st ben begin again

"Always we brainstorm once more." –St. Benedict

I just started my 41st semester of didactics. I love the "outset again" that comes with the teaching profession.  Ii of my favorite things most teaching are discovering new ways to share the dear of learning with students and the take a chance to showtime the adjacent semester with a clean slate. Fresh ideas, new education strategies, another opportunity to abound, learn and meliorate—and hoping a lilliputian of that rubs off on my students. I want to brand a difference and help students acquire.

I think I'm however learning that I volition never go it but right. I will never exist perfect. But I beloved that I tin can be creative each day, trying new things, forgiving myself for what doesn't piece of work and starting over again the next day, week or semester.

 It's a good reminder for everyday life equally well. So oft in our relationships we acquit the mistakes, hurts, expectations and fears into our adjacent twenty-four hour period; never really giving others, or ourselves, a chance to begin again.

What if we could truly give ourselves and others a clean slate? A fresh showtime?

What if we actually could bemerciful…compassionate, gentle, loving, understanding, kind, accepting, giving, patient, forgivingINSTEAD OFcold-hearted, impatient, irritated, withholding, reluctant, hard, thoughtless, self-centered, judgmental?

Beingness merciful means allowing ourselves and others the gamble to begin once more. How do we get at that place…to being more than merciful?

mercy1

Last year was a Jubilee Year of Mercy. Pope Francis believes we need a  "revolution of tenderness"—between nations and in our personal relationships. "How much I desire that the yr to come up will be steeped in mercy, and then that we can get out to every man and adult female, bringing the goodness and tenderness of God," he wrote. He believes it is time for the Church building to show " her motherly face to a humanity that is wounded." Even though the official Jubilee Year is over, the demand for mercy will never end. We are not perfect; we need to forgive ourselves and others once more and again. revolution4

What powerful images Pope Francis brings to this word nosotros all also often use, but exercise non sympathize or do: MERCY. A chance to begin once again.

Final Christmas, I wanted to create a SoulCollage® bill of fare for my monk friends at Christ the King Priory that represented the flavour. I gathered images that seemed Christmas-y and tried to bring them into unity on a carte.  But information technology only wasn't working; images that spoke of MERCY kept calling to me. I let the word, idea and images of mercy flow over me and into the creation. The process of creating was prayerful, inspired and joyful. The carte du jour and words that follow are the effect:

mercy

A gesture, an embrace, a tender gaze
Lays bare every vein, contraction, pore and blade.
In the Light, transparent and humbled,
We are seen, truly seen.

Despite our failures and flights,
Doors of mercy open to
Eternal love fabricated visible.

Pope Francis believes, "The nigh of import thing in the life of every man and every woman is not that they should never fall along the way, the important thing is always to go dorsum upward."

May we take this word and image, MERCY, into our new year and into our lives. The doors are ever open for us to begin again. We are received simply as the Prodigal Son was received, with open and forgiving artillery. The epitome of the Dissipated Son, created by Rembrandt, communicates both motherly and fatherly qualities of a God who welcomes u.s. all home. It conveys all of the qualities of mercy that we hope to receive and tin can strive to give: compassion, tenderness, honey and credence.

In our thoughts, words and actions, towards ourselves and others, we have a new day to endeavor again to give and receive the mercy that God has given united states.

Each new day is a new solar day.  Always nosotros brainstorm again.