God’s kingdom is creation healed Hans Kung The Kingdom is an attractive ….. What you are in love withwhat seizes your imaginationwill affect everything. Pedro Aruppe SJ Jesus paints in bold brush strokes a picture of the reign or kingdom of God. It’s not a place – or a program: it comes as a surprise, […]
A Spirituality of Communion: discovering our worth
It is precisely this space, which we might say God clears for us, in which we find our inherent worth and dignity. God’s first gift for us is to be able to say, “l AM”. St Augustine When I was born all creation stood up and said, “God is!” Meister Eckhart Being seen: Malcolm X, […]
A Spirituality of Communion: a hidden wholeness
a ‘hidden wholeness’ Thomas Merton An Aboriginal woman said a few years ago: “We Aboriginal people are spiritual people struggling to be human. You white Australians are humans struggling to be spiritual”. If the Enlightenment focused on knowledge , and one of the marks of Post-Modernism is information (and more and more of it) – […]
A Spirituality of Communion: the gift of otherness
The way forward is the way to someone else. John Taylor I cannot be me without youand we cannot be us without themand together we have a futureIn our African language we say, “A person is a person through other persons”. I would not know how to be a human being at all except I […]
A Spirituality of Communion: creating a culture of conversation
humanity is a family which has hardly met. Theodore Zelden The Spirit or “Go-between” God is the life-giving, erotic impulse, the spark of recognition, the relational pull and attraction in whom we find life. Jesus as the Word reminds us that our relationship with God is a kind of conversation, a “dialogue of salvation”. When […]
A Spirituality of Communion: “to see or to perish”
to see or to perish Teilhard de Chardin God “sees” and “attends” – and in the act of seeing God creates. Another way of saying this is to say God “makes room” for creation by constricting divine power. This quintessential female experience – making room for another – is always creative – it is a […]
A spirituality of communion: “fostering a climate where communion takes place”
This week begins a seven-part series A Spirituality of Communion. As an additional resource a PDF of the text of Fr Philip’s meditation is available at the link at the end of the post. fostering a climate where communion takes placeElizabeth O’Connor Let there be spaces in your togethernessKahlil Gibran The word salvation (like the […]
Fully Alive, Fully Human: Radical action begins with radical contemplation.
What sort of rhythm of life have you noticed you need? Get in touch with a time(s) when God’s presence touched you. Can you imagine that same God moving and acting in you now – for the sake of our world? What’s God saying to you now? What time and space and solitude do you […]
Fully Alive, Fully Human: Prayer, enlarging the heart
Real prayer leads to action, leads to what we can do for people. But it also saves us from fantasies of omnipotence, of imagining that we can do for people what we manifestly can’t do, and from the anxiety and guilt feelings such fantasies evoke. And praying for people also makes us sensitive to their […]
Fully Alive, Fully Human: Catalyst for change
Michael Ramsey, in his book on the Transfiguration, distinguishes between archaism (yearning for the golden past), futurism (lost in a fantasy unrelated to reality), escapism (which scarcely needs an explanation), and transfiguration – the faith whereby “we bring the total situation as we ourselves participate in it, into a larger context which gives it new […]