Tag: christianity

AN ADVENT MEDITATION FOR DECEMBER 2025

~ Sal Umana ~ Leave a comment

Here is a beautiful piece borrowed from Mirabai Starr of the Center For Action and Contemplation:


Saying Yes to Our Lives


Mirabai Starr recounts how she came to say yes to God in her life as it is instead of how she imagined it should be:
“All my life, I have been enamored of the God-intoxicated ones. Those rarified souls who slip into ecstatic states and spontaneously utter poetry. The ones who exude deep stillness, embody equanimity, listen more than they speak. The initiated and the ordained, the monastics….


I wanted to be one of them. Until I didn’t.


I want you not to want that as well…. I want you to want to be exactly who you are: a true human person doing their best to show up for this fleeting life with a measure of grace, with kindness and a sense of humor, with curiosity and a willingness to not have all the answers, with reverence for life.


You do not need to chant all night in a temple in the Himalayas. You don’t have to be the newest incarnation of Mary Magdalene. It is not necessary to read or write spiritual books. You are not required to know the difference between Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism or memorize the Beatitudes. All you have to do to walk the path of the ordinary mystic is to cultivate a gaze of wonder and step onto the road. Keep walking. Rest up, and walk again. Fall down, get up, walk on. Pay attention to the landscape. To the ways it changes and the ways it stays the same. Be alert to surprises and turn with the turning of the seasons. Honor your body, train your mind, and keep your heart open against all odds. Say yes to what is, even when it is uncomfortable or embarrassing or heartbreaking. Hurl your handful of yes into the treetops and then lift your face as the rain of yes drops its grace all over you, all around you, and settles deep inside you.”

Mary at the Annunciation lifted up her face and the rain of Grace came down as the Word of God became flesh in her.
“Be it done to me, according to your word.”

The Sermon on the Mount is About Life on Earth, not in Heaven

~ Sal Umana ~ Leave a comment

Today, Richard Rohr’s meditation stated succinctly and clearly an insight into spirituality that I have been pondering for fifty years, but have never been able to express as clearly as today’s meditation did.

We were often taught that Jesus was talking about: “Blessed are the poor, the meek, those who suffer, those who grieve, etc., etc. BECAUSE THEY WILL BE REWARDED AFTER DEATH IN HEAVEN.”

Here, the meditation clearly states that Jesus was saying that the poor are blessed and fortunate because if they live in the presence of God, they will not suffer from being poor. They will be filled with joy, as Francis of Assisi was.

Blessed are the meek, the kind, the non-violent because they realize that they already possess the earth. It was given to them by their Father in heaven.

This is the meditation that we need to begin and end each day with. Happy Blessings.

“What Does It Mean to Be Blessed? Heaven begins now, for any saints willing to sign up.” —Barbara Brown Taylor, Always a Guest

Spiritual writer Barbara Brown Taylor considers the promise of “blessing” that is central to Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount:

“We don’t have to wonder what a blessed life looks like. Jesus laid that out right at the beginning of his most famous sermon, though his description is so far from what some of us had hoped that we would rather discuss the teaching than act on it…. In this life, most of us pedal pretty hard to avoid going in the direction of Jesus’ Beatitudes. We read books that promise to enrich our spirits. We find all kinds of ways to sedate our mournfulness.

“According to Jesus, the blessings of the kingdom are available here and now—and later:

“The first words out of Jesus’ mouth are not ‘Blessed shall be’ but ‘Blessed are.’ ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’—not because of something that will happen to them later but because of what their poverty opens up in them right now. ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness’—not because God is going to fill them up later but because their appetites are so fine-tuned right now….

“When people who can’t stop crying hear Jesus call them blessed right in the basement of their grief, they realize this isn’t something they are supposed to get over soon. This is what it looks like to have a blessed and broken heart….

“When people who are getting beat up for doing the right thing hear Jesus call them blessed while the blows are still coming, they are freed to feel the pain in a different way. The bruises won’t hurt any less, but the new meaning in them can make them easier to bear. Who knows? They may even change the hearts of those landing the blows, while they bring the black-and-blue into communion with each other like almost nothing else can.

“This is what the Beatitudes have to do with real life. They describe a view of reality in which the least likely candidates are revealed to be extremely fortunate in the divine economy of things, not only later but right now. They are Jesus’ truth claims for all time, the basis of everything that follows, which everyone who hears them is free to accept, reject, or neglect. Whatever you believe about him, believe this about you: the things that seem to be going most wrong for you may in fact be the things that are going most right. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to fix them. It just means they may need blessing as much as they need fixing, since the blessing is already right there. If you can breathe into it—well, that’s when heaven comes to earth, because earth is where heaven starts, for all who are willing to live into it right now.”

It is in Dying that we are Born to Eternal Life

~ Sal Umana ~ Leave a comment

This was a stunning Easter Celebration with the death of Michael Volpe, a beloved friend whom I met on my first Mission in 1956, not quite 70 years ago. He died on early Good Friday, and left us in mourning until early Easter Monday when Pope Francis joined Mike in eternal life. On TV this morning Cardinal Dolan of New York talked about the Conclave in which they elected Pope Francis. Dolan said that they were told at the beginning that the Holy Spirit had already chosen a Pope among them, and it was their task to pray until they were told by the Hol Spirit who to vote for. I really believe that Jorge Mario Bergoglio was a gift from God to us. I also believe that Mike Volpe was a gift of God to us.

We may argue about the miracles of the Bible till the end of time, but I believe the gift of Mike and Bergoglio to us was a miracle. After all, miracle really means “something to marvel at”, “something that seems unbelievable”. But how could you not believe in miracles when you met these men? What a gift they were to us with their kindness, gentleness, above all, quiet overwhelming love?

Pope Francis’s last Encyclical was “Dilexit nos”, that is: “How God loved us” taken from Romans 8. In Romans, Paul says,  “God loved us”, but uses the expression dilexit which means God loved us with delight. God is so glad he made us.

The very first talk Francis made when he was elected Pope in 2013, he addressed the entire world in his urbi and orbi blessing which is every Pope’s traditional Blessing to the “city and to the world”, and he cried out simply, “You are all children of God.” That was an infallible statement.

Now I don’t have to go to Rochester, NY any more to see my friend Mike Volpe, neither do I have to fly to Rome to see Pope Francis. Now by the eternal goodness of God, I can talk immediately to them right now in my heart where they will always remain. So be it.

Yes, Love is Eternal

~ Sal Umana ~ Leave a comment

     A month ago, I reached my 96th birthday, and I was surprised how interested I was in how much longer I have to live. For the last few years, I have been obsessed with preparing for death. I want my passage out of time to be smooth and comfortable for everybody concerned, especially for me.

        When the covid pandemic struck five years ago, I even wrote a book about dying called “Entering Eternity With Ease.” I really wanted to name it “Dying Joyfully”, but that title was already taken by the Dalai Lama and Bishop Desmond Tutu in their book on the subject. Deep down, I was really so scared of the passage from life to whatever comes after life, that the book was an attempt to convince myself that dying wasn’t so scary.

        Then, two years ago, one of my best friends, Joe Matthews, suddenly, silently, softly passed away acquajogging in his pool. I had spent ten years playing golf and lunching with him every Friday, and we often talked about our anxiety over dying. While I was writing “Entering Eternity”, I brought a copy of “Me and Kuhbler Ross” the longest Chapter in the book, about the 5 stages of dying that are featured at most “Trivial Pursuits” contests. I know I won one with it. Joe must have made the pilgrimage from Denial of Death to Acceptance of Death, because he left us without a whisper or a whimper, without an “I love ya,” or even a “Bye, bye.”

        I wrote a blog article on “Wouldn’t You like to go like Joe ?”, surely wishing we all had the good fortune to just “pass away” so easily: Entering Eternity With Ease, indeed. But I would also like to say Goodbye and tell my loved ones how much I really loved them. I want them to understand how much I really appreciate every little item in their relationship with me. I want them to taste the joy we shared together, even including the pains that were inevitable, even the hurts that were avoidable. I need to thank them for everything.

        But how can I do this before I die? I have in front of me on the wall, the pictures of at least a hundred people whom I dearly love, and hundreds more, both alive and dead, whom I have known these 96 years. They are relatives, schoolmates, teachers, colleagues, clients, patients, neighbors, friends, and many, many others it is impossible to mention.

        How do I do justice to all the people I have known and loved in my life? To all the people who have known and loved me? It would take me a year to write to or call up just the closest ones. And most of the rest would be too hard to reach. There has to be a way, and it has to be somehow through the Holy Spirit. It has to be beyond this moment, this place, this person. It is endless, boundless, eternal.

Most of the people I loved have already passed away, so how can I tell them how much I loved them? This is where I begin to wonder about eternal love. We have to live forever because we will never be able to say how much we love each other. That is what eternity is for.

        Back in the 70’s there was a novel followed by a movie, called “Love Story”. The famous line was “Love means never having to say you’re sorry”. I’d like to say instead, “Love means never having to say goodbye.” After almost a century of contemplation, I suspect that something as important as love has got to take forever. When I was a little kid, a Jewish immigrant, Irving Berlin, sang “I’ll be loving you, always, not for just an hour, not for just a day, not for just a year, but always.” I had no idea then what eternity was. I still don’t. But then, in High School English, I read Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” and recognized what I had already deeply sensed, that I was going to live forever.

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting

And cometh from afar;…….

From God, who is our home.”

        Once we accept that death is not the end but the beginning, or rather the continuation of our life which we have had, in God, from all eternity, then we are relieved of the anxiety to settle our lifetime loves right now before we die. Right now, we must rest in peace in our own hearts, in our own minds, in our own souls. To rest in Peace is to rest in God. I know we say at funerals, “May they rest in peace”, about the dead, and that is good. But I am talking about us the living, especially those of us who approach death. May we rest in Peace, like the Hebrew ‘Shalom’, like the Arabic, ‘Salaam’. They all mean the same: may we rest in God, ‘In whom we live, and move, and have our being’ according to St. Paul.

        To rest in God, is to surrender our helplessness and our hopelessness to God who is Love Eternal. To rest in God is to accept that we exist, as Paul Tillich says, ‘in the Ground of Being’ which is Love Eternal. After all, St. John says God is love, and therefore Love is God. And we come from God, and we remain in God, world without end Amen.  And all of us are in the same Ground of Love forever. So believe that Love is never having to say Goodbye. 

I close this with T.S. Elliott’s words from “Four Quartets”:

“We die with the dying:

“See, they depart, and we go with them.

“We are born with the dead:

“See, they return, and bring us with them.

“Here is where you are and nowhere never and always where

“time has been redeemed and all shall be well and all manner of

“things shall be well. May it be so, Amen.”

Thomas Merton’s Simple Approach to Contemplation

~ Sal Umana ~ 1 Comment

From New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

“I speak only of contemplation that springs from the love of God.

“Contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that Source. It knows the Source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes both beyond reason and beyond simple faith. For contemplation is a kind of spiritual vision to which both reason and faith aspire, by their very nature, because without it they must always remain incomplete. Yet contemplation is not vision because it sees “without seeing” and knows “without knowing.” It is a more profound depth of faith, a knowledge too deep to be grasped in images, in words or even clear concepts. It can be suggested by words, by symbols, but in the very moment of trying to indicate what it knows,  the contemplative mind takes back what it has said, and denies what it has affirmed. For in contemplation we know by “unknowing”. Or, better, we know beyond all knowing or ‘unknowing.’“

As Merton says, in contemplation we know by “unknowing”. Or better, we know beyond all knowing or “unknowing”. Contemplation is beyond poetry, music, art, philosophy, or theology. Contemplation is beyond our own self. To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense, die: but this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being.

Merton continues: “And so, contemplation seems to supersede and to discard every other form of intuition and experience. This rejection is of course only apparent. Contemplation is and must be compatible with all the other human levels of love and belief for it is their highest fulfilment. But in the actual experience of contemplation all other experiences are momentarily lost. They “die” to be born again on a higher level of life.

“Contemplation reaches out to the knowledge and even the experience of the transcendent and inexpressible God. Contemplation is a sudden gift of awareness, an awakening of the Real within all that is real.”

An example of this happened to me recently:  I was walking the dog one morning after an hour of meditation, and I suddenly became aware that I was somehow a sacrament of the presence of God, in fact, everybody is a sacrament of the presence of God. Didn’t they teach us in religion class that a sacrament was an outward sign signifying an inner reality that can never be totally understood?  We are sacraments, signs of an inner reality that is infinitely unknowable. Merton calls this “A vivid awareness of infinite Being at the roots of our own limited being. An awareness of our contingent reality as received, as a present from God, as a free gift of love.

“Contemplation is a deep resonance in the inmost center of our spirit in which life loses its separate voice and re-sounds with the majesty and the mercy of the Hidden and Living One.”

Now here is my take on Merton’s explanation of contemplation. Merton says that we have to leave our own self to be taken by God into infused contemplation. How does one leave one’s own self. For now we’ll just say, metaphorically, that the self is the Ego that we have formed in our human lifetime around our inner soul that comes from God.It is our inner soul that is the image of God that Scripture calls us, present in God from all eternity. Our Ego is a psychological construct that was formed beginning at birth, by all the people around us: our parents, siblings, extended families, friends, teachers, priests, sisters- all the influences of our society and culture. Our Ego, with our name and sense of self, was not created directly by God. It was co-created by all these other people and influences. Your Ego is a child of American media, of radio, television, the internet, the press. Our real self, according to Merton, is the ‘soul child’ we were at birth which came directly from God’s own eternal “I am.”

Thus, my self can be symbolized by two words: my soul, and my Ego.

First, my soul is the image of God which existed from all eternity, because God is Pure Act, according to Thomas Aquinas, therefore everything in God is from eternity to eternity.

Second, my Ego is not eternal. It is on a temporary pilgrimage to eternity. My Ego begins with birth as a human “being.” To contemplate God, I have to let go of my Ego self, and center myself deep inside my eternal soul where God is.

To contemplate God, my Ego has to die, meaning: I must let go of all my feelings, all my thoughts, all my regrets, all my expectations, all my fears, all my failures, all my successes, all my desires, all my achievements, all my degrees, (graduate or undergraduate). I lose my name, all my identities, and favorite teams. I enter into the “Cloud of Unknowing,” like my soul child with a tabula rasa, a clean slate, in my awareness. And I wait for God. Who knows what happens? Can a finite mind know the infinite? Can the limited know the unlimited? Can the temporary know the eternal? That’s why you have to leave your Ego at the door.

A good example of what I am talking about is Centering Prayer as taught by Trappist Father Basil Pennington. Back in the 90’s Father Pennington came to Freeport, L.I., his hometown, where I was living. He gave us a talk in Holy Redeemer Church and told us that when he was a child he would go over his grandparents’ house for supper, and after supper, they would go out on the front porch and rock in silence for a half hour. They would silently listen to the chirping of the birds. That’s a lot like the old man in the Cure of Ars’ church. “ I just look at God, and God looks at me.”