I hope you have had a wonderful and prayerful Lent, and that your Holy Week is likewise a time for reflection and contemplative waiting. Here’s looking forward to Easter — and the Easter season. May it be filled with joy, warmth, and plenty of “alleluias”! One thing that won’t be part of this Easter season: new posts on my blog. I’m taking the Easter season — basically, March 26 through May 15 — as a kind of mini-sabbatical. So I do not... Read more
I hope you have had a wonderful and prayerful Lent, and that your Holy Week is likewise a time for reflection and contemplative waiting. Here’s looking forward to Easter — and the Easter season. May it be filled with joy, warmth, and plenty of “alleluias”! One thing that won’t be part of this Easter season: new posts on my blog. I’m taking the Easter season — basically, March 26 through May 15 — as a kind of mini-sabbatical. So I do not... Read more
Many years ago, when God was a boy and I was an Episcopalian, I heard a lovely Easter sunday sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Francis Wade at St. Alban’s Church, in the shadow of the National Cathedral. He started out by pointing out that we have tables that will tell exactly what day Easter Sunday falls on, well, for every year as far ahead as you would care to calculate. He noted that pretty much every year on Easter, we... Read more
A post on this blog received the following comment yesterday: Having been with the Catholic Church and seminary trained for all my 71 years of life . I am naturally contemplative . But I do now believe practising formal meditation/contemplation is false . Aren’t we missing the point if we try and set time aside for contemplation? Surely if we are made in Gods image we are already suffused with Gods holy grace and we are divinised, so if we... Read more
Did you know that when Pope Francis was a little boy, he wanted to be a butcher when he grew up? Or that, as a young man, his favorite dance was the tango? These are just two of many delightful surprises found in Dear Pope Francis: The Pope Answers Letters from Children Around the World, newly published by Loyola Press. Children from Jesuit schools around the world were invited to write a brief letter to the pope, asking him one question,... Read more
A friend of mine posed the following question recently on Facebook: You may have written about this before but how about dry times in prayer? What to do? Does it really mean anything? Can we have an impact on it or do we patiently wait it out? The fancy term here is “aridity.” I suspect anyone who has attempted a sustained, daily (or at least regular) practice of prayer encounters this sooner or later. A sense of dryness, as if... Read more
“Silence is where we speak something deeper than our words…” “Silence returns us to what is real.” These are two of many jewels of insight spoken over the course of In Pursuit of Silence, a luminous and vitally important movie, which, as far as I am concerned, everyone needs to see. In 2014 I interviewed the film’s director Patrick Shen (read the interview here), and now I have had the privilege to screen the film ahead of its North American debut... Read more
I once heard Richard Rohr tell a charming story of giving a retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani, where Thomas Merton lived. Rohr was surprised to find that not all the monks particularly cared for Merton. When he asked about this, one of the brothers said, “Merton told us we weren’t contemplatives, we were just introverts!” It’s a sweet story and the audience chuckled when we heard it, but it does point to an interesting question: what connection is there between personality type... Read more
As part of the Patheos Book Club, I’ve recently read Operating on Faith: A Painfully True Love Story by Matt Weber. Weber is the author of Fearing the Stigmata, about his search as a young Catholic for a “culturally relevant faith;” he also hosts a CatholicTV show and plenty of his videos can be found on Youtube. Like other young Catholic authors, Weber is known for using humor and whimsy to illustrate how the timeless truths of Catholicism still matter... Read more
February 29 is the feast day of St. John Cassian — who, in addition to being a “leap year saint” is also one of the most important early contemplatives in the Christian tradition. Cassian (ca. 360-435) brought monasticism — and, therefore, contemplative spirituality — from the deserts of the Middle East to Western Europe. His birthplace is uncertain, but by the 380s he was living in a monastery in Bethlehem; subsequently he left that location to travel the deserts of Egypt, where he... Read more
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