June 2020: Two Ways of Knowing God
In the two-thousand-year treasury of spiritual literature, we find two main streams that point us to different yet complementary ways of knowing and loving God. The first is cataphatic or the way of affirmation of what we can see and know of God through our senses and reason, aided by faith. This is the via positiva represented
May 2020: Spirit of Fire and Light
The Holy Spirit, our “Advocate” (Jn 14:26), is the Director of all directors, who guides our life’s formation as a whole. The Spirit breathes courage in us when we feel powerless; bestows peace on us when we feel afflicted; and restores hope when we are beset by doubt and despair. When we cannot pray as we ought,
April 2020: The Hidden Life
“…your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3). To understand what it means to be “hidden with Christ” leads us to the writings of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897), who found that the secret of eternal happiness was to hide herself in Jesus, to decrease that he might increase (see Jn 3:30). In her poem,
February 2020 • Moving from the Pain of Loneliness to the Joy of Solitude
On one of her trips to the United States, St. Teresa of Calcutta lamented that the disease of the West is loneliness. In her book, Essential Writings (NY: Orbis Books, 2005), she says: Jesus comes to meet us. To welcome him, let us go to meet him. He comes to us in the hungry, the naked, the
January 2020 – Moving from Fear to Wisdom and Love
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” So we read in Proverbs 1:7, but what kind of fear leads to our becoming wiser and more knowledgeable persons? A simple example would be the fear of touching a hot stove top because we know it will scorch our fingers. Or the fear of walking alone through