Blog Archive
Contemplation in Action – Community – Prayer – Listening – Spiritual Direction – Nature
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Exhaling My Prayer Breath
On January 29th I received my first Pfizer vaccine shot. On February 19th, I received the second shot. Two weeks later, I could finally begin to breathe deeply again. How long had I been holding my prayer breath? I didn’t realize how long I had been shallow breathing… more than 11 months, beginning when we…
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Love, Not Atonement
This year in the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar, the feast of the Annunciation falls just a few days before Palm Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week. (This isn’t always the case since Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox.) The proximity of the two feasts…
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Knowing by Heart
Jeremiah 31:31-34 (The Message) “That’s right. The time is coming when I will make a brand-new covenant with Israel and Judah. It won’t be a repeat of the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took their hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt. They broke that covenant even though I…
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Boundless Gratitude for Going Deeper
Do not forget that you serve a Mystery that neither you nor your father’s father nor your mother’s mother began. And the laughter and the tears that accompany your labor are not born of your cleverness or your holiness, but are reflections of the Mystery of God in the still waters of the eternal lake…
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Prayer Changes Us
There is an old saying: be careful what you wish for. In a similar vein we might also be careful how we pray and what we pray for. As we practice contemplative prayer things change and that change is mostly in ourselves. Our ways of seeing and acting in the world become transfigured by divine…
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Welcoming God with Open Arms
While Lent is sometimes thought of as a season to give up something, this Lent comes after a year of pandemic and unrest that has many feeling like they’ve already given up a lot. For some it has meant no in-person visits with family or friends for close to a year. Some have lost jobs.…