Sr Kathryn’s Podcast - Touching the Sunrise

Lord, you have searched me thoroughly. You know me.... This can be a scary thought. We want to be known, and seen, and loved, and respected. Not searched. Later in the Psalm we learn how wonderful and loving is the one who knit us in our mother's womb. His "searching" eyes are there to see our slightest need for him. How wonderful he is in his care for us in all things.... This is a quiet meditati...

Jesus, looking at him, loved him (Mk). Of course these are the words in the Gospel that describe how Jesus received the rich young man. This quiet and reflective reading will lead you to touch gently both your vulnerability and the way the Lord loves you unconditionally, incredibility, and forever.

O God, you are my God... For you I long... For you my soul thirsts... This psalm I prayed at my mother's side shortly before she passed into eternity. It is a psalm for any of us who are walking through a wilderness, where all is stripped away and we may feel lost and wondering and wandering...  Where God finds us.... Faithful. Love.  Take a breath. Rest. And join me in quiet prayer.   I hope you...

What is important here is that we approach our thought world with compassion, curiosity, and creativity, a bit of humor, and a lot of prayer. It is like a cluster of screaming children clustered around our heart where God is dwelling. Think about a playground with kids out of control. It’s hard to get to the center, to the ground, to the inner room where God is dwelling when we are deflected by so...

What keeps you up at night? What is in your heart that you wish you could share with someone who cares? In this Holy Thursday meditation, Jesus gathers you tightly into his embrace as he looks in to your eyes and says: "When will you give all this to me?"

A conversation between Sr Emily Beata Marsh and Sr Kathryn James exploring the questions we ask in times that are uncertain, when we face struggles and challenges in our life, and when we wonder why those we love suffer.

Welcome to the last in the series: Being the Child God Made You where we're exploring how to be the child that Jesus asks us to be. Today we'll be talking about God made us to be satisfied only in God. Excerpts: God has made us for himself. He is providing for us, nourishing us, protecting us, warming us, delighting us... As long as we keep our hearts open, begging for him and his life, we will re...

Welcome to the sixth in the series: Being the Child God Made You where we're exploring how to be the child that Jesus asks us to be. Today we'll be talking about how to accept our own neediness and also how to receive God's love, especially when we find it difficult. Excerpts: Recently on retreat I found myself asking Jesus: “Will you leave me, drop me, because I am not interesting enough?” Isn’t...

Welcome to the fifth in the series: Being the Child God Made You where we're exploring how to be the child that Jesus asks us to be. Today we'll be talking about Mary who teaches us how to receive the Spirit. Excerpts: Finally, the apostles had gathered around the Mother of Jesus after he had ascended into heaven, waiting with her for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Mary knew well the presence,...

Welcome to the fourth in the series: Being the Child God Made You where we're exploring how to be the child that Jesus asks us to be. Today we'll be talking about how we belong to the King of Kings and the Lord of the Universe. We truly are royalty! Excerpts: So amazing! Yet this reality, this truth that is hinted at on every page of God’s word, is so hard to remember about ourselves and about oth...

Welcome to the third in the series: Being the Child God Made You where we're exploring how we fill God with joy. Excerpts: It is as if John the Evangelist, John who had laid his head on the heart of Christ at the last supper and listened to the love that beat in his Lord’s most sacred and divine Heart, was trying to find the words to convince us that we are God’s children. Certainly, we’ve heard t...

Welcome to the first in the series: Being the Child God Made You where we're exploring how to be the child that Jesus asks us to be. Today we'll be talking about how how difficult it is sometimes to believe that God made us good and beautiful. Excerpts: Can you say to yourself, “God made something beautiful and strong and good and tender and kind when he made me.” What do you feel deep within your...

Welcome to the first in the series: Being the Child God Made You where we're exploring how to be the child that Jesus asks us to be. Today we'll be talking about how to accept our own neediness and also how to receive God's love, especially when we find it difficult. Excerpts: I heard these words in my heart: “You are just as helpless, and lovely, and loved as this tiny baby. She isn’t doing a sin...

Celebrating the Magi who followed a star in their search for the newly born King is a great opportunity to reflect on the stars we follow, the searches we have made during our life, what we have found, where we are, and where we are going.

Highlights: Questions about life’s meaninglessness, about the way in which our days pass like vapor, about how all that we do and accomplish seems to vanish without a trace as we age, these burden not just the heart of Qoheleth in today’s first reading, but at certain points in our lives these questions haunt us too. I once heard that the book of Ecclesiastes identifies the question to which the w...

Highlights: In the Gospel passage that recounts the calling of the tax collector, Matthew Jesus shows us that he is where we are. Whether we are living a holy life, struggling with temptations inundating us like a hurricane, or lost in the mire of vice or sin, Jesus is always passing by. Jesus is not passing by intent on avoiding us. He is passing by in order to see us, to show us that we are seen...

Highlights: It’s not that the people couldn’t figure out that Jesus was the Messiah, that all the prophesies pointed to him, that he spoke with an authority that even the religious leaders didn’t have. Instead, Jesus called them “hypocrites.” We call someone a hypocrite who knows what is right or true but lives in denial of what they know to be right and true. Jesus was saying to them that just as...

Highlights: In order to live, we need to nourish ourselves, we need dignity and peace. The hearts of the people in this crowd were hoping against hope that things could change for them on a temporal level. They just didn’t realize that things had already changed. With the radical newness of the incarnation of the Son of God, everything had already become new. A greater hope of a more eternal promi...

A meditation guide for healing through the gift of forgiveness. I hope you stay in touch. Sign up for my newsletter here: https://touchingthesunrise.com/newsletter/

We'll be addressing the million-and-one pin pricks that we receive and give to others every day. Though these aren’t dramatic or traumatic in themselves, when not attended to they can lead to drama and trauma and to the need for forgiveness in order to restore peace in a relationship. When minor annoyances are not addressed over time, they can have serious effects on a relationship. The way someon...

Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting or even pardoning an offense. It means changing our response to the offense. Some ways to practice what I call “everyday forgiveness” are: forgive yourself, forgive the “stupid stuff” that happens every day, forgive the people and institutions that have hurt us, forgive the unmerited suffering that seems so unfair like an illness or failure. Instead of bitternes...

hen we’ve been hurt by others we may struggle with feelings of anger at being treated unjustly, fear of what will happen next, guilt over our part in what may have happened, and the seeming impossibility of reconciliation. And yet, as we stay up at night replaying what has happened, we may wonder at the cost of not reconciling: The relationships broken. The difficulty of the situations we will be...

For us, forgiveness is a matter of becoming capable, of being given the power, to disrupt the cycle of continued wrath and suffering we experience as inevitable. Forgiveness is always going to be demanding, costly, and a freely chosen effort. Others cannot tell us when and how we must forgive. No one but we ourselves can require us to forgive. Through the amazing story of how Corrie Ten Boom disco...

I certainly would never compare my life to that of St. Elizabeth of the Trinity. The memories I have of my childhood are of a little girl who always wanted to be a nun and who was—by my own standards at least—well-behaved. St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, however, had a will of steel and a temper that raged into violent outbursts even at the age of four. She was impossible to control. Family and frie...

The most important truth to be convinced of is not that God loves you. As broken, wounded, wandering as we each may be, as desperately yearning to know that we matter and that we are worth someone’s attention, contrary to what we might think, we do not need most to know how much God loves us. I almost cringe as I write these words. For almost 40 years this has been both my mantra and my misery, my...