Weekly Word

For over twenty years, Mary Lou Kownacki, OSB, edited and compiled the weekly Vision and Viewpoint newsletter, as part of her ministry as director of Benetvision.

Holiness is not about hiding from the world in the depth of our rituals or in the distance from the questions of the time.

Christmas is a strange season. When you’re a child, it is a season of presents. When you’re young, it’s a season of parties.

We spend so much of our lives pretending to be God, it is often difficult to remember that we aren’t.

Life is not meant to be a burden. Life is not a problem to be solved. It is a blessing to be celebrated.

You can’t be in a monastery very long before you realize that there is always someone there besides the members of the community.

Somewhere along the line, the woman I once adored left me.

Abba Sisoes says: “Seek God, not where God lives.”

Abba Sisoes says: “Seek God, not where God lives.”
 
It is one thing to make a pilgrimage to the desert to find God. It is entirely another to be open to finding God where we are.

“I looked in temples, churches and mosques, but I found the Divine within my heart,” the Sufi poet Rumi writes. I know the truth of that awareness.

Life, we come to believe, is a straitjacket. As the years go by, we learn to think thoughts someone else produced. We do the things someone else tells us are good for us.