Holy delight and joy is the great antidote to despair and is a wellspring of genuine gratitude—the kind that starts at our toes and blasts off from our loins and diaphragm through the top of our head, flinging our arms and our eyes and our voice upward toward our good...
It cost God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost him crucifixion. from Mere Christianity ————————Gender-neutral version: It cost God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills...
Silence is therefore important even in the life of faith and in our deepest encounter with God. We cannot always be talking, praying in words, cajoling, reasoning, or keeping up a kind of devout background music. Much of our well-meant interior religious dialogue is,...
Keeping silence is work indeed. It goes against our obsessive need to communicate, socialize, produce, achieve. It is a confrontation with our emptiness, self-deceptions, even self-image—those things we try so hard to hide under blankets of activity and sound. Silence...
The ancient writers spoke of Wisdom as an initiate in the mysteries of God’s knowledge. I think this is the sort of wisdom we may find in the cave of the heart. When we turn inward, when we give ourselves to the shadows of unknowing, when we open ourselves to God, we...
God’s Spirit is poured out upon a community of believers. The Holy Spirit is not a “personal” gift from God that each believer privatizes—”you can have your Spirit if I can have mine.” This same Spirit of one God “appeared among them—on each of them” as the...
The Holy Spirit as the awe-inspiring power of life and of love is a reality with which every human being is familiar, whatever name we give to it. Spirit is the very aliveness of our life. This holds true for every one of us. We differ only by the degree to which we...
That moment was life transforming. Something deep in my spirit was being settled once and for all. From this moment there could be no turning back; there could be no erasure of the indelible imprint of its power. I was alone with God. A holy God. An awesome God. A God...
Perhaps our worship of God in the shadow of the glory of the past occurs because we fasten our attention on heroes of the faith of bygone days. The giants of yesteryear grow bigger each day with the food of our imagination until their size is tremendous. To be sure,...
I am afraid that in our day we are too often prone to think that God is only worshiped in the “Wow” moments, and then we begin to feel pressure as musician-ministers to “produce” those moments. We confuse inspiration and worse yet, cheap thrill with Spirit power. It...