I can respond to all the myriad small demands each day presents only if I never stop moving. I can hold chaos at bay only by breaking each moment into as many pieces as possible, hoping almost desperately that there will be enough to go around, that I can spread myself thin enough to cover it all.
Evangelism is fundamentally a spiritual practice, as important to our spiritual health as prayer, worship, fellowship, and study. As such, evangelism is not simply an act or a set of Christian techniques. It is not a programmatic effort or a formulaic recitation of a memorized speech.
[The doctrine of stewardship is the] belief that the Christian holds all his worldly possessions in trust for God and for his brothers. . . . The doctrine of stewardship is unsatisfactory on two counts.
In the opinion of Luard, the editor of [Robert Grosseteste’s] Letters, “probably no one has had a greater influence upon English thought and English literature for the two centuries that followed his age.” Wyclif ranks him even above Aristotle, and Gower calls him “the grete clerc.”
The “closed heart” is a striking image for our condition. It is as if our selves are normally encased in a hard rind, in a tough shell. Why is this so? Why do we commonly have closed hearts?
My five-year-old daughter asked me at breakfast one morning about her bedtime prayers. She wasn’t really sure, she admitted, just what to say to God. (Now this is the sort of opening I like: “Mom, teach us to pray.”)
The availability of printed Bibles in the language of the common people helped bring about what has been called a “Copernican revolution” in the history of spirituality. Although statistics are notoriously unreliable, there was clearly a symbiotic relation between literacy among the laity, Protestant piety, and the reading of the printed Bible.
It is not necessary to withdraw from the world in order to be holy. In fact, it may be more difficult to make a spiritual case for withdrawal than it is to understand creative immersion in the world around us.
Francis’ famous embrace of the leper he met on the road was not merely a response to human suffering but, in medieval terms, an encounter with the excluded “other.” Lepers were not simply infected with a fearful disease.
Let all humankind tremble,
let the whole world shake
and the heavens rejoice
when Christ, the Son of the living God,
is on the altar