For the vast majority of people the night of purification continues for their lifetime on earth. But the truth is that our final destination is union with God, in, with and through Christ, when what happened to him on Mount Tabor will begin to happen to us. The great Franciscan theologian Blessed John Duns Scotus [...]
Immediately after Jesus was baptised in the Jordan by St John the Baptist, “The Spirit drove him out into the desert and he remained there for forty days and was tempted by Satan” (Mark 1:13). St Matthew describes these temptations and the other evangelists show how his tussles with the devil continued in one way [...]
The woman's life was meant to be lived at least on a human basis of justice. In the divine life of charity, she attains her fullest development, her fullest happiness; for here justice and love rule, not strength. On such a basis, she has open to her a life of fullest perfection, the kind of [...]
Before the 1960s, mental prayer took place behind the closed doors of a personal prayer life. However, as the charismatic movement began to spread amongst Catholics, communal charismatic style prayer became more and more popular, not least because of unusual phenomena, from speaking in tongues to slaying in the spirit. When criticised as a deviation [...]
At its highest, love is not a spontaneous feeling. There is nothing spontaneous about an egalitarian community of comrades—it requires hard work and full commitment. There is nothing spontaneous even about sexual love, which is only ever satisfied by the proof that it is, at bottom, a free and deliberate choice: even among non-religious people, [...]
Putting it in precise Augustinian terms, it is the choice between the love of God and the love of self that will determine the outcome of a man’s life. There are two forces at work in the world—gravity and grace—and each of us must choose to follow one or the other. There is no third [...]
Meditation is a means to an end; contemplation is that end. It is our eternal destiny which we will enjoy with all we have known and loved in this life, and those whom we have never known, but who have loved Christ from the beginning. When most readers hear the expression “mystical spirituality” they usually [...]
The first Christians were urged to pray constantly, and this prayer became known later as the “prayer without ceasing”, “Pray constantly; and for all things give thanks to God, because this is what God expects you to do in Christ Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 5:17–18). The Morning Off ering and its implementation is the place where [...]
Hope’s gaze is not a surreal view that distorts and exaggerates reality. Rather, Hope is a God’s-eye view. It is the strength to see all of reality, ignoring none of it, embracing all of it, all through the Father’s own wisdom and love. This is part of a series entitled, “The Reason for Our Hope.” [...]
In the prayer that leads from meditation to contemplation, the deep human desire for love that has always been there is gradually transformed. It is set alight by reflecting and ruminating on love – God’s love. This love is made visible to us as we see it embodied in Jesus Christ, and as it is [...]
Begin your meditation by primarily using the Gospels to centre your whole attention on the person of Jesus so that knowledge can gradually turn to love. Affective Prayer begins when the sparks of love that are generated there begin to lead upwards and into the Risen Christ. After the Protestant Reformation, a new terminology began [...]
Prayer is a process of continual inner conversion that involves gently trying to turn, open and surrender the heart to God. As the process is practised, the heart is made accessible to the heart of God, and his love shafts down to purify and empty it so that Christ can come to birth again in [...]
Marriage is meant to be a bond breakable only by death, because love, by its nature, can be measured neither by space nor time. And yet, despite the ideal of marriage, the hard actualities of life make it end sometimes in dismal ruin and failure. A moment comes when the bonds once meant to be [...]
Love of one’s country stands better when it finds its office within a higher love. Lewis disaggregates ‘love’ into loves In his book The Four Loves, published in 1960, three years before he died in 1963, the Irish/Englishman C.S. Lewis says that, although goodness itself cannot turn bad, things that we associate with goodness and [...]