Gardening within a monastery is both a task and an art, and it’s something we only gradually begin to fathom in the early years of our monastic life. The more experienced gardener monks teach us to start slowly. They instruct us how to improve our soil with compost and other
“But I feel so betrayed” choked out, as Frank told me of the admiration and faith he had felt for his priest and rector, Jess, and the sense of loss from the current revelations about the priest’s activities. Today, Frank wonders, “Was it all a sham? Was I just conned? Did he use me? Or is it a vendetta by those who don’t like him?”
Some of our mothers taught us what it was like to be loved. Some others of us grew up with mothers who couldn’t really teach us much about love, because they’d never really learned themselves. We tend to idealize mothers as the perfect dispensers of love.
Can we say it is God’s home? I prefer to perceive it “through a glass darkly” as what I might call God’s holiest of holies. What is my connection, if any, to heaven? I’ve seen glimpses of it only by eyes of faith. I’ve felt the presence—never in a merely logical way—in thin places
An African woman perceives and accepts Christ as a woman and as an African. The commitment that flows from this faith is commitment to full womanhood (humanity), to the survival of human communities, to the ‘birthing’, nurturing, and maintenance of life, and to loving
One day he got into a boat with his disciples, and he said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side of the
A linguist who worked on the Aboriginal Bible translation, said the phrase “to love God with all one’s heart” was a special challenge. He said: “The Aboriginal people use a different part of the body to express emotions. They have a word that is, broadly translated, ‘insides’. So to love God with all your heart was to want God with all your insides.”
The cell was a sacred space, a place in which a woman could be with herself and the divine Presence and listen. The cell was a place of divine encounter and of ongoing, daily experience of being immersed in God’s presence.
This coming Sunday (6 Easter) was known, in a softer and more agricultural time, as Rogation Sunday. Along with the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday before Ascension Day (this year on May 17), these were days to “beat the bounds” of the parish, to make a grand procession along the boundaries of a church’s parish territory, through the farms and fields, to ask God’s blessing on the upcoming harvest.
God is the goodness that cannot be angry, for He is nothing but goodness.
Our soul is one-ed to Him, who is unchangeable goodness,
and between God and our soul is neither anger nor forgiveness, as He sees it.