· 14 July 2008 | 226 words
There is a line from a William Stafford poem: "It's for the best," my mother said, "Nothing can ever be wrong for anyone truly good." And then I look at the suffering Jesus endured, and the suffering of all people....
· 2 May 2008 | 202 words
From Br. Joseph -- What is a person? Classical Christian theology and philosophy defines a person as one who has the ability to know, to love, and to choose (to will). This is the image of God in which we...
· 18 July 2007 | 81 words
Freedom is about choice, and there are two kinds of freedom. There is a freedom to choose to do whatever you want, and another kind of freedom to choose to live for others. One freedom leads in, the other out....
· 18 July 2007 | 271 words
When I was younger, late high school and especially in college, I identified with Descartes' "I think, therefore I am." It was the motto for the Age of Rationalism. It is still often used in today's postmodernism. After finding faith,...
· 12 July 2007 | 168 words
What did God whisper to the bird to make him sing? What was said to the rose to make her unfold? And to the tree to stand tall and spread its canopy? What did the cricket hear to make him...
· 2 July 2007 | 579 words
I'm on page 148 of Paul Tillich's The Courage to Be. He has painstakingly described three types of anxiety that are part of being human (ontologically speaking). There is the anxiety of fate and death, of which the western ancients...
· 4 March 2007 | 281 words
"To sin, it is not necessary to break the rules," the sage said. "just keep them to the letter." It is more than possible to make rules for our existence, the measure of our souls. But when rule-keeping takes...
· 13 February 2007 | 318 words
From James Finley's Merton's Palace of Nowhere, Finley quotes Thomas Merton: It is...a blindness to prayer that exposes us to the pitfalls of becoming ourselves like those, ...for whom a tree has no reality until they think of cutting it...
· 13 February 2007 | 196 words
From James Finley's Merton's Palace of Nowhere: In prayer we are "useless." We do not "do" anything, but rather open ourselves to be the person God calls us to be. The Moslems say, "God does nothing and therefore there is...
· 28 January 2007 | 84 words
Found this little poem in a book laying around in the sacristy of the chapel at camp. For every pain we must bear, for every burden, for every care, there's a reason. for every grief that bows the head for...
· 17 January 2007 | 101 words
"...What I like doing best is Nothing." "How do you do Nothing," asked Pooh after he had wondered for a long time. "Well, it's when people call out at you just as you're going off to do it, 'What...
· 26 December 2006 | 152 words
Life is like a pearl: it needs a grain of sand at its center--death--as the irritant, the enemy, to stimulate the production of the mother-of-pearl of life around it. But death remains at its center. At the heart of...
· 14 December 2006 | 257 words
I have been struggling with purpose lately, my purpose. What specifically is my purpose in life? What is my part in the big picture of God's plan? I know and trust that God has a purpose for all things, including...
· 9 December 2006 | 692 words
In Three Philosophies of Life, Peter Kreeft writes about three books in the Old Testament that essentially outline three ways to live and view life: Ecclesiates, life as vanity; Job, life as suffering; and Song of Songs, life as love....
· 18 November 2006 | 345 words
At the beginning of his Spiritual Exercises, Saint Ignatius of Loyola wrote the Principle and Foundation as a mission statement to guide everything he did and to guide retreatants through the Exercises. About this time last year when I was...
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us