True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as “the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” Buechner’s definition starts with the self and moves toward the needs of the world; it begins, wisely,...
For generations the church has been polarized between those who see the main task being the saving of souls for heaven and the nurturing of those souls through the valley of this dark world, on the one hand, and on the other hand those who see the task of improving...
Use the things of this world as nature needs them, but not with excessive attachment. For it would be very displeasing to God if you were to set your heart on something of less value than yourself. That would be nothing but a surrender of your dignity.
The Spirit is loose in the world, and the Word of God through which and by which the cosmos was created is now moving in the world to transform the world. This is profoundly good news. The Spirit of Christ precedes us into the world. This Spirit is already at work in...
The awareness that we are yet meant to do more than we are signals where God lies in wait for us to become what we are meant to be. Then the spiritual life, the awareness of a driving energy within that is greater than ourselves, greater than anything around us,...
It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment or the courage to pay the price. One has to abandon altogether the search for security and reach out to the risk of living with both arms open. One has to embrace the world...
Saints never know they’re saints. That’s why they’re saints. They are too busy talking to God to look in the mirror. The same moles and wrinkles are there but contact with the Eternal has given them a borrowed glory. Divine conversation has left a residual luster. The...
There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down,...
I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.
Music, of course, does not remake us; the Holy Spirit does. But it seems possible that music may be one means by which the Holy Spirit makes us people who feel and respond. We are brought to our senses. We are drawn out of the darkness of self-absorption and become...