Our sense of urgency is balanced by the requirement to wait—to wait on the timing of God, which we can neither predict nor force. And the poor of the world have much to teach us about waiting—waiting with hope, purpose, and active preparation for change; waiting...
I said to my soul, be still and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God… I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith...
Saints never know they’re saints. That’s why they’re saints. They are too busy talking to God to look in the mirror. The same moles and wrinkles are there but contact with the Eternal has given them a borrowed glory. Divine conversation has left a residual luster. The...
One of the greatest challenges of the spiritual life is to receive God’s forgiveness. There is something in us humans that keeps us clinging to our sins and prevents us from letting God erase our past and offer us a completely new beginning. Sometimes it even seems as...
Music, of course, does not remake us; the Holy Spirit does. But it seems possible that music may be one means by which the Holy Spirit makes us people who feel and respond. We are brought to our senses. We are drawn out of the darkness of self-absorption and become...
Lent has begun, and we need to live in this dark place between the ashes and the bread and wine, between the declaration of our mortality and the declaration of Christ’s redeeming work. Lent is a time to reckon with the reality of the darkness. We do so with hope,...
Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of meaningless and empty life… It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as...
I said to the man who stood at the gate of years, “Give me light, that I may tread safely into the unknown.” And the man replied, “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than the known way.”...
Even so, however strongly we believe that our relationship with God begins here and now, life in its fullness—life described as “eternal” because it only rings true if it is somehow analogous to the depth and quality of our best, seemingly timeless, earthly...
The story of Jesus enables me to envision God as One who genuinely cares for each and all of us. In Jesus, God confronts the Darkness face to face, Incarnate, for our sake. Jesus is Light to the gentle face of God. The story of Jesus says that God laughs with us in...