We can't say why because it's an inner connection, more about feeling than words.

We have prayer routines that suit that inner space.

What those routines are, will be like a preference for certain foods.

We know our own spiritual appetite and what nourishes us.

In catering for our spiritual needs, the church offers us a wide range of nourishment.

We start with Eucharist and then allow the presence of Christ Jesus to guide us. Because spiritual growth is all about movement, this guidance will keep taking us to new states of awareness.

My personal devotion

I'd like to share with you, a personal devotion that is connected to the celebration of Pentecost.

It won't be meaningful for everyone, but some may find it helpful.

We know the Gospel reading and Jesus's words to his disciples, "Those whose sins you forgive are forgiven and those whose sins you retain, are retained."

Years ago, I read that the word translated as "retain" is a reflexive verb with a meaning of "holding to oneself."

And this is what Jesus did, taking to himself, the sins of others. He could have been commissioning his disciples to do the same.

How church teaching interprets Jesus' words, is also correct.

But the other meaning for "retain" provides a prayer opportunity for us all.

It invites us to closely identify with one who has failed, taking on his or her failure as our own, and handing it over to Jesus the healer who never turned anyone away.

‘Salvation' is another word that can have two meanings.

• Some think of it as being rescued.
• Others understand it as being healed. ( Latin: salve )

Jesus was the instrument of God's healing. He compared himself with the bronze serpent Moses lifted up in the desert for the healing of the people.

Jesus said, "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the son of man be lifted up."

We believe his healing power is with us today and is readily available.

Sin is what wounds us and others. I don't need to look far to see my own woundedness and the pain of the world. Every day it's in the news: people judging and people being judged. It is also in the human aspect of the church.

Let's consider what it means to have a personal devotion to healing in the church. We are all part of the church, one in its diversity, one in its beauty and its pain. We can't ignore the wounds because they belong to us.

They vary from the small scratches and irritations of pride, to the deep cuts and bruising caused by division.

It's in our self-protective nature to separate ourselves from anything unpleasant, but that's not the way of Jesus' the healer.

Where do we start?

We begin with something Catholics know well - the power of prayer.

We turn to prayer and claim the wounds of the church as our own. We take the pain upon ourselves and hand it all over to Jesus, expecting a miracle.

Miracle it is, and it happens within us. Jesus' healing extends to the judgements we've made about those wounds. We feel release, a cleansing, and a love for the church as an undivided whole.

Like all of God's graces, words are too small to describe it.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

Liza Minnelli showed up, along with Calvin Klein, Tom Wolfe and George Plimpton.

Yoko Ono arrived a bit early; she was giving a speech.

One could have easily mistaken Andy Warhol's memorial service for a society event rather than a religious one, were it not for the eulogy given by the artist's friend John Richardson.

He spoke of Warhol's "secret piety", which "inevitably changes our perception of an artist who fooled the world into believing his only obsessions were money, fame and glamour, and that he was cool to the point of callousness. Never take Andy at face value."

It is this secret piety that the Vatican Museums hope to uncover in their major exhibition of his work next year. Indeed, the Catholic faith is the only constant theme in his strange life.

Warhol's parents were born in a village on the northern border of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

They were Ruthenians: members of a small Byzantine Catholic Church that grew out of Cyril and Methodius's mission to the Carpathian Mountains.

In 1909, his father moved to Pittsburgh, home of the largest Ruthenian community outside Europe.

His mother followed in 1921, and their son Andrew was born seven years later.

His father worked as a coal miner until he died when Warhol was 13.

In 1955, the shoe brand I. Miller hired Warhol to illustrate its advertisements in the New York Times.

Critics compared the results to Toulouse-Lautrec's posters.

This drawing upon commercial themes in the pursuit of high culture came to define the Pop Art movement.

It also placed Warhol at the centre of the New York avant garde, and his studio (nicknamed "the Factory") became its headquarters.

The contrast with his working-class, immigrant Catholic boyhood could not be starker.

All the hallmarks of the Sixties were there: drugs, sex, radical politics, more drugs.

Several of the Warhol Superstars - minor artists whose work he promoted - overdosed or committed suicide in their twenties or thirties.

Religion kept Warhol from going over the brink.

He attended Mass almost daily. Continue reading

• Vatican Museums and the Andy Warhol Museum are finalizing a dual exhibition of Warhol's religious works in Rome and the artist's native Pittsburgh, planned for 2019.

In fact, devotion to the Blessed Virgin under this title has been common in parts of Germany for centuries.

Recently, however, the world's attention was drawn to it when Vatican Radio revealed that Pope Francis had championed the devotion decades ago in Argentina.

In the 1980s, while doing his doctoral studies in theology in Freiburg, Germany, as a Jesuit priest, Jorge Bergoglio saw a painting in a church in Augsburg entitled ‘Mary Untier of Knots'.

He was so impressed by its stark symbolism that he took postcards of the image back with him to his home province of Argentina.

He used to enclose copies in every letter he sent out.

An Argentinian artist-friend of his made an oil-on-canvas miniature painting of the picture, which was hung in the chapel of Colegio del Salvador in Buenos Aires where Bergoglio was posted.

The college staff was so attracted by it that they persuaded the local pastor to get a larger copy made. This was displayed in the parish church of San José del Talar, in 1996.

Eventually, devotion to Mary under the title ‘Untier of Knots' spread across Latin America.

Shortly after Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected pope, as Benedict XVI, the then-Cardinal Bergoglio presented the German-born pope with a silver chalice engraved with the image of Mary Untier of Knots along with that of Our Lady of Luján, a popular Marian devotion in Argentina. Continue reading.

Source: Thinking Faith

Image: Miles Jesu