The Daily Life

"We have been loved to life by God." 

Sister Joan Chittister, The Rule of Benedict  

      

  

What is your calling this year?  I dedicate this year to learning generosity. I believe generosity and mindfulness go hand in hand. Both require a letting go of our perceived notions about how our lives should be as we learn to respond to others. Both are gates into life as it is. I also believe that in the coming days, we as members of this society will need to pay close attention to who and what is needing our generosity. I have been thinking about Dorothy Day lately. This morning I reached for her book,Meditations, published in 1970. That is the year I graduated from high school. To say that I was focused on other matters then is definitely an understatement. 

   

"I know that what I write will be tinged with all the daily doings, with myself, my child, my study, as well as with God. God enters into them all. He is inseparable from them. I think of Him as I wake and I think of Teresa's [her daughter] daily doings. Perhaps it is that I have a wandering mind, and if my daily written meditations are of the people about me, of what is going on - then it must be so. It is apart of every meditation to apply the virtue, the mystery, to the daily life we lead." *  

 

Dorothy Day became a Benedictine Oblate in 1955.    

 

Wishing you all a year of deepening humor, wisdom, service, rest, and joy.  

 

 

   

  

*Meditations, Dorothy Day, Selected and arranged by Stanley Vishnewski, Paulist Press, New York, 1970, page 6.