If during Advent we welcome Jesus and turn away the stranger at the door, we fail to live up to the promise of hope that we say stirs in us at Christmas. If we want to show the world the “true meaning of Christmas,” if we want to really “keep Christ in Christmas,” then we must let it find us loving and caring for each other. …
Tag: Thomas Merton
What are you going to do today and how are you going to do it? …
For, as the wise monk [Thomas Merton] taught us, the real journey is what happens inside of us. More important than our accomplishments, careers and titles, is the way we have grown inside ourselves during the time we have been given. More important is our growing awareness, acknowledgement and, ultimately, surrender and response to the “creative action of love and grace in our hearts,” which is about as good a definition of God as you can find anywhere. …
From time to time, as both a writer and a spiritual director, I get asked for book recommendations. So on this cold and snowy Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday in the U.S., I stayed inside and scoured my shelves for ten books I would highly recommend, books that are both well-read and well-loved, books that have pointed me in different ways to the movement of God in my life, inspired me by their beauty and story, or have somehow …
So caught up in the business and busy-ness of our work and lives, we can all sometimes feel guilty about doing “nothing.” But, of course, it is exactly this nothingness that we need. We need time to unplug, time to refuel, time to remove ourselves from the rest of life so that we can be, in fact, better for the rest of life, better for those who need us, better for the work that needs to be done. …
It’s almost Christmas. It’s the fourth week of advent. And we wait. But for what? …
God plants these “spiritual seeds” in our lives every day. They are the seeds that may grow into an abundant harvest — a cornucopia of increased prayer, spiritual wisdom, service to others and other fruits of the spirit. …
We are all still trying out the freedom God has given us by placing us here, strangers in a strange land. We are not always sure what we are doing or how well we are doing it. We have this feeling that sometimes we are succeeding and sometimes we are failing. We’re not sure we are always pleasing God but perhaps have a sense, as Thomas Merton famously wrote, that in trying to please God we are doing so. …
Like Jesus, we need to have our “lonely place,” that quiet sacred space we can go, not just to get away from the world and its busy-ness, but to prepare ourselves more fully for our engagement in the world. …