“The world’s needs are increasing like molten lava in an overdue volcano. Each day we watch a litany of news reports of famines, wars, and epidemics, often even as we are deftly shoveling in the abundance of our own food. We casually flip past the advertisement appeals picturing babies with stomachs bloated by malnutrition. The needs […]
Still Saturday: The Silence of Surrender
We enter the land of silence by the silence of surrender, and there is no map of the silence that is surrender…. The practice of silence…cannot be reduced to a spiritual technique. Techniques are all the rage today. They suggest a certain control that aims to determine a certain outcome. They clearly have their […]
Still Saturday: What Does the Landscape Look Like?
“So, maps. Perhaps they are metaphors of progress towards a resting place, an ultimate goal. I used to teach courses in journal keeping as a means to self-awareness and God awareness. One of the exercises I suggested was this: “See your life as a landscape. Describe its contours and challenges, and think of yourself […]
Still Saturday: Why We Don’t Need Time
Thomas Merton wrote, in a light passage in one of his Gethsemane journals: “Suggested emendation in the Lord’s Prayer: Take out ‘Thy Kingdom come’ and substitute ‘Give us time!’ ” But time is the one thing we have been given, and we have been given to time. Time gives us a whirl. We […]
Still Saturday: Why There is No Need to Rush
“The theology of progress forces us to act before we are ready. We speak before we know what to say. We respond before we feel the truth of what we know. In the process, we inadvertently create suffering, heaping imprecision upon inaccuracy, until we are all buried under a mountain of misperception. But Sabbath […]
Still Saturday: The Problem with Busyness
“To remember is, literally, to put broken pieces back together, to re-member. It is to create an original wholeness out of what has become scattered fragments . . . “There is a terrible cost to our busyness. It erodes memory. Or worse than that: it turns good memory into mere nostalgia–memory falsified and petrified–and […]
Still Saturday: How Being Saved Sounds
An empty room is silent. A room where people are not speaking or moving is quiet. Silence is a given, quiet a gift. Silence is the absence of sound and quiet the stilling of sound. Silence can’t be anything but silent. Quiet chooses to be silent. It holds its breath to listen. It […]
Still Saturday: Atmosphere
“Atmosphere is created when we bring our memories, thoughts, and emotions to a place. It is our physical presence that makes a space become real . . . “Dare to awaken your soul to be physically present. “Taste the atmosphere with God and bring all the stories you’re living–the joy, heartbreak, worries, hopes, and […]
Still Saturday: Abandoned
“His wounds didn’t disappear with his resurrected body. Jesus chose to walk out into the world with scars from the past–visible. “It’s with those hands he reaches out to gently hold you and draw you to his side, where his other scar is tender, where water and blood flowed. So you can touch it […]
Still Saturday: Quiet
But when our questions are invisible, we become invisible. Each time I am still, they emerge: my questions. Quietness resurfaces the thoughts and questions that are important. Quietness connects my soulful self to Jesus. ~Bonnie Gray :: :: invisibility fog of fear quiet connections intimacy. Inspired by chapter 13, “The Walk.” Leaving some […]
