“The attention we give to space and place is important, and how will our children ever learn about these things if we, ourselves, aren’t actually offering attention? I don’t know anyone who would text or check an SF Giants’ score during a service, or who would check to see who called that very last time the phone vibrated, but I hear that it happens.”
“As I climbed higher and higher along the rocky path – with very few plants and certainly no trees marking the way – I walked deeper into solitude, step by step. I was alone; nobody else was hiking the trail that day. Nobody, that is, except for one man.”
“Not far from here on the another side of Mauna Loa you can find Kiluia, so very active with its molten lava bubbling orange. New earth, like John’s Revelation, a new heaven and a new earth … raw and untamed…”
“And I do. Praise spills from this invocation into my soul like water from a pitcher into a glass. The Venite. The Jubilate. A Psalm. Routine, unextraordinary, but this opening praise is marvelously settling.”
“And when Jesus quoted Isaiah, who wrote that all shall be taught of God, he likewise meant all. And, get this: I think when Jesus called God father, he may have envisioned God as rabbi, teacher and parent as one. Pouring honey across slate, so you can learn to love, and love to learn.”
“We do not exercise the disciplines of Lent because we are afraid God might not be merciful – and we must compel God’s presence into our lives by piety – or by fooling God into believing that we really are good enough – but because God can be nothing but merciful. God has a proprietary interest in you, living between your bone and soul.”
“Worship, meaning to turn attention to concentration and consecration, to turn aside not only from tasks, but from myself. Worship, which explains why silence in communion is so … simultaneously emptying and filling.”
“I write all of this to add memorial upon memorial, but also because I think dignity, these days, is so seldom accorded. Dignity, the simple dignity of being a child of God, a creature of the earth, and a soul of the universe.”
“Yesterday, the Anne Frank Human Rights memorial in Boise was defaced by swastikas and threatening signs. Our Jewish sisters and brothers are understandably afraid, angry, and exhausted.”
“There is only one reason for the monk’s existence: not farming, not chanting the psalms … not fasting, not manual labor, not reading, not meditation, not vigils in the night, but only God.” (Thomas Merton)