Christmas is a 12-day feast. It begins on the evening of December 24th and ends on the evening of January 5th, or Twelfth Night. Practice a deeper Christmas. Stay with the story of the human God. It means so much that God is one of us. The mystery is too great for one...
Waiting in hope is an active spiritual practice. It requires a fundamental trust in God's faithfulness and the humility to allow the mystery of God's work to unfold over time.
It dawned on me that there’s a difference between doubting God and doubting my understanding of God. Would I be able to doubt my understanding of God while simultaneously trusting God beyond my understanding? In a strange way, that question for the first time in my...
Before conversion, we tend to think that God is out there. After transformation, God is not out there and we don’t look at reality. We look from reality. We’re in the middle of it now; we’re a part of it. This whole thing is...
It is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.
(Father Mychal Judge's last homily with NYFD on Sept 10, 2001:) That's the way it is. Good days. And bad days. Up days. Down days. Sad days. Happy days. But never a boring day on this job. You do what God has called you to do. You show up. You put one foot in front of...
Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.
In essence, adaptive capacity is applied creativity. It is the ability to look at a problem or crisis and see an array of unconventional solutions. Adaptive capacity includes the quality Keats found essential to the genius of Shakespeare--negative capability. This...
One of the hardest things we must do sometimes is to be present to another person's pain without trying to 'fix' it, to simply stand respectfully at the edge of that person's mystery and misery.
An analogy: You are responsible for fifty teenagers. So you gather them together and put them in the parish hall and tell them to dance. You go for a cup of coffee. You return and witness this scene, a typical one: four or five girls dancing in the middle of the hall,...