The true purpose of all spiritual disciplines is to clear away whatever may block our awareness of that which is God in us... It will be in order to suggest certain simple aids to this end. One of these is the practice of silence, or quiet. As a child I was accustomed...
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
Spiritual life is an ongoing experience of spiritual gestation, of giving birth to deeper dimensions of wholeness. We enter the spiritual womb many times. As the Bible says, "We...are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another" (2 Cor. 3:18),...
One of the essential paradoxes of Advent: that while we wait for God, we are with God all along, that while we need to be reassured of God's arrival, or the arrival of our homecoming, we are already at home. While we wait, we have to trust, to have faith, but it is...
Carlo Carretto, one of the great spiritual writers of our time, once spent a number of years living by himself, as a hermit, praying in the Sahara desert. When someone asked him what he thought he heard God say to him in all that silence and after all that prayer,...
“Being” means allowing God to lead even when opportunities have been postponed and the doors seem closed. That is exactly what happened to Paul. If he had not been forced to wait, he would have never heard the call to Macedonia. The same is often true for each of us....
To wait with openness and trust is an enormously radical attitude toward life. It is choosing to hope that something is happening for us that is far beyond our own imaginings. It is giving up control over our future and letting God define our life. It is living with...
Such are the two great realities of Psalm 130: suffering is real, God is real. Suffering is a mark of our existential authenticity; God is proof of our essential and external humanity. We accept suffering; we believe in God. …But there is more than a description of...
The Christian’s waiting and hoping is based on the conviction that God is actively involved in his creation and vigorously at work in redemption. Waiting does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident...
Our sense of urgency is balanced by the requirement to wait—to wait on the timing of God, which we can neither predict nor force. And the poor of the world have much to teach us about waiting—waiting with hope, purpose, and active preparation for change; waiting...