Hell is never a nasty surprise waiting for a basically happy person. Hell can only be the full-flowering of a pride and selfishness that have, through a long time, twisted a heart so thoroughly that it considers happiness as unhappiness and has an arrogant disdain for happy people. If you are essentially warm of heart…
As a young boy, I longed to be a professional athlete but I had to soon accept the unwelcome fact that I simply wasn’t gifted with an athlete’s body. Speed, strength, coordination, instinct, vision… I got by in ordinary life with what I had been given of these, but I wasn’t physically robust enough to…
There’s a haunting text in the Book of Revelations where poetic image, for all its beauty, can be dangerously misleading. The author there writes: “So the angel swung his sickle over the earth and cut the earth’s vintage. He threw it into the great winepress of God’s fury.” A fierce angel cleansing the world! God…
Why don’t we live happier lives? Why are we forever caught up in frustrations, tensions, angers and resentments? The reasons of course are too many to name. Each day, as Jesus himself tells us, brings problems enough for the day. We’re unhappy for reasons too many to count. And yet it can be helpful to…
We live in a world wherein most everything over-stimulates our grandiosity, even as we are handed less and less tools to deal with that. Several years ago, Robert L. Moore wrote a very significant book, Facing the Dragon. The dragon that most threatens us, he believes, is the dragon of our own grandiosity, that sense…
“I am a citizen, not of Athens or Greece, but of the world.” Socrates wrote those words more than 2,400 years ago. Today more than ever these are words which we would need to appropriate because, more and more, our world and we ourselves are sinking into some unhealthy forms of tribalism where we are…
The Gospels tell us that after King Herod died, an angel appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, telling him: “Get up! Take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those seeking the child’s life are now dead” (Matthew 2: 19-20). The angel, it would seem, spoke prematurely,…
“The most damaging idolatry is not the golden calf but enmity against the other.” The renowned anthropologist, Rene Girard, wrote that and its truth is not easily admitted. Most of us like to believe that we are mature and big-hearted and that we do love our neighbours and are free of enmity towards others. But…
Pain will flow into us more deeply when we take God seriously not because God wants it or because pain is somehow more blessed than joy
The spirituality writer, Tom Stella, tells a story about three monks at prayer in their monastery chapel. The first monk imagines himself being carried up to Heaven by the angels. The second monk imagines himself already in Heaven, chanting God’s praises with the angels and saints. The third monk cannot focus on any holy thoughts…