Welcome to the first post of our new weekly blog.
Fr Philip Carter offers a ministry of spirituality, with a series of meditations on some questions that we may ponder as we consider our life in God.
You will find here his reflections and questions for meditation, images, music and poetry to enrich your life’s journey.
Preparing for meditation
Find a place to sit comfortably. Mobile phone on silent.
Take your time. Breathe in and out a few times, slowing down …
Don't try too hard. Relax. Be open.
Prayer isn't telling what God should be doing but becoming aware of what God is already doing.
"The best prayer is to rest in the goodness of God and to let that goodness reach right down to your lowest place of need." (Julian of Norwich)
When you seem ready, begin.
You don't have to finish the exercise now, or today.
If and when something arrests your attention, stay there. Savour the words. Let them speak to you.
That may be enough for the next few minutes.
Richard Wilbur
The longest journey is the journey inwards
Dag Hammarsjköld
Our primary vocation is “to be, to exist in ourselves, to be bearers of our names, answering to the word which gives each its distinctive identity”. The question is not: “What must I do?” but “Who is the person God is calling me to become?”
The ancient question “Who am I?” leads inevitably to the equally important question “Whose am I?”
I don’t know who-or what- put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t
even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone-or Something- and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.
Dag Hammarskjöld
When will people discover that in the core of people there lives the divine reality?
Pedro Aruppe S.J.
A person must be in contact with her own reality if God is to be real to her.
W.J. Connolly
As a “victim of mistaken identity”, the self I normally take myself to be, full of thoughts, feelings, and actions,is only a fraction of who I really am, my True Self, whose secret identity remains hidden in the love and mercy of God. This is why Jesus said: the “one who hangs on to her (“little”) life will lose it, and the one who loses it will find it”. His call to repent asks me to “go beyond” my everyday mind, for this mind created the situation I now find myself in and will never be the mind that gets me out of it.
The question before me, now that I
am old, is not how to be dead,
which I know from enough practice,
but how to be alive, as these worn
hills still tell, and some paintings
of Paul Cezanne, and this mere singing wren, who thinks he’s alive forever, this instant, and maybe.
Wendell Berry
Sabbaths VIII
What vision of the human person do I live out of?
Before asking “What can I do?” I need to ask “What can I be?”
How can I be attentive? How can I find myself being addressed, and in being addressed, to find myself? How can I be real, and authentic?
Is my image of God a creative, hope-full, life-giving one?
What needs to change for me to be able to see more clearly?
