Category Archives: contemplation

We Get to Choose

Posted on January 17, 2024 | Leave a comment
I SUSPECT THAT PEOPLE ARE PLOTTING
TO MAKE ME HAPPY.
–J. D. Salinger, author

I first came across this quote many years ago. It was on a poster of a big gumball machine
with its lip wide open and hundreds of gum balls were flooding out. I hung the
poster in my office.

We have a choice, you know. We may greet the day with dread, fear, doom and gloom.
Or we may welcome the day with gratitude and joy.

We have the power and freedom to choose life in its best, or wallow in our personal losses, regrets, resentments, anger, sorrow, and suffering. Our brains have a preference for hanging on to negative experiences. We are hardwired for survival. Sometimes such choices become very difficult for us.

We live in a culture of bullies and victims.  I understand trauma. I have both experienced, and see up close its ravages on people’s lives daily. I know its terror and darkness. I also know we are survivors. If you are caught in the grip of trauma and loss, I hold you in my heart. These words are not a condemnation but a call to hope that you will not always be in its grip.  We do not have to wallow. We have more power than we think.

 Our world seems to thrive on negative outlooks. There are industries that focus on and profit from our misery and offer a constant stream of remedies. It almost as if our economy depends on people feeling afraid, alone, sad, rejected.

We are not doomed. We have a choice. I have a quote stuck to the lampshade on my desk: Don’t trip over something that is behind you.

Many years ago, as I was out walking with my daughters. My oldest, Diana, walked ahead of me. I was pushing her sister in the stroller. When Diana spotted a person down the block coming our way, she exclaimed, “Mom, maybe they are bringing a present for me!”

What if we walked into our life each day expecting presents, joyful surprises, and goodness coming to meet us?

I have another sticker on my lampshade: You can do this.

Defy the gloom that suffocates your joy. Expect miracles. Choose life, love, goodness.

19 I call heaven and earth as my witnesses against you right now: I have set life and death, blessing and curse before you. Now choose life so that you and your descendants will live – loving the Lord your God, by obeying his voice, and by clinging to him. That’s how you will survive and live long on the fertile land the Lord swore to give to your ancestors: to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

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Chicken Little, Faith and Being Still

Posted on December 20, 2023 | Leave a comment

Hello,

Are plans for Christmas and the New Year weighing you down?
Stop.
Take a deep breath, and again … Right
here is the glory:

The whole journey is about embracing our weakness, failure, and vulnerability like Mary held the helpless baby close to her heart with overflowing love.

Holy Ground – Chicken Little and Being StillDownload

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Urgent Virgins

Posted on December 13, 2023 | Leave a comment
The Virgin Daughter of Jerusalem

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Barbie and Disorientation

Posted on October 17, 2023 | Leave a comment

Perhaps you saw the Barbie movie. I did and enjoyed it. Barbie and Taylor Swift have lifted the hearts and hope of many folks this summer. We take ourselves so seriously, it is a relief to play, to pretend and laugh and wear pink with a crowd of other folks, all worn down and exhausted from constant “Breaking Bad News.” It is delicious to step out of someone else’s fantasy of reality and find the freedom to defy the burdens of our own expectations, as well as the expectations of others. Finding out that who we thought we were, is not who were, and that who we are becoming is still unknown and just winking over the horizon is the beginning of transformation. Learn more about that process of shedding an old self that has become too tight and uncomfortable, and discovering a self just coming into your awareness. The hard part is the waiting and not knowing. We may feel lost and abandoned.

Read Latest Issue of Holy Ground Here

Barbie and DisorientationDownload

Subscribe to Holy Ground

We are celebrating 35 years of publication of this simple quarterly reminder to slow down, rest, an rediscover serenity. Help us celebrate by buying a subscription for yourself or a friend.

Back issues of this little newsletter can be found in every stack of papers in my house – I move them from my desk to the kitchen counter to the pile of mail on the dining room table, until they eventually become dog-eared and fall apart. I just can’t seem to throw an issue of Holy Ground away. Why? Because Loretta Ross an ordained Presbyterian clergy woman and a fine writer, puts equal amounts of inspiration and whimsy into every issue. Even though Holy Ground is a thin little folder – 7 or 8 pages, one essay, really – it’s always refreshing, renewing,; an awakening of sorts.
Review by Susan Jelus in A New Song

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What If Jonah met Rumi?

Posted on July 11, 2023 | Leave a comment

New Issue of Holy Ground! Celebrating 35 years of publication.
What if – God told Jonah to go to Rumi and help him start a guest house? This would be impossible, of course, given that Rumi didn’t come along until 800 years after Jonah was written by – likely a woman, according to Hebrew Bible scholar, David Rosenberg. Are you struggling to know your right hand from your left? Are you overwhelmed with too many projects and possessions and responsibilities?

This might be just for you.

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Ouch!

Posted on March 28, 2023 | 1 comment

This issue of Holy Ground guides you to a place
beyond pain and tumult.

You will discover poet, Vassar Miller, who writes …

Without Ceremony –

Except ourselves we have no other prayer;
our needs are sores upon our nakedness.
We do not have to name them; we are here.
And You who can make eyes can see no less….

You also will be invited to your Still Point of the turning world,
a place described by St. John of the Cross and his admirer, poet T.S. Eliot.
where the weary soul finds repose.

Here, also, is where Teshuvah (Hebrew for repent) happens.
Repentance is not so much contrition and guilt, as you may think,
as it is simply a shift of focus. Here we are reconciled to the brokenness
and pain of ourselves and of our beautiful world.

I hope you learn and find peace in this issue, Ouch.
You are worthy. You are deeply and eternally loved.

To see into our sin and dysfunction with love,
as we fumble to touch the hem of Jesus’ robe, is to repent.
To see the hunger, humiliation and pain behind the eyes of the angry,
disillusioned and violent ones is to see with God’s eyes.

A blessed Easter to you and yours! Loretta F Ross

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If there be any virtue

Posted on December 19, 2022 | Leave a comment

“I beg you to keep me in this silence so that I may learn from it the word of your peace and the word of your gentleness to the world. And that through me perhaps your word of peace may make itself heard where it has not been possible for anyone to hear it for a long time. ” Thomas Merton

In the chaos and static of our inner and outer lives – the brewing anger, fear, shame, anguish, sorrow, and the constant push to produce or accomplish – we struggle to meet these deep desires of our hearts. Our perception of reality is obscured and distorted. St John of the Cross used the image of a dirty window to describe the process of spiritual maturing, which includes purification or cleansing. The prophet Malachi called for a good scrub with a steel wool pad of Fuller’s soap and the heat of a refiner’s fire. 

We recognize that we cannot go on living in the way we have. Something needs to change and part of that is how we see ourselves, each other, and our beliefs about the God and the world.

NEW ISSUE OF HOLY GROUND
If There Be Any Virtue . . .
What clouds your window on the world?
What disturbs your serenity?
How do you change channels?

Three crows
a sky-puppy
a snatch of Gerald Manley Hopkins’ grandeur
might be all it takes

Read More
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Posted in Advent, contemplation, Contemplation, prayer

What the Trees Said

Posted on October 1, 2022 | Leave a comment

“This effort to distinguish yourself
is so hard on you.”

The summer issue of Holy Ground – What the Trees Said – celebrates
the wonder of trees and how the natural world restores and draws us
into God’s embrace. What is it in nature that calls you and makes you stop,
still and wordless, as if held and absorbed in One beyond yourself?

https://conta.cc/3DPh7yYhttps://conta.cc/3DPh7yY

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Lost Light, Stolen Joy

Posted on July 24, 2022 | 3 comments

New Issue of Holy Ground!

This, my dear

is the greatest challenge

to being alive.

To witness injustice in the world

and to not allow it to consume our light.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Beloved one, how is your light? Do you know where it is? What is the quality of your light – a dim sputtering flame, a sparkler in the dark, a burning sun? Or has the injustice of the world gobbled up your light? We are all easy prey for the temptations of despair, fear, and hopelessness.

Nothing could prepare Jesus’s disciples for what it would mean to follow him. They just had to do it and be overcome by it. It will always be “too much.” Nothing can really prepare us for this process of inner and outer crucifixion and death to ourselves. Still, we each must kneel in our own Gethsemane and come to terms with that sticky web of self-deceit, confusion, and fear which binds our minds and bodies in endless knots that blind us to the brilliant light of God within us and our responsibility to lift it up for all to see.

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Somebody Needs to Bow

Posted on April 12, 2022 | Leave a comment

Will it be you?

A new self, a true self, a self, grounded, not in its own willfulness and endless needs, but in the abundant life in Christ, waits in the wings for its cue. To stand clueless and empty-handed in the midst of the mystery of our being is to dwell in the realm of God.

Holy Ground Winter 2022Download

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Posted in contemplation, Good Friday, transformation

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