Sometimes it is as though the praise of God filled with world; as if it went out to and enfolded all creation, as for instance in the Psalms of creation or in the response which those songs have found in the hearts of God-enraptured people sucYh as St. Francis of Assisi. … This is not […]
What then is it all about? In a brilliant sentence, Benedict carefully explained the broad sweep of our being to us: “God made the world so that there could be a space where he might communicate his love, and from which the response of love might come back to him.” This passage emphasizes the central […]
Why should we consider this power to be transcendent (that is—transcending the universe as a whole)? Because if the universe was nothing prior to its beginning, then the reality which causes it to exist must be completely beyond it (independent of it). This transcendent reality which causes the universe as a whole to exist is […]
The question “why is there something rather than nothing?” is not searching after a thing within the universe, but rather the being of the universe. It is wondering why (to use the technical term) contingent things exist, that is to say, things that do not contain within themselves the reason for their own being. You […]
Do we dare say it, “it’s all for you”? The winters marked the Earth Its floor with frozen glass You slip into my arms And you quickly correct yourself Your freezing speech bubbles Seem to hold your words aloft I want the smoky clouds of laughter To swim about me forever more I will race […]
Is “image and likeness” a redundant phrase, or does it mark a distinction? Arguably the latter. To be created in God’s image is to be granted the potentiality for sharing in the divine life, a potentiality that may or may not be actualized and is shared in equally by all human beings without their consent. […]
I ventured out recently into the blogsphere and discovered this meme via Sarx (with some links in the chain A and the original). if the nature of god is omnipotent, benevolent, and anthropomorphic (that god is a person, who sees suffering as wrong, and can change all of it), why does god not act to […]
From Br. Joseph — From today’s Gospel reading, John 3:16-17: God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son,so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be […]
A thought for what needs to be done this coming year… I am a humble artist moulding my earthly clod, adding my labour to nature’s, simply assisting God. Not that my effort is needed; yet somehow, I understand, my maker has willed it that I too should have unmoulded clay in my hand. — Piet […]
From today’s reading: Before the Lord the whole universe is as a grain from a balance or a drop of morning dew come down upon the earth. But you have mercy on all, because you can do all things; and you overlook people’s sins […]
Butterfly flutters, A flower basks in the sun, Contact charges life.
The struggle to be creative is the friction of the Spirit trying to pass through you to others. It is much like electricity passing through wire. You are the wire, and the friction causes heat to make the wire malleable. And in the end, the wire itself becomes a majestic work of art formed by […]
At the beginning of his Spiritual Exercises, Saint Ignatius of Loyola wrote the Principle and Foundation as a mission statement to guide everything he did and to guide retreatants through the Exercises. About this time last year when I was in A Retreat in Daily Life, I wrote my own Principle and Foundation. It seems […]