Maybe it is bec ause of the warmth of the sun and the generosity of the days that are at the longest they will be  all year long.  Maybe it is because the sparrow carries on in the good work of building a nest des pite my early morning, coffee-in-hand presence on the front porch.  Maybe it is because the long afternoon shadows turn a certain oak lined section of the Arboretum into a magnificent sanctuary that not even those great European cathedrals can fully emulate.   Who knows what it is, but I am finding myself particularly grateful for these glimpses of beauty. For I am convinced that, if there still is beauty, then there is still hope.  And with all that has been going on in the world lately, I could use a little hope. 

Summer reading has taken me into the pages of Richard Rohr's new book on Saint Francis and has reintroduced me to the man who lived his life at the intersection of beauty and hope.  Rohr calls Francis a mystic in that Francis "knew that if you can accept that the finite manifests the infinite, and that the physical is the doorway to the spiritual (which is the foundational principal we call "incarnation"), then all you need is right here and right now - in this world.  This is the way to that!  Heaven includes earth.  Time opens you up to the timeless, space opens you up to spacelessness, if you only take them for the clear doorways that they are.  There are not sacred and profane things, places, and moments. There are only sacred and desecrated things, places, and moments - and it is we alone who desecrate them by our blindness and lack of reverence. It is one sacred universe, and we are all a part of it.  You really cannot get any better or more simple than that, in terms of a spiritual vision."  ¹

                                                                                                     .............continue reading HERE