When you put them down, they never get mad; when you take them up again, they seem to enrich you all the more.

What not to do

For One-Liner Wednesday, I have a quotation from the great Archbishop Fulton Sheen. This is taken from my daily book of his quotations.

We hate others and call it ‘zeal;’ we flatter people because of what they can do for us, and call it ‘love;” we lie to them, and call it ‘tact.’

Help us to not be like this but to be honest and truly loving, focusing on what we can give and not what we can get. 

Influencers

Another Tuesday evening is here, so here is another Sijo for Ronovan Writes’s challenge! This week’s theme is “pride.” I thought of being proud of my accomplishments in high school, which is a legitimate thing to be proud of, yet of how little importance it is now, even just a handful of years later in my life, let alone in the light of eternity. Then I kept thinking and wrote this:

"Non serviam," Lucifer said in pride, and so he fell,
While in humility Mary gladly gave her life to God:
Which one is truly happier, living without any regrets?

 

I am happy to have the Virgin Mary as one of my primary influences and inspirations. It’s because of her and the respect that the Catholic Church gives her that I started to be not only accepting but happy to be a woman. The Catholic Church does NOT worship her, but we give her the utmost respect as the Mother of God, Jesus Christ.

 

 

Saint Maria Goretti

So, I wrote this yesterday and wasn’t going to share, but then I just couldn’t handle how much this saint’s day triggered me yesterday (I had a hard time with it last year, too, and this day last year). Thankfully, today’s not as bad as I thought it would be. Yesterday was much worse. Thank God I could go to work and get out of my own head yesterday. A reverse cherita.

I love God and love my Church, and Maria did show a great example of forgiveness, but she bothers me. A lot.

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Is safeguarding "purity" so important
That a woman should prefer to be 
Dead, rather than a rape victim?

God forgive my impiety I'm
Upset that that's considered saintly.

If Maria forgave Alessandro,* she'd forgive me.

       *her attacker

Quirky Man

It’s Flashback Friday! It also happens to be the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the Catholic Church. 🙂 Usually this date, June 24th, celebrates the birth of St. John the Baptist, so that’s what this poem, written exactly 3 years ago, is about. It’s in a form called a Rhyming Wave and is kind of funny. 🙂

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Saint John the Baptist was a quirky man,
A quirky, quirky, quirky man,
He acted strongly in God’s plan,
He acted zealously.

He said, “Greater comes after me,
Comes after, after, after me,”
He dined on locusts with honey,
He dined in wilderness.

John the Baptist was a quirky man,
He dined in wilderness.

Our Lady

Loss is part of your sorrow,
And you know that God has
Done marvels, Magnificat anima mea
You proclaim; may I echo.

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I’m not sure exactly what prompted this but had wanted to write this acrostic for a few days and finally filled it in today.