Category: Prayer
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No tricks and no short cuts
I’ve been reading Thomas Merton this week and found both helpful and challenging. I love this quote in particular: “… in the the spiritual life there are no tricks and no short cuts. Those who imagine that they can discover spiritual gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God’s will and his…
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Children of Grace
Every so often you read a book that you just love, to the extent that it seems a waste to rush it, but all the same you chug through it. Then you tell everyone about it, and then even that’s not enough and you start to think of who you could buy copies for. Culture…
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Becoming fully human
He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, “Do you see anything?” He looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.” Once more Jesus put his hands on…
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Beauty and Justice
There is a great deal to lament as we look around the world, with conflicts all around: from the small places with in ourselves and the communities around us to the more tragic and dramatic unrest in the middle east and further to Sudan, the Congo and Zimbabwe. It can leave us feeling overwhelmed and…
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Silence
Following our entering through the ‘door of sanctuary’ with virtue, Abbot Christopher suggests we need to lay a floor of silence. The Abbot recommends a period of silence in the morning and another at night – effectively book ending our days with silence. Catherine de Hueck.Doherty has this to say about silence and the ‘desert…
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Door to sanctuary
For the life caught up with following Jesus, the inward journey and outward journey are linked and find energy and momentum from each other — like a pendulum swinging back and forth. Both motions orientated around the fulcrum of God, but one expressing that relationship outwardly in love and service to others and the other…
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A harvest reflection
I wrote the following reflection for a the lead up to the lord’s supper at the harvest event we had last night. We sow seeds, but we did not create them. We plant them in the ground; a soil we did not form. The rain nourishes it, with waters we did not produce. The sun…
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Reality and Hope
It’s taken me a while to continue the series of post that have stopped off at points of pain, hope and the prophetic imagination. My eldest brother has wonderfully distilled Brueggemann’s thesis as follows: In his book The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann identifies two modes of Old Testament prophets. The first is the message of future…
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A prayer for the blessed life
The following is a Franciscan Prayer I stumbled on: May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart. May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.…
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Energizing Visions
I ended the last post with a couple of quotes from Henri Nouwen concerning eschatological dreams and visions of harmony. Here’s a quick reminder: These visions… offer us hope when we are close to despair, courage when we are tempted to give up on life, and trust when suspicion seems the more logical attitude. Without…