You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. Do the thing you think you cannot do.
01403 – Look Fear in the Face
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01371 – Living Honestly with Our Dust
It is something we all have experience with--the dust of our lives. We miss the mark of God's best for us when we believe the illusion that our dustiness is only in part of us. Our lives are not...as shiny clean as we like to think they are. Our lives are not free of...
01349 – We are Loved!
We are not loved because we are so beautiful and good. We are beautiful and good because we are loved. from Theology of Joy
01333 – Dawn: An Awakening in Love
The dawn is an awakening to a deepening realization of who we really are in and with God and the world, and of what has been going on within us in the night. Always, and most important, the dawn is an awakening in love. Contemplatives of all traditions agree on one...
01324 – The Silence of God in the Company of Friends
Jesus experienced the silence of God in the company and companionship of his closest friends. Did they fail him? Yes, perhaps here more than anytime earlier in his ministry, but they did not fail him completely, at least not yet. They were with him--awake or asleep,...
01318 – Faith: Exploring, Exposing, & Testing
To have faith is to explore--and go on exploring--the life of the spirit on the only journey that matters: that of becoming a more rounded and authentic human being. It is to expose yourself to what has been thought of most value by past generations and test it in the...
01262 – God is the Subject of Worship
Because God is the subject of worship, we must back up a step to recall that, before liturgy can involve the work of the people who offer their praise, it begins with the presence of God graciously inviting that response. It seems to me that some of the worship wars...
01247 – Faith: Propositional Truth vs. Personal Experience
When the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said that God is dead, he was not making an ontological point. He was making an existential point. He was not announcing that God had died, but that our experience of God had died. This was due, in part, to...
01181 – Studying Hymnody
A hymn can be defined as a poetic statement of a personal religious encounter or insight, universal in its truth, and suitable for corporate expression when sung in stanzas to a hymn tune. Perhaps few forms of poetry are so widely known and used, and so generally...
01162 – Jesus: Human and Divine
The God who in and through Jesus reveals Himself is human. And the human being who emerges in and through Jesus is divine. This is the specific characteristic of the Christian experience of God and human beings, one that is different from that of Judaism and paganism....