The Way to Emmaus

 

The Way to Emmaus

Susan Heffron Hajec 3-31-18

How many times, Lord
have I walked
the road to Emmaus
like your disciples?
Distraught over what
has happened.
Afraid of what lies
before me.
Confused that things
didn’t work out
as I planned.

Many times, I
must confess,
many times.
How can I so
easily forget
it is you, yourself
who told me—
“Behold, I Am
with you always.”

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Right Now Normal is Abnormal

 

Today is a special day in Spirituality. No matter what I’ve claimed and left behind in the traditions of Catholicism today IS Palm Sunday. I am in a dress with makeup on and I will bake something special. I am playing old CDs with the musical doxology and other songs of a spirritual nature and I will create here at home and the nearby outdoors for I am grateful for the gifts of faith and family freely given to me.

Today also begins what the scientists and CDC is also the beginning of two of the hardest weeks of sickness and death due to the pandemic virus COVID-19 attacking the world, and has been focused on the United States of America for the past four weeks, having arrived here earlier than that.

Healthcare in NYC, the epicenter, of the disease in America, is scrambling to provide adequate hospital space and the necessary PPE Personal Protection Equipment to the growing need. Healthcare professionals are coming in from other states to help the overburdened system. Ventilators are in such high demand and number needed so high, they are in a race to get one before a patient dies from the respiratory virus that shuts down the lungs.

And I know I shall rise and persist upon my own path of life. They say we have an unknown future. But we have always had an unknown future as those so fully know when an instant tragedy bested them. What we have is now and our actions and thoughts in this day.

I don’t know. And becoming friends with “I don’t know” is grace, itself. This is the second set of words that confirm me today. The first was another writer/artist speaking and she brought a quote in that said, “You can’t make the abnormal, normal. It is NOT normal.” I think therein, I give up the fight. I do not try to trick myself by doing “what is normal” to do. What I do is what rings true for me within this abnormal time. My interior world feels fairly normal. But as my gaze and my hearing focuses in on the outside world-wide — it is anything but normal. And that is what it is.

I do not know the future, but then I never have. A normal future is palatable. An unknown future leaves so many questions in its wake. Most of us try for the most normal we can manage for this abnormal time of Covid–19. We are plagued with the big question— how long? Someone tell us please when we can return to normal

With a return to normal, will survivors (because that is what we all are now) go back to the jobs they had? Will they, once again, work from an office rather than home? Will small businesses be there for the employees to return to? Will the economic structure hold for ourselves and our families? Will we bring the good, bad, and ugly back with us in our ways of life, or has this forced “time-out” reshape us in ways that we want to continue with and shed other stuff we would see as of no value?

This all remains to be seen. But for today, Palm Sunday, I am raised up, in the spirit of Resurrection, because others have reached through “social distancing” and touched me with their normal thoughts and actions. And for me, today, that is enough. It is normal.

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Angels in the Doorway Again

Hark! The herald angels sing….Glory be…. The Christmas hymns sing of them, the Christmas stories have many mentions of them. I believe in my guardian angel and so many others who attend to us, help us and guide us. I have an angel story that happened in our home during one of Tom’s many surgery recoveries. I reprint it here for angels know no season. They are present when needed.

Reprint of Napkinwriter blog:

I Have Something to Tell You

This happened in the early morning hours of Friday, Feb. 22, 2013

“I have something to tell you, stay there a minute.” This is what Tom said to me this morning when he got up. I was sitting in my “quiet chair” with early morning prayer and meditation. I stayed where I was.

He returned and sat down in his lounger chair and told me the following:

“Last night I got up around 2:00 o’clock AM. As I turned to come around the bed to head into the bathroom, I noticed a bright light near the door of the bedroom. I turned to look at it and I saw a white form just leaving the room. I only saw the back of her. My first thought was, angel.
I walked to the doorway and looked down the hallway that opens to the kitchen area. I saw two of these white forms standing and conversing with one another. They had white/tannish flowing garments. I could not see where they ended at the floor. I watched them. I could not hear them. I felt very peaceful.

I had to go to the bathroom so I did and when I returned, they were not there. I still felt the peace and returned to bed and went back to sleep.”

Tom is healing from the first of three scheduled skin cancer surgeries. I had given him Reiki healing/love energies as he fell asleep last night. The heat coming from his body was quite intense as I held my hands softly above his head and drew the Reiki healing symbols onto him. He fell asleep quite easily and was not in pain.

My guidance tells me Tom saw his healers. He said he knew them to be feminine, but doesn’t know how he knew. He has Archangel Raphael, the healing angel Icon above his workspace since his back surgery a couple years ago, when the green Raphael Energy flooded him with an instant turn-around from a crisis situation in the hospital.

So I have been conversing with my angel guides on a regular basis now for a couple of years. I write what I hear as my guidance in my journals. I sense their loving and guiding presence around and within me. And when I say “they” and “their” I mean only ONE — for that is all there is, ONE. In fact, the name I’ve been given to converse with is…..WHO — Whole and Holy One.
This year, I have opened to not only hearing and writing and sensing my guide, but I have told my guide I Am ready to see it.

And WHO sees his guide(s)? Tom, of course. He has that type of accepting spirit. I read, and meditate and think, and “do”, all of which has some merit. But I know that I need more of a “Mary” consciousness than a busy “Martha” (but bless her abundantly for I love her biblical activity and understand where she’s coming from). At least my hallway was neat for the angels to converse in!

Then I remember an angel correspondence I wrote down and posted in Napkinwriter and went back to look for it. This was posted one and one-half years before last night’s experience.
I am glad with joy! In the year of 2013- My Intention Mandala Year of Joy and Fun!

Angels in a Doorway

August 25, 2011 by Napkinwriter

A Message from the Angels
By Susan H. Hajec
Dedicated to Margo & Janet

In an open doorway, there is a space.
It is the space between
where you are
and where
you are going.

Pay attention to what comes to you
when you open this door
with the space between
you
and your future.

We are in that space
as your guides
and as your direction.
We are your angels.

So there is no need to fear
when you make your choices
from the love and light
that are in this doorway.

We are willing to pull you
or push you through the appearance
of obstacles or a harsh wind.

In this doorway you can create
a new now
filled with what is attracting you.
It takes only your decision.

There is no need
to hurry, dear one,
no need to rush.

Just be in the quiet
in the space
in the open door

between you
and your future.
We are here!
And in a millisecond
of the time it takes you to decide,
we will make it happen!

Again, do not be afraid.
It feels like you are lost
but you are not.
You are just in the space

in the open door
immersed in possibility and potential.

When what you have enjoyed
has come to an end,
it is your turn

to choose once again
what comes next
in the open door
where you can create
and just be.

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A Long Day

 

“It’s been a long day for you,” the angel said to me. It was only 7:45pm but this angel knew the length of my day was not truly measured in the minutes on the clock. “Yes,” I agreed. “And it is the third long day this week with two more likely ahead of me.”

He listened quietly and nodded his head. This angel was the driver of the hospital shuttle bus that had picked me up to drive me across the street to the parking garage I left at 8:30 am this morning. I was his sole rider going back, just as I was the only one on the morning shuttle, most unusual.

This ride was very short and I was burdened down with two carry bags and my purse. In the course of this short ride, he learned today was my 54th wedding anniversary date, and my husband lay in the hospital, possibly awaiting the insertion of a pacemaker for his tired, slow beating heart. The conversation dribbled on between the two of us – me telling him we came to Lexington the day after we were married for Tom had gotten his first job out of college at the IBM Corporation.

“Oh,” he said. “I wished I would have gone with them. I had a chance, but I stayed in printing a long time.” The only trouble is, he lamented, was that the pay was good, but there was no retirement for him at the end.

Well, I told him, I worked in public relations so I had many interactions with printers.  Our lives took many turns after Tom left IBM, and with Tom’s health challenges and our own financial limitations I hoped God had me somewhere in the Big Picture.

“Oh, that’s certain. You believe he does.”  Yes, I said, I do.

So much in such a short trip. An old man still making his way on earth. Me, still hanging with it. I know I thanked him and told him he was kind as I stepped down the loading ramp of the shuttle.

Afterward at home, I was, sitting tired in my lounge chair, heading for bed, I thought about him again. Either as man or angel, he is why I don’t believe what they are telling us about living in a hateful, spiteful world. I, myself, keep bumping up against kind and thoughtful people like this one encounter with a perfect stranger.

I wished I had said to him, “You are doing a very important job now. Thank you.”

 

 

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After the Fact

AP photo credits

 

 

I don’t seem to write of tragic happenings at the time they occur. Words and feelings bulk up inside of me for a time before they are released upon the paper or the computer file.

April 15 is always a day that refers to United States Tax Day and whether or not you have filed on time. April 15, 2019 now lives in infamy as the Notre Dame Cathedral burned as we all watched via computer, or television, or hand-held device, or in person, standing on the streets and bridges of the Seine river in Paris.

 

 

GOD BLESS the heroic firefighters. At 11:23pm when the fire chief announced the rest of the structure of fire-stricken Notre Dame Cathedral was saved, it was within 30 minutes of total collapse. The roof’s irreplaceable ancient wooden beams cut from trees that were alive a millennium ago were gone, The iconic spire fell at 7:40. As darkness poured over the city, 20 firefighters at great risk to their own lives climbed into the two towers to fight the fire from the inside out. By 9:49 pm, fire officials didn’t know if their best would be good enough. But it was. And the world is grateful to them for what they saved. I think of my cousin firefighter Theresa Hajec in Fenton Michigan and say special prayers for her and her fire crew for God’s love and safety to surround them on their daily job.

 

 

It is Holy Week on the Church calendar. People around the world are turned inward in reflection upon what meaning and purpose their practice of Christianity holds in their lives. It is the season of Resurrection and Mary is the way through which all graces flow.

A silence overtakes us now, just as it did for the apostles immediately following Christ’s crucifixion What stood in our midst is no longer there and we grieve the hole it leaves in our hearts and in our lives for it’s pure magnificence touched even ones who could not be in it’s presence.

But in the air is felt a strong current of Resurrection. Yes, there is faith and beyond that a whole certainty that Notre Dame shall rise again. Somehow providing us with a noble link to the past, a firm acceptance of the present, and a way shower to future times.

Ave Maria. Gratia plena. Ora pro nobis.

 

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Lent 2019

Today, I didn’t have my napkin in my purse to write upon, when I was at the 8 am children’s Mass on Ash Wednesday at Christ the King Cathedral. So many blessings entered my soul from the readings, to the music, to the homily and the children filling most of the cathedral. “Bless the Lord, Oh my soul.”

And of course, I can’t remember most of what I wanted to. I need napkins more than ever these days to remember, oh my remember. I know the first message I soaked up like a sponge was “Return to me with all your heart.” It is such a blessing to be involved in anything in our life where we are in it whole-heartedly.  Another scripture at another time warns us to be a full Yes or a No — anything in between  is not “of the Spirit.”

I am so grateful to be living whole-hearted in each day, maybe with a few aches and pains, various trials here and there, some inconveniences, but in the over-all appraisal, I feel grateful and whole hearted for the life I have.

Today, I share my SoulCollage image I made for Lent maybe over five years ago. I add to it the magnificent blog post of Jan Richardson, and thus I am complete. It is all here.

 

Readings for Ash Wednesday: Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Psalm 51:1-17;
2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

From Jan Richardson:

We are entering the season that begins with a smudge. That smudge is a testimony to what survives. It is a witness to what abides when everything seems lost. It is a sign that what we know and love may, for a time, be reduced to dust, but it does not disappear. We belong to the God who well knows what to do with dust, who sees the dust as a place to dream anew, who creates from it again and again.
—Jan Richardson, from Ash Wednesday: What God Can Do with Dust
The Painted Prayerbook, February 2018

Friends, as we enter into Lent, I want to share this Ash Wednesday blessing again. It’s been six years since I first wrote it, during what would turn out to be my last Lent with Gary. I have found that the question the blessing holds—”Did you not know what the Holy One can do with dust?”—is a good one to ask myself anew each time Ash Wednesday comes around. And I can say now: I know what God can do with dust. And I am learning still.

As this season begins, what blessing do you need to claim from the ashes?

Blessing the Dust
For Ash Wednesday

All those days
you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if all you had to do
was turn your face
toward the wind
and be scattered
to the four corners
or swept away
by the smallest breath
as insubstantial—
did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?
This is the day
we freely say
we are scorched.
This is the hour
we are marked
by what has made it
through the burning.
This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.
So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are
but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made
and the stars that blaze
in our bones
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.
—Jan Richardson
from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons

NAPKINWRITER so highly recommended this beautiful, inspiring book. Buy it now!

 

Please include this info in a credit line: “© Jan Richardson. janrichardson.com.”

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Lois, Let’s Kick up our Heals

I know. We all have mountains to climb. We all have moments when the spirit is willing, but the body is weak. We all have times when fitness means lying down and resting, not doing the next 5K around the corner.

This post is for those moments. When we can count on that indomitable, shining spirit within us, that excels beyond all belief. We are one with our God. And that is good enough!

Here is that spirit, in action! Call upon it today.

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Today, I Fretted…

 

Today, I fretted…
I had been tipped off
to an MRI finding
that needed addressing.
So I fretted about…
possible outcomes of
stents and bypasses.

Not what I wanted.

Today high school students
looked forward
to weekend plans of fun and
dates
and companionship

All they wanted.

Today, I sprung free
with a healthy heart
and a cheer from my doctor
to carry on.

Today, I heard once again
the depth and width and
the untold sorrow of the
directive to…

Carry on.

Peace Be and the heartbeat of
One
carries you all, Texas.

 

 

 

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Author’s Preface

 

It’s a writing day for me and my supporting angels are feeling humorous; which means fun along the way for me.

I opened my Bible to a random spot to practice Lectio Divina before getting into my own writing. I opened to page 1067, which is 2 Maccabees 2 and my eye fell to the bold paragraph title, Author’s Preface. 

“Well,” I thought. “This is a good place to begin.  I read, with interest how a writer in the days before Christ arrived on earth performed his writing process. The author is Jason of Cyrene and he reports events in Jewish history from the time of the High Priest, Onias the Third (about 180 B.C.) to the death of Nicanor (161B.C.).

Since I have recently completely revamped my own preface and introduction and first chapter to the memoir I am working on, I felt delighted to discover this page. I love synchronicity.

I will report his process in his own words:

2 Maccabees 2:23-32

“I will now try to summarize in a single book the five volumes written by Jason. The number of details and the bulk of material can be overwhelming for anyone who wants to read an account of the events. But I have attempted to simplify it for all readers; those who read for sheer pleasure will find enjoyment and those who want to memorize the facts will not find it difficult. Writing such a summary is a difficult task, demanding hard work and sleepless nights. It is as difficult as preparing a banquet that people of different tastes will enjoy.

But I am happy to undergo this hardship in order to please my readers. I will leave the matter of details to the original author and attempt to give only a summary of the events. I am not the builder of a new house, who is concerned with every detail of the structure, but simply a painter whose only concern is to make the house look attractive.

The historian must master his subject, examine every detail, and then explain it carefully, but whoever is merely writing a summary should be permitted to give a brief account without going into a detailed discussion.

So then, without any further comment, I will begin my story. It would be foolish to write such a long introduction that the story itself would have to be cut short.”

Thousands of years later, I believe we writers inspect our own work in much the same way.

 

 

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CONFIRM YOUR HUMANITY

Photograph by Christine Valters Paintner

 

My dream is to make a pilgrimage with Christine and her husband John on the holy terrain of western Ireland, spin stories, open hearts, and pray together in our pilgrimage tribe. I still wish upon a star and stay open to the possibility it may happen,

But today I have to settle for re-subscribing to her newsletter and Abbey of the Arts information and inspiration from her website. And read chapters of several of her books I have in hard copy and on my Kindle Fire.

 

To meet the new privacy laws, I had to re-subscribe this morning and I had to CONFIRM MY HUMANITY, and reveal I am not a robot.

I love that! I think about the things I go about the day and do in a robotic fashion and reaffirm I wish to stop that and only do what fills my heart and soul. Or else, actually put my heart and soul INTO that which I am doing robotically.

I also do wish to CONFIRM MY HUMANITY. There is so much less than human behavior being put in front of us on a daily basis…on TV, on the Internet, on the roads, all over the place in politics,… in personal interactions,…the hot button is growing, inappropriate behavior is getting all the attention; we are all putting ourselves at risk ever more often, IF we don’t stop and think…

we are humans, homo-sapiens, made to a greater image and likeness than what is showing…

Today, I confirm my humanity. I do the things that are mine to do. I respect myself and I respect others. I plant kindness in my day. I watch my thoughts and actions. I apologize quickly. I don’t hold grudges. I look for the joy. I believe in the good. I am humane.  I am active in the Human Humane Society.

Below are words from Christine. You may find her at http://www.abbeyofthearts.com

Have a humane day today.

 

A guest post this morning from Christine Vaulters Paintner, contemplative artist and writer

in Ireland

 

 

I am a joyful member of the Disorderly Dancing Monks and here are words from our Abbess.

A love note from your online Abbess

“Dearest monks and artists,

Like many of you, global events lately feel quite overwhelming at times and I ponder and pray about my response. One thing I keep coming back to is a sense of deep certainty that the way of the monk and path of the artist make a difference in the world. What distinguishes these two ways of being is that each are called to live deliberately on the edges of things, in active resistance to a world that places all its value on speed and productivity, that reduces people to producers and consumers, and reduces the earth to a commodity for our use.

The longer I follow this path in my life, the more I consider hospitality to be one of the most essential of all the monk’s wisdom. To practice actively welcoming in what is most strange or other in my world as the very place of divine encounter – what St Benedict tells us in the Rule – is a holy challenge! But in a world where otherness sparks so much fear and policies which further divide us, learning to embrace the gift of the stranger, both within our own hearts, as well as in the world is a true balm.

This is what Jesus taught as well through his actions everyday – welcoming the outcast, the stranger, the foreigner. Always breaking boundaries to witness to immense love over fear.

Perhaps the other great essential for me is the practice of silence and solitude. Making time for a deep listening, rather than reacting to what we hear. What are the sacred invitations being whispered in quiet moments? And can we resist a culture of noise where we are bombarded with endless cycles of news.

In her book Mystical Hope, Cynthia Bourgeault writes that “(Mystical hope) has something to do with presence — not a future good outcome, but the immediate experience of being met, held in communion, by something intimately at hand.” Allowing time to feel met by the divine and held in communion is a reminder for us as we return to the demands of our lives and seek to make wise and compassionate choices. It helps to nourish hope deep within us.

In my book The Artist’s Rule, I include a favorite scripture passage:

Now I am revealing new things to you, things hidden and unknown to you, created just now, this very moment. Of these things you have heard nothing until now. So that you cannot say, Oh yes, I knew this. (Isaiah 48:6-7 – Jerusalem Bible translation)

It is a reminder that more than ever we need people willing to pause and listen, to open their hearts to what is uncomfortable, and to hold space and attention until the new thing emerges.

I don’t have the answers, but I do have ancient practices which help to sustain me when I would rather run away. Perhaps if we keep practicing together, we will hear whispers of a new beginning.”

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