Category: Spirit matters

Hope is rooted in the past but believes in the future. Hope lies in the memory of God’s previous goodness to us in a world that is both bountiful and harsh. Joan Chittister Memory [is] not just a storehouse of the past, but also a warehouse in the present containing the building blocks of the […]

God has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. 1 Peter 1:3 Hope is a fragile plant reaching towards the sun, whose rays are radiated through the attention and care we have found in so many of the people, events and circumstances that make […]

[Faith] sees the raising of the tortured and crucified Son of Man as God’s great protest against death… Jurgen Moltmann [Faith] sees the raising of the tortured and crucified Son of Man as God’s great protest against death and against everyone who plays into death’s hands and threatens life…. Resistance is the protest of those […]

Hope is a deeply inward grace Hope is a deeply inward grace, perhaps our most basic and grandest resource. It is also a deeply communal act, when we know that “there is help on the outside of us”. For if it were an entirely inward resource, the implication would be that we all we need […]

Our human hungers are seeds of hope. Robert Durback Being human is about being hopeful. But because we are incomplete, unfinished, hopelessness is also part of the deal. To ensure that we keep this hopelessness out of our hoping, we need to live out of our deepest desires. For when we stop wanting, we stop […]

Hope: the native land of the Spirit Emily Dickinson Sir Ninian Stephen, in his eulogy at “Weary” Dunlop’s State funeral, said that “Weary” inspired his men “through sheer nobility of character, strength of purpose and strength of body….with hope when hope was faint”. This capacity to inspire hope in others was central to Jesus of […]

We thank you for your continued support of the Spirit matters blog and are glad that we have been able to bring you a time of reflection and refreshment each week. We will be back in January 2021, ready to start a new year with a new series from Fr Philip Carter on Hope.

Faith necessarily refers us to something beyond ourselves. CH Dodd Faith “is the confidence that reality is not the same as what is being felt at any given moment”. Rowan Williams The act of faith is not a leap from darkness into light. It is an affirmation that light exists beyond the darkness …..Morris West It […]

Faith releases in us a power that is beyond us. Albert Nolan The great tragedy for Christianity (it’s been said) is the transfer of faith from the dimension of personal encounter into the dimension of formal instruction. Faith then is reduced to assent, believing that a statement or claim is true. Marcus Borg says we […]

The opposite of faith is not doubt, but the closed mind. True faith can only grow and mature if it includes the elements of paradox and creative doubt. Such doubt is not the enemy of faith but an essential element of it. For faith in God does not bring the false peace of answered questions […]