In our busy, device-encumbered modern world, there are good reasons to unplug and step into the wild. And if not the wild, at least a place where you can break from the compulsive access to information, connection, and the overload it brings. The mind needs spaciousness to do its job well. And besides, it just feels good to stop and smell the rain.
For another helpful reflection along this line see this New York Times article by Pico Iyer.
If you practice contemplative prayer, you may know how challenging it can be to know when to stop praying. What I mean is, if you get lost or absorbed in prayer, it's really annoying to have your cell phone alarm ring or beep or whatever and summon you out of such deep intimacy with God.
So, here's a great little app for your phone or tablet. I don't have many apps and frankly find many of them a waste of precious time. This one, though, is enormously helpful to help you time your periods of contemplation.
Check it out . . . here.
Satire's a powerful way to open our eyes. Here's an eye-opener to our misunderstandings and abuses of prayer
"When you pray," it has been wisely said by an Orthodox writer in Finland, "you yourself must be silent. . . . You must be silent; let the prayer speak." To achieve silence: this is of all things the hardest and the most decisive in the art of prayer.
So begins Bishop Kallistos Ware's little booklet on the Jesus Prayer. A theologian at Oxford University, Ware insightful draws the ancient Christian practice into the modern world. I've written often about the Jesus Prayer or Prayer of the Heart, and commend the little book to you.
Continued from a previous series of posts on the stages of spiritual growth . . . Abiding in love is the fruit of years of spiritual practice. There’s no shortcut to this experience of full union with God in Christ through the Spirit, nor is there any way for you to bring yourself here. It comes to you. You become “a partaker of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1.4) only because you’ve participated all along the way along with the mischief of God at work in you—through all your joys and sorrows. You’ve finally become fully human, alive to love, and therefore a person in whom all the fullness of God abides (Ephesians 3.19).
This doesn’t mean that you will live without suffering or frustration, temptation or even anger. Rather, when you abide in love, you know how to sublimate your reactivity to such things. You can redirect your spirit quickly and re-establish yourself in the current of God’s love.
Gratitude, warmth, and wisdom are the chief characteristics of those whom God has brought to this final stage, a stage, which is a taste of the eternal life that awaits us beyond death. These “saints” are a healing presence to us all.
The end of the series.