Category: Speaking to the Soul

Nightingale’s ideas might have more appeal now in the third millennium than in her own day. Certainly her most holistic approach to health care and emphasis on environmental factors and nutrition are popular now. Her highly positive conceptualization of human life will resonate with the present age, where it offended the dour hellfire and damnation adherents of her own. Her unorthodox religious views would offend few people now while her spirituality, nourished from diverse sources and not tied to any one religious institution, would attract rather than appear heretical. The fact that she gave up church attendance

I, Clare, a handmaid of Christ, a little plant of our most holy father Francis, a sister and mother of you and the other poor sisters, although unworthy, beg our Lord Jesus Christ through his mercy and the intercession of his most holy Mother Mary and of blessed Michael the Archangel and of all the holy angels of God,

It is a very great incentive to mercy to share in others’ misfortunes, to help the needs of others as far as our means allow, and sometimes even beyond them. For it is better for mercy’s sake to take up a case, or to suffer odium rather than to show hard feeling. So I once brought odium on myself because I broke up the sacred vessels to redeem captives

Once the Elder was invited aboard a frigate which came from St. Petersburg. The Captain of the frigate was a highly educated man, who had been sent to America by order of the Emperor to make an inspection of all the colonies. There were more than twenty-five officers with the Captain, and they also were educated men. In the company of this group sat a monk of a hermitage, small in stature and wearing very old clothes.

It is not surprising that the friars, both Dominican and Franciscan, were greeted with incredulity and alarm, because of their habit of wandering around and frequenting public places. Even someone as sympathetic as Jacques de Vitry regarded Franciscan life as dangerous, because of its lack of enclosure and stability.

If there be one point of ecclesiastical order which would at first might seem, more than any other, to be commanded by Holy Scripture, fashioned by primitive usage, and required by common sense, it is surely this,—that the public offices of the Church should be offered in the vernacular language of the people. To employ, in addressing God, a tongue which his worshippers cannot comprehend; to wrap up lessons, epistles, and gospels in the obscurity of a dead language,—can this be a reasonable service?

Tauler, the preacher, walked, one autumn day

without the walls of Strasburg, by the Rhine,

Pondering the solemn Miracle of Life;

As one who, wandering in a starless night,

Feels, momently, the jar of unseen waves,

One of the most monstrous offences against religion is to regard Christianity as utterly unrelated to present-day life or as something eccentric and peculiar, or to regard the Church either as a hot-house or a prison. They are its worst foes who keep Christianity apart from Science, apart from Art, or apart from all manner of social and political life. They are the enemies of the Church who place a barrier between it and music, drama, poetry, sculpture, painting, or forbid any traffic with philosophy and modern thought.

I was fortunate enough to come upon . . . Archbishop Anthony Bloom’s School for Prayer; it helped me greatly in many ways, especially to find the presence of God in ordinary places, people, events and moments of time. I listened to the advice that Archbishop Bloom once gave to a woman who had been trying to perceive God’s presence for fourteen years and failed to do so. He advised her:

When the Church of England came to America, it sought to embrace all of the people, without respect to race. Despite the difficulties and unfavorable conditions the very early records of parish churches disclose the fact that babes of African descent were brought to Holy Baptism and incorporated into the Church of Christ. The children of the slaves or servant class, were diligently instructed in the Church Catechism,