Dying to Know You
Old streets don’t lead back where they used toWe blaze new trails to ancient placesI still love You just like I used toBut this love won’t fit spreadsheets I don’t just want to hear itI want to feel it tooIt’s…
The Vindication of Feeling
The vindication of the importance of feeling in our life, and in particular its primacy over reason in all that has to do with man’s contact with the transcendental world, has been one of the great achievements of modern psychology.…
On Gambling
To a frog that’s never left his pond the ocean seems like a gamble. Look what he’s giving up: security, mastery of his world, recognition! The ocean frog just shakes his head. “I can’t really explain what it’s like where…
Like Weather . . . Each Moment Unfolding As It Does
Dearly Beloved,Grace and Peace to you. Days are longer now,birds sing sweetly,daffodils sway brightly,and a storm dumps four inches of snowand a tree on our house.On the road the sun on the deadly ice is brilliant. Life mixes its metaphors.Besides the snow…
The Way that is Strait and Narrow
AN ELDER was asked: What does it mean, this word we read in the Bible, that the way is strait and narrow? And the elder replied: This is the strait and narrow way: that a man should do violence to…
The Primacy of Love
Charity and hospitality were matters of top priority (for the Desert Fathers), and took precedence over fasting and personal ascetic routines. The countless sayings which bear witness to this warm-hearted friendliness should be sufficient to take care of accusations that…
On the Way . . . Not Yet Arrived
Most of the characters represented in these sayings and stories are men who are “on the way” to purity of heart rather than men who have fully arrived. The Desert Fathers, inspired by Clement and Origen, and the Neo-Platonic tradition,…
Exchanging One False Self For Another
What the (Desert) Fathers sought most of all was their own true self, in Christ. And in order to do this, they had to reject completely the false, formal self, fabricated under social compulsion in “the world” . . .…