I discovered a plethora of quotes in reading Radical Hospitality: Benedict’s Way to Love by Fr. Daniel Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt. Each quote kind of stands on its own, but together they form a picture of Benedictine spirituality. Hospitality is the answer to hostility. Jesus said to love your neighbor; hospitality is how. (Introduction) […]
From John Kirvan’s book, Raw Faith: Let nothing disturb you. Let nothing make you afraid. — St. Teresa of Avila It’s amazing how many of us think that being anxious and worried is a sign that we are spiritual, that we are committed, that we are not like everyone else, content to live on the […]
To him who overcomes I will give him a white stone, and on the stone a new name written which no one knows except him who receives it. (Revelation 2:17) From a chapter on heaven, C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain comments: I am considering not how, but why, [God] makes each soul unique. […]
From a chapter on hell, C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain concludes: The doors of hell are locked on the inside. …They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved: just as the blessed, forever submitting to obedience, become through all eternity more and more free. In the long run […]
Does God change? Did Jesus die on The Cross as atonement for God’s curse of death on humanity?
In the old days, on Easter night, the Russian peasants used to carry the blest fire home from church. The light would scatter and travel in all directions through the darkness, and the desolation of the night would be pierced and dispelled as lamps came on in the windows of the farm houses, one by […]
Selected quotes from the book “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” by Mitch Albom
In Henri Nouwen’s book, Can You Drink the Cup?, the cup of life is a cup of sorrows and a cup of joys. It is a cup of blessings. The cup is your life. You are asked to drink it. Drink it to the bottom. Drinking the cup is not a heroic act with a […]
An excerpt from Henri Nouwen’s book, Can You Drink the Cup?: “Can you drink the cup that I am going to drink?” When Jesus brought this question to John and James, and when they impulsively answered with a big “We can,” he made this terrifying, yet hope-filled prediction: “Very well; you shall drink my cup.” […]
Community is like a large mosaic. Each little piece seems so insignificant. One piece is bright red, another cold blue or dull green, another warm purple, another sharp yellow, another shining gold. Some look precious, others ordinary. Some look valuable, others worthless. Some look gaudy, others delicate. As individuals stones, we can do little with […]
We are not begotten by God, we are only made by Him: in our natural state we are not sons of God, only (so to speak) statues. We have not got ‘Zoe’ or spiritual life: only ‘Bios’ or biological life which is presently going to run down and die. Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share a life which was begotten, not made, which has always existed and always will exist. Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as He does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us. He came into this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of life He has—by what I call ‘good infection’. Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing more. — C.S. Lewis, from “Mere Christianity”
Anthony de Mello tells the following story in the forward of his book, Awareness: A man found an eagle’s egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking […]
I happened across a web page full of quotes and started to ponder over this one: I don’t want to be rich and famous. I want to be rich and anonymous. — Anonymous My first thought was sure, I wouldn’t mind the money. Who needs the fame if it means paparazzi hounding you and your name […]
The spirit enters a wilderness and travels blindly in directions that seem to lead away from vision, away from God, away from all fulfillment and joy. It may become almost impossible to believe that this road goes anywhere at all except to a desolation full of dry bones—the ruin of all our hopes and good intentions.
In an earlier entry, I mentioned something about having doubts. Doubts are funny things. You are never sure about them. (Sorry, pun intended.) But seriously, it is the fact that you are unsure that makes things challenging. I don’t know about you, but my mind craves certainty. I have reached a point in my life […]
In my previous entry, I mentioned something about knowing that my faith had nothing to do with my feelings. Thomas Merton, in New Seeds of Contemplation, wrote the following about faith: First of all, faith is not an emotion, not a feeling. It is not a blind subconscious urge toward something vaguely supernatural. It is […]
Sometime in the middle of August, I ran into Becca, one of my former students. She was about to start her freshman year in college as a pre-med major. As we caught up on our recent histories, she told me that her boss Charlie was in the hospital in a coma. He was in there […]
Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are not prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity and love. — Thomas Merton
Kallistos Ware, Desert Fathers, parable, story, sin, silence
I have been trying to write this journal entry for over a week now. I have started and stopped several times, and eventually erased all of them because I never liked where they were heading. The topic is about prayer, and none of the words I can find seem to describe what I am going […]
This list has been making the email circuit. It is the Bible condensed down to only 50 words. This list hits upon the Golden Thread that runs throughout the Bible, but at the expense of the beauty in the story. God made Adam bit Noah arked Abraham split Joseph ruled Jacob fooled Bush talked Moses […]
This quote about choices by C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, seems applicable to my previous journal entry: People often think that Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, ‘If you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.’ I do not think […]
Back in April, I wrote about a problem I had with understanding Jesus’ words on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34) In my prior, faithless life as a skeptic and agnostic, I saw this as a big hole in all of the reasons for believing in […]
I have a friend who says that there is no such things as coincidences. Everything happens for a reason. The mathematician inside of me is skeptical with images of probability calculations and statistical charts. I am resistant to ascribe a higher meaning to why I ran into a former student yesterday, but it feels at […]
I am currently reading the book Reaching Out by Henri J. M. Nouwen. In this book, Nouwen describes three type of movements or spectrums. Nouwen views our spiritual “ascent” as evolving in three movements. The first movement, loneliness to solitude, focuses on the spiritual life as it relates to the experience of our own selves. […]