Tag: spirituality

Spirituality

Time to wonder

Karl MöllerLeave a comment

Some thoughts on the Sabbath from Colm Tóibín’s book The Testament of Mary:

The Sabbath mornings … were placid mornings, hours when stillness and ease prevailed, when we looked inside ourselves and remained almost indifferent to the noise the world made or the stamp the previous days had left on us.

On those Sabbath days once the prayers were intoned and God was thanked and praised, there was always time to wonder about what was beyond us in the sky or what world lay buried in the hollows of the earth.

Mary, the narrator, also reflects on ‘the peaceful night after the day when we had renewed ourselves, when our love for each other, for God and the world, had deepened and spread’.

Spirituality

Accepting the darkness

Karl MöllerLeave a comment

There is a deep rightness in accepting the darkness of doubt and uncertainty on our spiritual journey, reflected as it is in the seasonal growing of the dark and of the cold. There is an appropriate place for letting ourselves go into what is unknown and unsure.

Janet Morley, Haphazard by Starlight

Spirituality

People in need of saving

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We believed that God’s home was the church …, and that the world was a barren place full of lost souls in need of all the help they could get. […] The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do. … What if a lost soul strikes God as more reachable than a lifelong believer?

Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: Finding the Sacred Beneath Our Feet

Spirituality

Divine spaciousness in all the tight places

Karl MöllerLeave a comment

Salvation is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk, regardless of how they got there or whether they know God’s name. Sometimes it comes as an extended human hand and sometimes as a bolt from the blue, but either way it opens a door in what looked for all the world like a wall.

Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith

Spirituality

Not a manipulated extension of myself

Karl MöllerLeave a comment

We cannot love God or our neighbour. We love both or neither. And what love means is rejoicing in the otherness of the other because the depth of this awareness is the depth of our communion with the other. … in the people we live with we find not objects to be cast in our own superficial likeness but, much more, we find in them our true selves, for our true selves only appear, only become realized, when we are wholly turned towards another.

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In this recognition of the other person, a recognition that remakes my mind and expands my consciousness, the other person comes into being as they really are, in their real self, not as a manipulated extension of myself. People move and act out of their own integral reality and no longer as some image created by my imagination.

[…]

The essence of community … is a recognition of and deep reverence for the other.

John Main, Word into Silence