There is no sense of absence where there has been no sense of presence. What makes absence hurt, what makes it ache, is the memory of what used to be there but is no longer. Absence is the arm flung across the bed in the middle of the night, the empty space where a...
I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me - -that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the...
Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.
If you're exhausted, rest. If you don't feel like starting a new project, don't. If you don't feel the urge to make something new, just rest in the beauty of the old, the familiar, the known. If you don't feel like talking, stay silent. If you're fed up with the news,...
It's okay to grieve and hope at the same time.It's okay to exhale all of your loss and sadness and pain and feel an aching emptiness words cannot express.And it's okay, in the very next breath, to inhale joy and expectation and assurance with all the strength you...
I am convinced that we all long for the presence of God with a deep, aching hunger, a hunger as sure as the hunger for food, but with this difference--we do not always know how to fill it. We do not always know what we are looking for. Saint Augustine observed that...
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don't open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
When people are empty of Christ, a thousand and one other things come and fill them up: jealousies, hatreds, boredom, melancholy, resentment, a worldly outlook, worldly pleasures. Try to fill your soul with Christ so that it’s not empty.
The sense of being stranded in the midst of life . . . is enough to drain a person’s very personality until there is little left to recognize. Where did the joy go all of a sudden? Where did the feeling of self-confidence disappear to in the midst of this emptiness?...
Corporate worship can become empty—it can turn into an abstraction—outside of each individual worship taking on full responsibility, for each person is the church, and it is the church that is to be at worship, individual by individual. In corporate worship, it is not...