When we find what we were not looking for, there is deep joy. The joy of discovering what we are not looking for. The journey not the destination is what is important. Bishop Vincent Long from homily at Pat Mara’s Deaconate.
Posts
No desires, no goal, no seeking …
Thursday 25th July, 2013
Sorrento Retreat Day 7: The goal, if there is one, is out of sight. I see no thing, nor do I intuit where it is leading me. I am in the darkest dark I have known. Not a dark humour but a darkness of clarity. To arrive at a goal I...
Wednesday 24 July, 2013
Sorrento Retreat Day 6: Again, light and joy. Light and joy at some level beneath apprehension. Light and joy in the morning and light and joy in the evening. And if this is so then light and joy is the constant underpinning of standing in willingness rather than a...
Tuesday 23 July, 2013
Sorrento Retreat Day 5: While to my complete awe I am greeted again, a seventh time in three days, with light and joy, there is a new night-time dawning. The clarity with which separation is determined, is not clear at all. I turn and face the strange; as Bowie serenaded in the...
Why We Shout in Anger
A Hindu saint who was visiting the River Ganges to take bath, found a group of family members on the banks shouting in anger at each other. He turned to his disciples smiled and asked, “Why do people in anger shout at each other?” His disciples thought for a...
Incarnation
“Jesus has no hands but ours.” Teresa of Avila
Love – a way of looking
“Love is not a matter of looking at each other, but of looking together in the same direction.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Monday 22 July, 2013
Sorrento Retreat Day 4: The joy and light of the last two days offers a fruit-bearing branch. It seems the time of travail is ended and I have come home to myself in some regard – the separation, mindfulness and determination now a deliberate choice. The unexpected shift that...
Deep Silence
“Deep silence leads us to suspect that, in the first place, prayer is acceptance. A person who prays is a person standing with their hands open to the world. They know that God will choose to be revealed in the nature which surrounds them, in the people they meet,...
Obaudire
From; The Gift of Saint Benedict, by Verna A. Holyhead SGS and Lynne Muir. John Garrett Publishing, Victoria, Australia. 2002. Pp. 32-33 In contemporary life we may seem to spend much of our time listening, but often this may only take us across the threshold of ‘auditory over-load’ into...
Friday 19 July, 2013
Sorrento Retreat Day 1: Rising, I recall the dream of hours earlier, talking with David Bowie – what a nice guy! The night messenger still playing in my head the music but with some adapted (italics) lyrics. Don’t know if the dreaming has a problem with copyright infringement. Changes by David...
Born to Love
Supermoon
Sunday night June 23rd, 2013 As the moon rose tonight over Western Port Bay, it was an eerie red colour and quite large and bright. The photo shows how the sky was lit up as if it was twilight. The moon was at its closest proximity to the earth this...
Mythology
As myth transcends thought, Incarnation transcends myth. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heavens of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. ....
An Evolutionary Agenda for the Third Millennium
“Applying this larger time perspective to present-time terrestrial crises and urgencies, however, should not be egoically misinterpreted as a rationale to kick back and procrastinate. For if we continue to wait for some deus ex machina, spiritual or secular, to save us from ourselves – some final proof,...
Fanaticism – why pick on Islam?
I received an email recently entitled, “A German’s View on Islam”, and was about to send it off to others, because what it says about fanaticism and the silent majority seemed poignant at this time. But two things caused me to question its integrity; firstly, the original article has...
Words of Justice
“In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized robbery?” St. Augustine “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this...
Intention: faith or science?
Intentionality & The Field of God’s Love Firstly let us consider the nature and exploration of the science of Intention. Secondly let us consider particular intentions being held in the Field of God’s Love – that is to say intentions being held in prayer. Physics names and explores empirically what we know by faith...
Desert Wisdom
Sayings of the Desert Fathers Introduced by Henri J.M. Nouwen. Translation and art by Yushi Nomura, Orbis Books, New York, 2001 p. xii Yushi also knew that the Christian monk in Egypt and the Buddhist monk in...