We had to learn ourselves
Victor Frankl
What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing ones, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.
Victor Frankl, speaking out of his experience of being in a concentration camp
Image: Colin McCahon, Cross, 1959
This is the promise and challenge of the gospel: a new heart or spirit an altogether new attitude bringing hope and freedom. We are called to a new, healthy and positive attitude which penetrates both our feelings and judgements. We are not promised freedom from our feelings, but the freedom to choose what to do with them.
Image: Colin McCahon, 6 days in Nelson and Canterbury, 1950
Get in touch with an attitude that you have –
perhaps a negative attitude about yourself –
and how the everyday feelings you register convince you of the rightness of this attitude.
Because such an attitude keeps you either depressed or feeling bad about yourself,
imagine instead what life would be like if you approached it with a new attitude.
Dispute the false belief system that keeps you trapped.
Ask for courage to choose life.
God is not in the first place ‘absolute power’, but ‘absolute love’.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Image: Colin McCahon, Waterfall, one panel from a polytich, 1964
The images in this post are of paintings by New Zealand artist, Colin McCahon.
Colin McCahon once said that his landscapes weren’t landscapes. But in interpreting a place through symbol and imagination, they heighten our own perceptions in ways that are rarely permitted by the ordinary process of ‘seeing’. Eyes feeding on the wildness pressing in on him, he came along this road because these dark, primal Aotearoan hills has something to tell, and he’d been asked tell it. Seeking truth in a peculiarly hard place. Source: History of Our World: A Question of Faith
O my Hope, pour into my heart the inebriation that consists in the hope of you. O Jesus Christ, the resurrection and light of all worlds, place upon my soul’s head the crown of the knowledge of you, and open before me suddenly the door of mercies; cause the rays of your grace to shine out in my heart. . . . I give praise to your holy nature, Lord, for you have made my nature a sanctuary for your hiddenness, a tabernacle for your mystery, a place where you can dwell, a holy temple for yourself.
For a printable PDF of the text of this meditation please click on the link below.
