Jesus refuses to bolster the illusion that we protect ourselves by good and faithful living. …He dismisses that assumption by ignoring [the inquirers’] question. What Jesus does do is recognize [their] vulnerability, their feeling of being small and fragile, which...
Am I afraid to die? I am every time I let myself be seduced by the noisy voices of my world telling me that my “little life” is all I have and advising me to cling to it with all my might. But when I let these voices move to the background of my life and listen to...
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...