Listen to the River
The power in listening/watching those coming through the self-driven ego rapids; I wait ready to catch the bow of their rapidly deflating boat as it swings in to the bend close to the place God has brought me through so…
Poverty Makes a Good Host
Once we have given up our desire to be fully fulfilled, we can offer emptiness to others. Once we have become poor, we can be a good host. It is indeed the paradox of hospitality that poverty makes a good…
A Cry for Mercy
Yes, Lord, I have to die – with you, through you, and in you – and thus become ready to recognize you when you appear to me in your resurrection. There is so much in me that needs to die:…
Holiness as the Ultimate Mirroring
What’s happening in prayer is that you’re presenting yourself for the ultimate gaze, the ultimate mirroring, the gaze of God. Little by little you become more naked before that perfectly accepting gaze. It’s like lovemaking. You slowly disrobe and become…
Holiness
There is a way of living life, a mode of being religious that causes destruction wherever it appears. It is the misinterpretation of the concept of holiness. It was certainly an issue in Jesus’ day. The variety of the ‘Judaisms’…
The Moor
It was like church to me. I entered it on soft foot, Breath held like a cap in the hand. It was quiet. What God was there made himself felt, Not listened to, in clean colours That brought a moistening…
The Doorway Into a Wound
The doorway into the silent land is a wound. Silence lays bare this wound. We do not journey far along the spiritual path before we get some sense of the wound of the human condition, and this is precisely why…
Thinking Our Way Out of Contemplation
Preserve a loving attentiveness to God with no desire to feel or understand any particular thing concerning God. – St John of the Cross, St. Maxims on Love, 9, in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross .…