A reflection for Wednesday in Holy Week: Salvation is not comfortable. There is something terrifying about it. Even human love is terrifying in the forces that it releases and directs; and human love is a faint radiation from the fire of love which is God. Salvation is not a gentle application of vaseline to a [...]
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A reflection for Tuesday in Holy Week: A cup must be empty before it can be filled. If it is already full, it can’t be filled again except by emptying it out. In order to fill anything, there must be a hollowed-out space. Otherwise it can’t receive. This is especially true of God’s word. In [...]
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A reflection for Holy Week: Those who really do know and love [Jesus] will . . . see the suffering of all the people whom God puts in their life world and strive with great effort to grieve with them and do whatever they can to alleviate their suffering. Right here is the deepest spiritual [...]
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St. Ignatius, writing to Jesuits in Portugal, about the problems with spiritual disciplines that he deemed excessive: The first is that God is not really served in the long run, as the horse worn out in the first days does not as a rule finish the journey, and thus it happens that someone must be [...]
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The First Little Way of Praying: Recall the commandments or any list such as the Cardinal Virtues or the Capital Sins. Take each in turn, consider the beautiful divine invitation it expresses, and ask yourself how you are living it out. Thank your Creator and Lord for all your good and beg God to make [...]
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It’s Friday and with plenty of time before sunset, I dashed over* to The Catholic Community of St. Ignatius (Baltimore) to get these: *Grateful to all who made this happen! Share or bookmark this post:
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With Valentine’s Day coming up I’m taking the initiative to get folks thinking about love. Here’s a clip that I sometimes make reference to in my classes, from the 1997 film As Good As It Gets. If you can’t see the video, click here. Ignatius wrote that “love shows itself more in deeds than in [...]
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Nicholas Carr asks what the internet is doing to our brains. His answer: rewiring it for easy distraction. He observes that the way we read online–with constant distractions–is actually changing the way our neural pathways work, with the resulting effect of limiting our ability for sustained attention to a long reading. It is good to [...]
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Note: I jotted this down in real time last Friday evening and didn’t get around to posting it. Another week has passed with a new set of stresses and demands. May I be graced with the energy to get myself to Vespers tonight. I feel like going to Mass this evening and am marveling, a [...]
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The most basic spiritual practice is learning silence. Practicing silence is an act of faith precisely because one cannot know for certain that anything is to be gained from it. It might be a waste of that most precious commodity: time. What the Christian spiritual tradition teaches us, though, is that the practice of silence [...]
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