Sometimes there’s nothing as helpful as a good metaphor. In his book, The God Instinct, Tom Stella shares this story: A number of men who made their living as porters were hired one day to carry a huge load of supplies for a group on safari. Their loads were unusually heavy and the trek through…
Aging as a natural monastery
What is a monastery? How do monasteries work? St Benedict (480-547AD) who is considered the founder of Western monasticism, offered this counsel as an essential rule for his monks: Stay in your cell and it will teach all you need to know. Properly understood, this is a rich metaphor, not a literal counsel. When…
I hate mindless crowds
I hate crowds, at least most of them. I’m okay at football games, where a crowd has bracketed its sanity for a couple of hours for a cathartic release. But I hate those crowds that are caught up in a fever that feeds off group think, be that a cultural fad, a political ideology, a…
After the bloom has left the rose
What is our deepest centre? Normally we take that to mean the deepest part of our heart, the deepest part of our soul, our affective centre, our moral centre, that place inside of us which Thomas Merton called le pointe vierge. And that is a good way of imagining it. But there’s another. John of…
Praying the psalms
God behaves in the psalms in ways that God is not allowed to behave in theology. That quip comes from Sebastian Moore and should be highlighted at a time when fewer people want to use the psalms in prayer because they feel offended by what they sometimes find there. More and more, we see people…
The ‘dark night’ as impasse
What happens to us when we experience a dark night of the soul? What’s happening and what’s to be our response? There are libraries of literature on this, each book or article making its own point, but here I want to share a rather unique and highly insightful take on this by Constance FitzGerald, a…
The spirituality of Eugene de Mazenod
During the years I have been writing this column, I have rarely mentioned the fact that I belong to a religious order, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. That omission is not an evasion, since being an Oblate of Mary Immaculate is something of which I am quite proud. However, I rarely flag the fact…
The law of gravity and the Holy Spirit
A sound theology and a sound science will both recognise that the law of gravity and the Holy Spirit are one in the same principle. There isn’t a different spirit undergirding the physical than the spiritual. There’s one spirit that’s speaking through both the law of gravity and the Sermon on the Mount. If we…
Preserve us from false piety!
Piety is the enemy of humour, at least whenever something less than piety is masquerading as piety. Here’s an example: I once lived in community with an overly serious man who, after someone would tell a colourful joke, would bring us back to earth with the question, “Would you tell a joke like that in…
Only in silence
The Belgian spiritual writer, Bieke Vandekerckhove, comes by her wisdom honestly. She didn’t learn what she shares from a book or even primarily from the good example of others. She learned what she shares through the crucible of a unique suffering, being hit at the tender age of 19 with a terminal disease that promised…