The desert witnesses to the confrontation with God in terrible simplicity, it is the ‘primal scriptural symbol of the absence of all human aid and comfort’. Here, in the experience of waste and emptiness, of liberation through and from oppression, Christians have seen the foreshadowing of the redeeming work of God in Christ.
Now the divine nature, as it is in itself, according to its essence, transcends every act of comprehensive knowledge, and it cannot be approached or attained by our speculation. Men have never discovered a faculty to comprehend the incomprehensible; nor have we ever been able to devise an intellectual technique for grasping the inconceivable.
These are the words of Jesus taken from St Mark’s Gospel: ‘Anyone who wishes to be a follower of mine must leave self behind; he must take up his cross and come with me.’ Now we meditate to do just that: to obey that absolutely fundamental call Jesus makes, which is the basis of all our Christian faith, to leave self behind in order that we can indeed journey with Christ in His return to the Father.
Early Christians were all supposed to be martyrs—witnesses—although not all were expected to die. . . . The eagerness with which many early Christians sought a public occasion to give witness indicates that they had already been primed, indeed trained, for the opportunity.
Listening to your heart is not simple. Finding out who you are is not simple. It takes a lot of hard work and courage to get to know who you are and what you want. I never knew what to say if someone asked me at a party, “What do you do?” Artist, writer, therapist, wife, mother—I would be judged by the label I chose.
“Once upon a time,” an ancient story tells, “the master had a visitor who came to inquire about Zen. But instead of listening, the visitor kept talking about his own concerns and giving his own thoughts. After a while, the master served tea. He poured tea into his visitor’s cup until it was full and then he kept on pouring.
Pilgrim, faint and tempest-beaten,
Lift thy gaze, behold and know
Christ the Lamb, our Mediator,
Robed in vestments trailing low;
Faithfulness his golden girdle;
[John] Wesley’s friend and fellow preacher George Whitefield had begun preaching in the open air to anyone who would stop to listen, and he appealed to Wesley for assistance. Preaching out of doors was not an idea Wesley took to immediately. “I could scarcely reconcile myself at first to this strange way of preaching in the fields, of which he [Whitefield] set me an example this Sunday,” Wesley wrote on March 29, 1739.
One day Chad was alone in his house with a brother whose name was Owini, his other companions having had occasion to return to the church. This Owini was a monk of great merit, who had renounced the world with the pure intention of winning a heavenly reward, so that he was altogether a fit person to receive a revelation of God’s secrets, and one whose word everyone could trust.
Soon after Jesus had been baptized, he performed a fast of forty days by himself, and he taught and informed us by his example that, after we have received forgiveness of sins in baptism, we should devote ourselves to vigils, fasts, prayers and other spiritually fruitful things, lest when we are sluggish and less vigilant the unclean spirit expelled from our heart by baptism may return,