My children are too young – they hadn’t yet come into the world – but one day they’ll ask about it: not just the facts, but the mood, the tenor. I have no problem talking about drugs, sex, any of the the many things you hear parents dreading. And I don’t really even dread this. But it will be singularly humbling to have to be the one who will explain just how dark men’s hearts can be.
“Our pain is God’s pain and that means that in due time it will become life-giving and healing in the very measure of its intensity.”
What is exceedingly strange about the story of Jacob and the angel is that most of us don’t think of God as our adversary–certainly not one we could fight with and win. Moreover, for many of us, our relationship with God is a place of safety, comfort, and security. We are wounded enough already!
In the Alban Institute’s weekly offering, Bruce G. Epperly , Katherine Gould Epperly, reflect on simplicity as being at the heart of the pastoral task.
When she finished telling me how my sermon had “hit home,” I wasn’t certain that she heard the sermon I preached.
For the past two weeks each night after I set the alarm and just before putting my bedside light out, I’ve journaled a short litany of specific “thank you’s.” Literally I begin each night’s journal page – “thank you God for…” and then simply make a new list, thank you’s for eight or ten specific things I’ve experienced or done or seen that day. I’m looking to remember that my life is blest, that all life is blest.
Evelyn Underhill, one of the best loved modern writers on spirituality, is being remembered on the 100th anniversary of the publication of her book “Mysticism”.
Winfrey may be tapping into her higher power, but she’s also connecting with trends in religious behavior in American culture at large. We are a nation of seekers who increasingly report being unaffiliated with any particular religious tradition.
… both Carolingian and English law codes place some very heavy penalties upon working on Sundays. Free-men found working will be enslaved; slaves ordered to work on Sundays by their masters gain their freedom. Heavy fines, forfeiture of goods, and floggings are all part of it too.
What is fascinating about Mysticism, and a thread through all of Underhill’s writing, is her simple insistence that spiritual experience is about God, and not (primarily) about our own internal psychology or makeup. A thoughtful and well-reasoned Christian apologist, she is unapologetic about insisting on the “reality” of God as the ground of mystical experience.