Seasons of waiting are seasons of contemplation—of quietness and resting in God, of letting go, of self-yielding. They are times when we watch and listen with the eyes and ears of our heart. Advent, more than any other liturgical season, is about this kind of...
Work is not primarily a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to...
What are you hoping to accomplish with your life? When you get where you’re going, where will you be? If you spend forty years being a lawyer, engineer, salesperson, nurse, what will you have accomplished? If you’ve had only a job all those years, you may not have...
The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do. What if the gravel of a parking lot looks as promising to God as the floorboards of a...
Little by little, Christians became devoted to their comforts instead: the soft couch, the flannel sheets, the leg of lamb roasted with rosemary. These things made them feel safe and cared for—if not by God, then by themselves. They decided there was no contradiction...
Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish—separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world. But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two. Earth is so thick with divine...
Learning to say no is how we clear space for a few carefully planted yesses to grow. Saying no to lesser gods is part of saying yes to God. from Christian Century
If the soul is to know God, it must also forget itself and lose itself. For as long as it sees itself, it will not see and know God.
Now testimony is…”who we are and who we are becoming.” Our stories no longer tell tales of spiritual acquiescence and conformity. Rather, they tell of finding meaning, finding unique selves, and finding God in a confusing and chaotic world. Contemporary thinkers have...
This internal dying or death has two closely related dimensions of meaning. On the one hand, it is a dying of the self as the center of its own concern. On the other hand, it is a dying to the world as the center of security and identity. These—the self and the...