Think glorious thoughts of God and serve God with a quiet mind.  Janet Erskine Stuart, Superior General of the Society of the Sacred Heart, 1911-1914.

I love this quotation. In fact, it occurs to me as I write this that perhaps I have written of it before.  No matter…it calls to me anew, as a book of poetry frequently does, however well-thumbed.

Writer and educator that Janet Stuart was, I have no doubt that choosing her words was a conscious process of selection. Pairing glorious with quiet is part of the resonance in this for me.  Allowing those two images to flow together is something like the fullness of a waterfall being heard in the slow revelatory blooming of a springtime bud.

Glorious thoughts of God…for me, these are thoughts of the vastness of God, the limitless nature of God’s love, the motivating faith that good will triumph and death will have no hold and we are called to believe that glory and act on that glory with those around us to bring about a more peaceful, just, loving world.   Glorious thoughts are thoughts of wonder and thanksgiving and marvel at the quotidian revelation of God’s love.

A quiet mind is not a silent mind, nor is it still.  I think of quiet as open, receptive, alert, awake, steady.

Holding those images together speaks to me of courage, too…of a constant and humming Yes to God and to life and to lives.

As I sat here tonight and watched the sun go down, casting her threads of light among the branches and fresh-alive greenness of leaves, weaving a hammock for the moon, I prayed

“Let it be so now and forever. Amen.”

(image is from http://www.flickr.com/photos/amarcord69/6868712348/sizes/o/in/photostream/)