To truly love is to work for a just equity of power between nations, races, and genders, and in our day-to-day relationships and transactions. It is to oppose all patterns of power over another. This is why [Simone] Weil appeals again and again to the ancient symbol...
Whether rich or poor, male or female…our stories are all stories of searching. We search for a good self to be and for good work to do. We search to become human in a world that tempts us always to be less than human or looks to us to be more. We search to love and to...
Worship is both the heart and heartache of contemporary religious life. In many churches, worship is an exciting, meaningful and inspirational moment. In many churches of today, however, worship is a battleground for its membership, an opportunity for fracturing and...
It is extremely strange, and extremely interesting, that the stories of Jesus’ resurrection never mention the future hope of the Christian… Instead, we find a commission within the present world: “Jesus is risen, therefore you have work ahead of you.” The stories are...
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...
Plenty of people write to me in the hope of getting some spectacular work to do, and at the same time they fail to see the worthwhileness of the immediate duty God has given them.
How to achieve “unity of life”? You start by giving over space in your crowded schedule of work and family duties to prayer and the sacraments. But even people who pray daily can still fence off their praying and working lives in separate compartments. Unity of life...
I too had noticed that our prayers for others flow more easily than those we offer on our own behalf. And it would be nice to accept your view that this just shows we are made to live by charity. I’m afraid, however, I detect two much less attractive reasons for the...
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...