There is something calming and focusing about praying at night. It is often a time to be alone with nothing to distract one from oneself and God, a time of waiting and longing for the Lord. We could all profit from such prayer. About half of our life takes place at night. Much of that, [...]
When the love of God strikes a human heart, it strikes it as a simple ray of light strikes a prism. Just as that light is then diffused and transformed into all the colours of the spectrum, so the love of God is diffused and transformed into all the virtues and gifts that are needed [...]
If we learn how to wait while doing all we can to invite the Holy Spirit to take possession of us, then before too long all our hopes, all our deepest desires and yearnings will be realized. I never spoke to my father about his spiritual life, or my own for that matter, but I [...]
Making the spiritual ascent into God is rather like trying to run up a downward escalator. The moment you stop moving steadily forwards is the moment when you start moving steadily downward. Going forwards means finding daily time to do what St Peter told his listeners to do when he was the first to announce [...]
The Catholic faith is not firstly a body of dogmatic truths, but a body full of love that rose from the dead on the first Easter Day. It should begin then by teaching the young how to come to know and love Jesus Christ, as soon as possible, by introducing them to true Catholic meditation. [...]
The very essence of the teaching of Jesus Christ is that God is love, and his love was so embodied in his own mystical body on the first Pentecost that it could draw up into itself all who are open to receive it. You do not find any trace of this profound mystical teaching in [...]
While Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite was busily employed in deceiving Christians into believing in his Neoplatonic mysticism without Christ, St. Maximus the Confessor was suffering terribly for his orthodoxy at the hands of the Areopagite's fellow Monophysites. Dionysius the Areopagite Before moving on to end this book with some simple practical examples, and what [...]
What we now need is a year of repentance, reparation, and prayer. Repentance to turn back to Jesus Christ and make him once more, what he was in the early Church, the heart and the soul of our daily personal prayer. The Greco-Roman Stoics were all inspired by the words of the Delphic Oracle to [...]
It is important to remember that St Thomas Aquinas said the vocation of God’s apostles in every age is to contemplate and then share the fruits of contemplation with others. When we all start to do this then we will be back on the road to do what God had created us for in the [...]
The ideal for personal and communal renewal is not to return endlessly to man-made programmes to make oneself into a perfect human being, but to God-made love to make us into the perfect man which is Christ. This is why the revelation to St Francis about the primacy of love is of such absolute importance. [...]
Sadly, the “Devout Humanism” that has been all but universally accepted since the condemnation of Quietism, without the majority even realizing it, has been transmitted to the faithful, instead of the profound mystical theology that Christ first gave to them in the early Church. Please do not think that I am only singling out the [...]
That God's love is ever present to us is of no doubt. The question is, what are we doing to receive it? It is only by daily turning away from self-absorption that we can become absorbed in the love of God that is continually poured out upon us by his son, Jesus Christ. When going [...]
At the very beginning of the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius writes that they have been written to enable a person “to conquer oneself.” The way this is done is by embracing the stoicism kept at bay in the early Church but introduced into Christianity at the Renaissance. When most of our school friends were dreaming [...]
If you continue persevering in prayer, come what may, the subtle magnetic force of God’s love becomes stronger. Then, as this process continues and you feel you are going nowhere, a welcome change takes place. When your purification has been sufficiently advanced you are able to experience the love of the Holy Spirit enveloping you [...]