Dear Paul, I would normally start a letter with pleasantries like “How are you? Hope all is well with you.” I’ve read your letters and notice you have a formula for greeting those to whom you write, but it’s as alien to me as mine would be to you so we’ll dispense with that for now, if you don’t mind. The passage above causes me a lot of angst.
I remember a period of about three weeks one summer when I got into the zone playing tennis.
God can be approached directly and immediately as “Our Father” (there are other names), the gracious source and origin of all reality, without any need for specialized, esoteric techniques.
Every day is a day when we can reclaim an inch of the planet, including an inch of our own psychological and spiritual territory. All it takes is a little turning.
Paul asks us to walk a fine line between two unacceptable extremes
Today we have a story of God’s wisdom being exercised through Joseph to create an enormous federal program to organize the agricultural industry in order to prepare for a famine that the federal bureaucrat Joseph predicts.
My soul longs, indeed it faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God. Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, at your altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God.
Dreams in the Bible were serious business, considered messages from God (or their god) or revelations of truth that needed attention.
Paul gives us today the fundamental truth that echoes from Genesis: You are God’s temple, and all things are yours.
The desert is the home of despair. And despair, now, is everywhere. Let us not think that our interior solitude consists in the acceptance of defeat. We cannot escape anything by consenting tacitly to be defeated. Despair is an abyss without bottom. Do not think to close it by consenting to it and trying to forget you have consented. ~Merton