You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. No single line, outside of Scripture, has ever spoken to me as powerfully, as persistently, and as hauntingly, as that line from St Augustine. In essence, it’s Augustine’s life story – and the story of each of our…
The subtlety of hypocrisy! How easy it is not to see our own inconsistencies, even as we so clearly see the faults of others. Are we wilfully blind, or is it that we just don’t see? Is this a moral problem or a visual one? Consider these examples: In his travels, the 18th Century explorer,…
Someone once asked Thérèse of Lisieux if it was wrong to fall asleep while in prayer. Her answer: “Absolutely not. A little child is equally pleasing to her parents, awake or asleep – probably more when asleep!” That’s more than a warm, cute answer. There’s a wisdom in her reply that’s generally lost to us,…
A friend of mine shares this story. He was an only child. When he was in his late twenties, still single, building a successful career and living in the same city as his mother and father, his father died, leaving his mother widowed. His mother, who had centred her life on her family and on…
A colleague of mine, a clinical therapist, shares this story: A woman came to him in considerable distress. Her husband had recently died of a heart attack. His death had been sudden and at a most inept time. They’d been happily married for 30 years and, during all those years, had never had a major…
Andrew Greeley once suggested that we might profitably meditate on the following vision of heaven: The condition of physical ecstasy and emotional satisfaction which results from sexual intercourse between two people who are deeply in love is the best anticipation currently available to us of our permanent condition in the resurrected state. “The powerful inspirational…
A number of years ago, I attended the funeral of a man who died at the age of ninety. From every indication, he had been a good man, solidly religious, the father of a large family, a man respected in the community, and a man with a generous heart. However, he had also been a…
The 13th Century Persian poet and Sufi mystic, Rumi, once said that this is how faith moves in our lives: We live with a deep secret that sometimes we know, then not, and then know again. New York columnist David Brooks says something quite similar. In his book, The Second Mountain, he shares how he…
In a 1990s movie, City Slickers, there’s a scene that sheds light on the importance of private integrity. Three men, New Yorkers, close friends, have gone off together for a summer to ride on a cattle drive in the hope that this experience will help them sort through their respective mid-life issues. There is no…
When Jesus instituted the Eucharist at the Last Supper, he held up bread and wine as two elements within which to make himself especially present to us. Since that time, now more than 2,000 years ago, Christians celebrating the Eucharist have used the same two things, bread and wine, to ask Christ to bless this…