The priest or religious who takes a vow of Chastity, binding them to Christ as to their spiritual married partner, will be lost without daily access to the contemplation that is for them the indispensable means of uniting them with him. From the very beginning, the faithful have been taught that the Church is the [...]
Learning to love is more important than anything else because it guarantees the happiness that nothing else can. That is why the whole of the spiritual life and the mystic way is dedicated to teaching how love can be learned, sustained and perfected. I once attended a conference titled “The Moral Malaise” during which the [...]
What happens to the muscles of our bodies can happen to the muscles of our hearts too. This can happen with ever greater intensity when spiritual weightlifting is practised in prayer, in the mystic way. The difference between conversion and repentance is so important that it needs further explanation. I hope to do this by [...]
In this book I am not just trying to view God’s Plan, but our personal and unique part in it. God can only enable us to participate in his plan to the degree to which we are prepared to respond to his call as the Apostles did, and those who radically chose to follow him [...]
Without returning to the prayer and the spirituality of our forefathers, the Church has seemed to have gradually deteriorated at every level. However, I am now witnessing the many who are beginning to see the truth. They are beginning to see and do what can alone bring personal renewal, and Church renewal, by generating and [...]
After the Second Vatican Council, not only were mystics and saints all but absent, but so also were the sort of new and vital religious orders to help spread and disseminate the teachings of the Council. However, as history has shown, pendulums do swing. St John Henry Newman’s “New Spring” is at last on the [...]
Why did the introduction of the new liturgy not bring about the long-anticipated renewal for which we were all longing? Without the deep personal relationship with Christ that develops and grows in personal prayer, the liturgy can soon become ineffective, not in itself, but in those who are not prepared to receive it. Many of [...]
By prayer, I do not just mean saying prayers or performing prayers of obligation but practising the deep prayer that leads onward beyond first beginnings into the mystic way. It is only here that we will come to know and experience the love that surpasses the understanding. When the constitution on the liturgy was promulgated [...]
Without contemplation, St. Thomas Aquinas’ "Summa Theologica" is seen as a great stained-glass window, but from the outside. But with contemplation, his masterwork is seen, as if from the inside, iridescent with all the brilliance with which he was able to write, thanks to the Holy Spirit who guided his every word and his every [...]
Quietism in all its different manifestations seemed to encourage the reformer’s belief that our own efforts are useless and even blasphemous. Its adherents were not only encouraged to do absolutely nothing in prayer, but to do nothing about temptations either, that could only be overcome with God’s grace. Miguel de Molinos Molinos, the [...]
The reforms sweeping through the Church across Europe in the century leading up to the Reformation should put to bed the later Protestant assertion that Catholic spirituality was in a state of “terminal decline” prior to Martin Luther hammering his 95 articles to the door of the church in Wurttemberg in 1517. If you visit [...]
It may sound fine to proclaim a new age in which the primacy of love was to be paramount, as it was in the beginning. But it must not be forgotten that the love Francis was talking about was God’s love, the love that can change all things including us. It was thanks to St [...]
It can be seen how St Francis was able to see, not just with such clarity, but in poetry and in technicolor what St Paul originally called “God’s Secret Plan”, and to see the way to enter into it by entering through Love into the one who embodied it in his mystical body. I have [...]
It is above all Saint Bernard, particularly through his innovative mystical theology, who shaped the theology of the later Middle Ages and also of modern times. The history of Christian spirituality is rather like a roller coaster with continual ups and downs, as renewal is followed by decline as the human spirit inevitably falters and [...]