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Prayer and change
Prayer should move us to action, even if it simply makes us want to be more compassionate and faithful. Entering into a relationship with God will change us, will make us more loving, and will move us...
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The crumbs which clever minds tread underfoot
Those who have abandoned themselves to God always lead mysterious lives and receive from God exceptional and miraculous gifts by means of the most ordinary, natural and chance experiences in which...
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Reluctant
Very often we are reluctant to admit that we are the sick and sinful Jesus came to heal, and very often we prefer our self-protecting isolation to the risk of our face-to-face encounter with the Other...
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Not a manipulated extension of myself
We cannot love God or our neighbour. We love both or neither. And what love means is rejoicing in the otherness of the other because the depth of this awareness is the depth of our communion with the...
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To help
To help lift a burden, to help light a path, to help heal a hurt, to help seek a truth – these struck me as the sorts of things that human beings were created to do for one another …. Barbara Brown...
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Divine spaciousness in all the tight places
Salvation is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk, regardless of how they got there or whether they know God’s name....
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People in need of saving
We believed that God’s home was the church …, and that the world was a barren place full of lost souls in need of all the help they could get. [...] The problem is, many of the people in need of saving...
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A sin against life
If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life. Albert Camus, ‘Summer in...
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Accepting the darkness
There is a deep rightness in accepting the darkness of doubt and uncertainty on our spiritual journey, reflected as it is in the seasonal growing of the dark and of the cold. There is an appropriate...
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Time to wonder
Some thoughts on the Sabbath from Colm Tóibín’s book The Testament of Mary: The Sabbath mornings … were placid mornings, hours when stillness and ease prevailed, when we looked inside ourselves and...
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Perfect rest is an art
Some quotes from Abraham Joshua Heschel’s wonderful and inspiring book The Sabbath, first published in 1951: There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give,...
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Free to be
Those who remember and keep Sabbath find they are less driven, less coerced, less frantic to meet deadlines, free to be, rather than to do. Sabbath is not simply a pause. It is an occasion for...
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Suffering and transformation
Transformed life can only be found through confusion, struggle, literal and metaphorical deaths because we understand only from within the constellation of our present suffering. Mark Vernon in Third...
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The sky got crowded and complained
If you think that the Truth can be known From words, If you think that the Sun and the Ocean Can pass through that tiny opening Called the mouth, O someone should start laughing! Someone should start...
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You get to decide what you worship
You get to decide what you worship …. Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of … life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not...
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Myriad petty little unsexy ways
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad...
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A cozy, empty hut in the forest
We Keep Each Other Happy Like two lovers who have become lost In a winter blizzard And find a cozy, empty hut In the forest, I now huddle everywhere With the friend. God and I have built an immense...
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The liberation of saying ‘No’
It may be that vice, depravity, and crime are nearly always, or perhaps even always, in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at. Thus Simone Weil in Waiting for God....
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Life, food, air
It’s the really hungry who can smell fresh bread a mile away. For those who know their need, God is immediate – not an idea, not a theory, but life, food, air for the stifled spirit and the beaten,...
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Mystery vs certainty
Spirituality and fundamentalism are at opposite ends of the cultural spectrum. Spirituality seeks a sensitive, contemplative relationship with the sacred and is able to sustain levels of uncertainty in...
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