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.
Learning Jesus is discovering that he is an alive and contemporary Jesus.
This is how God is; the one who shares our tiredness and burdens. And everything he said came out of his own lived experience of life and of God. Learning Jesus is awakening to the realisation that his inner experience is ours, if only we knew it.
Come unto me all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
Matthew 11: 28-30
God is intimately and immediately, deeply and profoundly, lovingly and passionately and vulnerably present to the whole cosmos and to all of humanity, and to each and every one of us. Jesus, the human one, the Son of Man, invites us – especially when we are weary and carrying heavy burdens, to come to him and learn from him. As Julian of Norwich says: “The best prayer is to rest in the goodness of God and to let that goodness reach right down to our lowest depth of need”.
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring goodness to the poor.
Luke 4:18
The befriending Spirit of God – in a spirit of solidarity – declares our true vocation. We flourish by giving ourselves away. Self transcendence – for the sake of the other – is where we find ourselves. Jesus is the very truth of our existence. He shows us who we really are.
Blessed are you who are poor, for the reign of God is yours.
Luke 6:20
We are in the right place when we are poor. Poverty is truly the “hidden component of every self-transcending act”. We have nothing to brag about before God. We do not belong to ourselves. We are dependent creatures: we are “creatures of borrowed breath”: everything is gift. Our treasure, our coming to ourselves, springs from the mystery of God. Jesus is the very truth of our existence: we are Christologically and Paschally structured: we flourish when we give ourselves away.
The images in this post are linocut prints by Azaria Mbatha. At the top of the post is a detail of his print Jesus at Work, and in the body of the post is his representation of the Sermon on the Mount.
For a printable PDF of the text of this meditation please click on the link below.
