The success or failure of a given day is measured by the quality of our interest and compassion toward those around us. We define ourselves by our response to human need. The question is not how we feel about our neighbor but what we have done for him or her. We reveal our heart in the way we listen to a child, speak to the person who delivers mail, bear an injury, and share our resources with the indigent.
In our society, where money, power, and pleasure are the name of the game, the body truth is bleeding from thousand wounds.
The devil never rejoices more,” said Francis of Assisi, “than when he robs a servant of God of his peace of heart.” Peace and joy go a-begging when the heart of a Christian pants for one sign after another of God’s merciful love.
I can state unequivocally that childlike surrender in trust is the defining spirit of authentic discipleship. And I would add that the supreme need in most of our lives is often the most overlooked – namely, the need for an uncompromising trust in the love of God. Furthermore, I would say that, while there are times when it is good to go to God as might a ragged beggar to the King of kings, it is vastly superior to approach God as a little child would approach his or her papa.
When I am divided within myself, when I am so preoccupied with my own sins, egocentricity, and moral failures that I cannot hear the anguished cry of others, then I have subtly reestablished self as the center of my focus and concern.
We are not pro-life simply because we are warding off death. We are pro-life to the extent that we are men and women for others, all others; to the extent that no human flesh is a stranger to us; to the extent that we can touch the hand of another in love, to the extent that for us there are no “others.
Jesus responded that He did not come to discuss the Law nor to challenge the Roman Empire. He had come to herald the Good News that the Really Real is love and to invite men and women to a joyous response to that love. Sober, hard-headed, realistic critics simply shook their heads. “Why doesn’t He address the critical questions?
A life of praying means death to every identity that does not come from God.
When we give anything more priority than we give to God, we commit idolatry. Thus we all commit idolatry countless times every day.
Abandonment is the triumph of trust in our lives.
Through no merit of ours, but by His mercy, we have been restored to a right relationship with God through the life, death, and resurrection of His beloved Son. This is the Good News, the gospel of grace.
In days long ago when there were no spiritual directors or brilliant commentaries on Scripture, fidelity to God’s will was the whole of spirituality.
No one, it seems to me, who has fully grasped the Crucifixion can ever again take seriously any expression or instrument of worldly power, however venerable, glittering, or seemingly formidable. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE.
The second journey begins when we know we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the morning program.
Christians are a people of hope to the extent that others can find in us a source of strength and joy. If not, our profession of faith ‘by the power of the Holy Spirit He was born of the Virgin Mary and became man’ is as academic, tentative, and hopeless as the alcoholic who promises, ‘I’ll quit tomorrow.
One spiritual writer has observed that human beings are born with two diseases: life, from which we die; and hope, which says the first disease is not terminal. Hope is built into the structure of our personalities, into the depths of our unconscious; it plagues us to the very moment of our death. The critical question is whether hope is self-deception, the ultimate cruelty of a cruel and tricky universe, or whether it is just possibly the imprint of reality.
To live in the wisdom of accepted tenderness is to humbly acknowledge the limitations of the rational, scientific, finite mind and to freely embrace mystery.
Dear Abba, I’m starting out free today, free from the advertised lies that promise me everything from four-doors of turbo-charged happiness to some contraption that will shake, rattle, and roll my abs back into a pack I never had even in my twenties. It would be comical if it wasn’t so sad: all of our desires to make ourselves worthy of this world but unfit for the world to come. I want to be a follower of the sacred dream, and one day arrive fully free, free at last.
A poem by Leonard Cohen says it well: Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
His consistent banging on the drums of God’s unconditional love sounded at a time when many of us had about “had it up to here” with religion and church and, probably most importantly, ourselves. We were the tired, poor, self-hating huddled masses yearning to be free, and along came a patchwork preacher who grinned and said, “You already are. Abba loves you. Let’s go get some chocolate ice cream.