I once lived in community for several years with an Oblate brother who was wonderfully generous and pious to a fault. But he struggled to pick up symbol and metaphor. He took things literally. For him, what the words said is what they meant! This caused him considerable confusion and consternation when each day praying…
Recently I was listening to a religious talk show on the radio when a caller asked: How do we know that God exists? A good question. The radio host answered by saying that we know it through faith. That’s not a bad answer, except what needs to be teased out is how we know this…
Jesus was once asked why he spoke in parables. His answer is more than a little curious: I speak in parables . . . lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn again, and I should heal them. At first glance, it would seem…
In one sense, we might say that Christianity invented religion in that, before Christianity, communities of faith were mostly ethnically and tribally based. Jesus defined a family of faith differently, telling us that it is not the womb you were born out of, but the womb that you were reborn from that defines your family.…
Are we sometimes too stingy about who we allow into God’s family? Says Fr Ron Rolheiser John Muir once asked: “Why are Christians so reluctant to let animals into their stingy heaven?” Indeed, why? Especially since St Paul tells us in the Epistle to the Romans that all creation (mineral, plant, animal) is groaning to…
At a conference which I attended, a psychiatrist shared this story. A woman came to see him in considerable distress. Her anguish had to do with her last conversation with her husband before he died. She shared how they had enjoyed a good marriage for more than thirty years, with never more than a minor…
“God behaves in the psalms in ways he is not allowed to behave in systemic theology.” That quip from Sebastian Moore might be highlighted at a time when fewer people want to use the psalms as a form of prayer because they feel offended that the psalms speak of murder, revenge, anger, violence, war-making, and…
In her autobiography The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day shares how she once prayed at a low time in her life. Dorothy Day, as you know, grew up without faith. An intellectual, moving in Marxist and anti-church circles, she entered her twenties convinced that if anyone had the courage to look life square in the eye,…
Why did early Christianity alight on the ideal of virginity, when an intelligent or even just a suspicious Roman could see that its adoption would undermine the very fabric of ancient society?” That’s a comment from historian Kate Cooper and it poses some questions worth examining. Does the single state, celibacy, (vowed or otherwise) undermine…
In the movie The English Patient there’s a very heartwarming scene. A number of people from various countries are thrown together by circumstance in an abandoned villa in post-war Italy. Among them are a young nurse, attending to an English pilot who’s been badly burned in an air crash, and a young Asian man whose…