there is this opacity the point of no-beyond where patterns become permanently shaded and it’s not that the crime scene has been taped...

...who choose to awaken ourselves, but God Who chooses to awaken us. - Thomas Merton

A tree gives glory to God simply by being a tree. Thomas Merton It is a certainty that if you cannot be fully present to another - that...

- mental - rational - passive - a matter of temperament - inactivity - inertia - sitting - thinking - vacancy - reflective - automatism -...

There is no cogito (I think) and no ergo (therefore) but only SUM, I Am. Not in the sense of futile assertion of our individuality...but...

A surprising number of people subscribe to the notion that the Bible is the highest authority for what they believe. But that notion...

The humble, immediate, and intimate harmonic experience of the presence of God is the only way to dispel misconceptions about the true...

There are windbag clerics. There are smarty-pants traditon-ists. There are walking-encyclopedia scriptur-ists. But it is not possible...

Too much has been written about contemplation. Not too much in the sense of over-valuation, but too much in the sense of verbiage. In...

Contemplation springs from God's initiative, that and that alone. That initiative is love. If we can say at all that we love God it is...

First of all, always remember, this word itself - contemplation - is fraught with difficulty primarily because of the spectre that it can...

There is an overwhelming number of people who have no need to read a blog like this. Their's is a different order of spirituality. To...

Creating a context in which we need others to depend upon us means exploiting others for our own benefit. Even carried out passively...

So now, don't be anxious about life (what you shall eat), nor for your body (what you shall wear). Life is more than eating; the body is...

This false self is the person that people want themselves to be. It is the person whom they will themselves to be. It exists outside of...

Taboos are most often associated with sin in pious people's minds. But this popular piety of religious people proves to be only a...

The experience of God depends completely on one's sense of sin in their life. Sin is a mystery because it is a game of cat and mouse. It...

The apophatic grasp of I Am cannot be adequately explained to anyone who has not had some aspect of the same experience. It is a fact...

The church as a whole is filled with people looking for tangible results, people who want to know at the end of the day that they have...