We must accept the reality that our spouse is God’s gift—all of our spouse. We can’t merely “put up with” our spouse’s splinters in long-suffering frustration. If we take seriously God’s providence in giving us this husband or this wife, their vices are what we’ve needed, and what we should love. We’re seeing a New [...]
The key to understanding Thomas More’s generous dedication to the real but limited good he could do on earth is, as Frank Mitjans makes clear, that More’s constant contemplation of God was the source of his boundless care for the souls surrounding him. Thomas More’s Vocation, by Frank Mitjans (320 pages, The Catholic University of [...]
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 debt Wendell Berry described is owed by everyone who has inherited something – a faith, a family, a school, a country – from people who are now gone and who are now responsible for handing it, intact and loved, to people yet to be born. That is the whole of the cultural cycle Berry described. [...]
Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde should prompt us to search for an antidote to the lovers’ death wish—to pursue a love that preserves rather than destroys, celebrates rather than abolishes individuality, and seeks life rather than death. “They who were two and divided now became one and united.” —Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan and Isolde I come [...]
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 [...]