E&W 6-16-13

Sacred Story

Encouragements & Wisdom: June 16, 2013

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Encouragements and Wisdom: June 16, 2013 (PDF).

E & W reflections are additional helps for your Sacred Story prayer journey. Reflect on them at the beginning of the week or outside of your fifteen-minute prayer windows.

Eternity

Sacred Story prayer calls our attention daily to ETERNITY. Doing so makes us aware of what is truly valuable in life. Over the next five weeks, we will pause briefly and notice some of these important things. This week, we realize that focusing on ETERNITY helps us realize this life is transient. With our first-ever Pope Francis, we are reminded that St. Francis of Assisi regularly prayed to God in the presence of a skull. By doing so he daily recalled that he was dust and to dust he would return. St. Ignatius said in the Constitutions:

“For our profession requires that we be prepared and very much ready for whatever is enjoined upon us in our Lord and at whatsoever time, without asking for or expecting any reward in this present and transitory life, but hoping always for that life which lasts for eternity, through God’s supreme mercy.”
 

When we recall our mortality in contemplation of ETERNITY, we keep our final destination clearly in view: God, who is our source and our ETERNITY.
Lord Jesus, help us to daily remember that we have been created from the dust, and to dust we shall return Yet we do not despair, because You are our hope and our ETERNITY.

May we have life’s true focus restored to our vision of reality so that
in all our thoughts and words and deeds, we will see Christ who is our
Creation, Presence, Memory, Mercy and Eternity.

I acknowledged my sin to you,
my guilt I covered not.
I said, “I confess my faults to the LORD,”
and you took away the guilt of my sin.
You are my shelter; from distress you will preserve me;
with glad cries of freedom you will ring me round.

(Psalm 32: 5, 7)

https://sacredstory.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/st-francis-zurbaran.jpg

St. Francis of Assisi by Francisco Zurbaran