"YOUR HAIR, YOUR FACE"

What is it
you want to change?
Your hair, your face, your body?
Why?

For God is
in love with all those things
and He might weep
when they are gone.

_________________________________

I was blessed---empowered, encouraged, touched--this morning to read about and from Catherine of Siena, an amazing vessel of God during the transitioning period between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. I only wish I would have known of her when I spent a few days in Siena, Italy many years ago on my 5 months European trek...but I can still feel the lay of the land and spending time in the amazing half shelled Piazza del Campo where so much activity has taken place for centuries and continues to do so.

Catherine reaffirmed my previous blog post that Mark Nepo laid out so well, garnished from all sacred wisdom: that there is deep love, a kind of love at first sight for all things living, when one is fully conscious, fully awakened, having a deep sense of the sacred and divine that is within everything.

Let me share some background information on Catherine, interspersed with her pure poems flowing out of her connection with God.

Blessings and Inspiration,
Ken

(The words below are taken from Daniel Ladinsky's book, "Love Poems from God, Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West", from Penguin Compass books.)
____________________________________

St. Catherine (1347-1380) was said to have been profoundly interested in every human being that ever came before here. She devoted herself to relieving the mental and emotional suffering of the hundreds who sought her out; her words and her touch bestowed a soothing grace. "Strange," she once said, "that so much suffering is caused because of the misunderstanding of God's true nature. God's heart is more gentle than the Virgin's first kiss upon the Christ. And God's forgiveness to all, to any thought or act, is more certain than our own being."
__________________________________

I WON'T TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER

"I won't take no for an answer,"
God began to say
to me

when He opened His arms each night
wanting us to
dance.
______________________________________

Catherine Benincasa was born March 25, 1347, in the Fontebranda district of Siena, Italy. She and her twin sister, who died soon after birth, were two of more than twenty children born to parents who were devout Catholics.
It was a time of class feuds and religious wars as well as the Black Plague and famine in Siena; it was the time of transition from the Middle ages to the Renaissance.

One day when Catherine was six years old, she and her brother were returning from her older sister's house; as they neared the church of the Dominican friars, set upon the beautiful hill of Campporeggi, Catherine looked up above the church and saw in the sunset Jesus and three of his apostles. Jesus smiled at her and raised his hand in a blessing. Catherine became happy beyond any delight she had ever known. She became transfixed by this vision, and it took her brother's tugging at her arm to bring her back into this world. She was transformed by this experience and began devoting her life to finding God through solitude, fasting, and prayer.
_________________________

CONSUMED IN GRACE

I first saw God when I was a child, six years of age.
The cheeks of the sun were pale before Him,
and the earth acted as a shy
girl, like me.

Divine light entered my heart from His love
that did never fully wane,

though indeed, dear, I can understand how a person's
faith can at times flicker,

for what is the mind to do
with something that becomes the mind's ruin:
a God that consumes us
in His grace.

I have seen what you want;
it is there,

A Beloved of infinite
tenderness.

______________________

As she became older, she resisted her parents' pressure to marry, and became a Dominican nun. At twenty-one she returned to her family to begin a life of active service to the infirm and destitute, while maintaining a deep interior life of contemplation. Jesus appeared to her many times, sometimes performing miracles, and nourishing her deep love for Him. She was a diplomat and people from all walks of life sought her counsel.
_______________________________

HIS LIPS UPON THE VEIL

He has never left you.

It is just
that your soul is so vast
that just like

the earth in its innocence,
it may think,

"I do not feel my lover's warmth
against my face right
now."

But look, dear,
is not the sun reaching down its arms
and always holding a continent
in it's light?

God cannot leave us.
It is just that our soul is so vast,

we do not always feel His lips
upon the veil.
_____________________________


Catherine died at the age of thirty-three. She was a rare, fearless human being whose faith in God turned into tangible experiences with the Divine. Although she thought of herself as uneducated, her book, "The Dialogue" and her other writings are highly valued by theologians. She had no official appointment, yet it is clear she served as the Church's conscience. In 1970, Pope Paul VI proclaimed her a "Doctor of the Church."
___________________________________


CONSECRATED

All has been consecrated.
The creatures in the forest know this,

the earth does, the seas do, the clouds know
as does the heart full of
love.

Strange a priest would rob us of this
knowledge

and then empower himself
with the ability

to make holy what
already was.