Our Saint of the Day reintroduced the Rule of St. Clare in the 17 monasteries. ✝️
February 7, 2025
Dear John,
Today’s Minute Mediation from Maureen O’Brien features poetic writing and symbolic imagery. I invite you to read it slowly, returning again and again to your breath, visualizing the images she references. Then dare read it again, even more slowly, countering our linear tendency to "check it off" or “get it done,” and allow your own imagination to play and dance with the symbols. Maybe even read the passage a third time, even more slowly. What arises within your own heart or spiritual imagination? I leave you with this quote from T.S. Eliot and invite you to take it with you into your weekend, “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”
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Colette did not seek the limelight, but in doing God’s will she certainly attracted a lot of attention. Colette was born in Corbie, France. At 21, she began to follow the Third Order Rule and became an anchoress, a woman walled into a room whose only opening was a window into a church.
After four years of prayer and penance in this cell, she left it. With the approval and encouragement of the pope, she joined the Poor Clares and reintroduced the primitive Rule of St. Clare in the 17 monasteries she established. Her sisters were known for their poverty—they rejected any fixed income—and for their perpetual fast. Colette’s reform movement spread to other countries and is still thriving today. Colette was canonized in 1807. Her liturgical feast is celebrated on March 6.
Reflection
Colette began her reform during the time of the Great Western Schism (1378-1417) when three men claimed to be pope and thus divided Western Christianity. The 15th century in general was a very difficult one for the Western Church. Abuses long neglected cost the Church dearly in the following century. Colette’s reform indicated the entire Church’s need to follow Christ more closely.
We return over and over to the same place, a connection to the unswerving, the unchanging: God. There is no beginning and no end. My idea of time may be linear like the train tracks; my life had its beginning, photographed at the sea by my mother when I was a small girl, and now my mother’s life is beginning its end. But God is our circle in the Sunday morning sky, with clouds so pale they have no edges.
I longed for Christ in the Eucharist, but first, I had found his beauty in the sunrise through a winter Ferris wheel, gray spikes and spokes radiating out from the center.
On my walk today, I saw a young woman training for a marathon. Her husband rode his bike beside her, gently encouraging her with his words as they went. He reminded me that Jesus always walks alongside us, encouraging, strengthening, and cheering us on our paths.
Pray
Holy Spirit, Thank you for walking beside me and coaching me on the marathon of my life, helping me go farther than I can on my own. Thank you for whispering in my heart the support I need to avoid temptation and be the person you designed me to be. I want to say, as St. Paul did: “I have competed well; I have finished the race; I have kept the faith” (2 Tim 4:7).
Act
Spend a few minutes meditating on running. Imagine the wind in your hair, your arms pumping, and your feet touching down heel to toe. Then, picture Jesus beside you, smiling, encouraging, and loving you.
Today's Pause+Pray was written by Colleen Arnold, MD. Learn more here!
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