Category: Spirit matters

If you’ve never run away from God, I wonder who your God is? Paul Tillich Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of the mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, or even, at times, without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself. […]

Tell all the truth, but tell it slantSuccess in circuit lies Emily Dickinson By love God may be grasped and held: by thought neverThe Cloud of Unknowing _______________________________________ God cannot be grasped by the mind. If he could be grasped, he would not be God.Evagrius of Pontus When we speak of God, using names and […]

For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand Gerard Manly Hopkins As a focus of absolute trust, one to whom you can give yourself without fear of betrayal, the holy mystery of God undergirds and implicitly gives direction to all of a believing person’s enterprises, principles, choices, systems of […]

This post begins a new series of meditations by Fr Philip Carter, Approaching God. This series will be accompanied by images and music from Hildegard of Bingen, medieval nun and abbess, scientist, musician, artist, mystic and saint. The notion that what we happen to apprehend directly with our five senses is all the reality there […]

Hospitality is the creation of space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Henri Nouwen Community, or how we live with others, is crucial for our world. To disappear as object of interest, like Thomas Merton, is to cease to be ego-driven, to refuse to compete or to make […]

St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) invites us to consider four degrees of love: The love of self for the sake of self.The love of God for the sake of self.The love of God for the sake of God.The love of self for the sake of God. We may illustrate these from the parable of the […]

To live fully, love wastefully and to be all that God intends me to be. John Shelby Spong ________________________________________________ Prayer is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God which is a form of love.Iris Murdoch _____________________________________________ ___________________________________________ Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart […]

Love is the pain of waking from illusion Monica Furlong Love is God’s life code; it is what instructs and informs life.Carlo Maria Martini To see things as they really are. To see someone as she really is. Simone Weil suggests that “love sees what is invisible”.  ______________________________________________________________ Who or what don’t you see? To […]

And did you get whatYou wanted from this life, even so?I did.And what did you want?To call myself beloved, to feel myselfbeloved on earth. Raymond Carver ___________________________________________ Imagine you were an oyster. The public would see you as an infrangible nut, a kind of sea-raid shelter, but you would see yourself as all mother-of­ pearl […]

The way of compassion is truly beyond seeing love as a duty, an attitude we “should” have, but simply and radically a new way of being in the world, a new way of (freely) relating. The conversion that is called for is an awakening to our true self, our true home. Such a conversion is […]