Last week I was feeling particularly discouraged. Selling intimate apparel was never my dream job! As I spoke with customers and cleaned out fitting rooms that had been left a mess, I wondered what a person with a graduate degree, an educator, and author was doing in my position. The Holiday shopping season looming ahead did littel to brighten my mood.
I guess I had forgotten the lessons learned from Brother Lawrence about "Practicing the Presence of God." Reading through some of the reflections in Liturgical Press's new monthly prayer guide, "Give Us This Day," reminded me of the call to be present to God in the ordinary events of our lives.
The October "Blessed Among Us" reflection highlighted a woman I have read, Caryll Houselander, an English laywoman mystic whose vocation was to help others become aware of Christ in our world. She was not the stereotypical mystic. She enjoyed a drinking, battled for twenty years to give up chain-smoking, and was left broken hearted by the man she loved. She never married.
Her mystical visions were of Christ in those around her. In one, she saw him suffering in a Bavarian nun, who being German, suffered discrimination during WWII in England. In another, she saw Christ in each person in a busy railway station. In some he was rejoicing, happy, in others, suffering and in pain. Her first book. This War Is the Passion,"was written in 1941 and presented the sufferings of those traumatized by WWII through the perspective of the passion of Christ.
She was an artist, a wood carver, but later in her life, writing became her primary artistic expression. Read More