Lately I’ve been drawn to poetry. Resting on the words that touch me, noticing them, and creating space for their wisdom. I’m sharing one such prayer/poem from the Center for Action and Contemplation Practice on Being Born of the Spirit. May you breathe in new life!
Continue reading “Being Born of the Spirit”
There are some ideas that stay with you long after you first hear them. Richard Rohr’s description of the Holy Spirit is one of those ideas, simple, tender, and quietly revolutionary. He writes of an Inner Reminder, an Inner Rememberer, the One who gathers up every scattered piece of our lives and holds them in love.
Continue reading “The Spirit Who Holds Us Together”
Some days the spiritual life feels complicated, but Scripture keeps handing us simple, steady markers—quiet signposts that help us walk in the light.
Continue reading “Markers for a Life of Truth”
There is a way of reading Psalm 101 that turns the spotlight outward—toward “evil men,” corrupt influences, and those who walk in darkness. But there is another, more tender and more courageous reading: the “evil men” are not strangers at all. They are the wounded, frightened, unhealed parts within us that still speak in crooked ways, still wander from the straight path, still cling to old patterns of self‑protection.
Continue reading “Welcoming Wisdom Within”
There is a truth so tender and so bold that Peter can only name it with the language of new birth: You have been born anew… from imperishable seed.
Continue reading “The Imperishable Seed Within”
When we read Paul’s words in Philippians 1:9–11, it’s easy to hear them as a personal prayer—something spoken over my heart, my growth, my discernment. But Paul wasn’t writing to an individual. He was praying over an entire community, a people learning to follow Christ together.
Continue reading “Prayer That Calls Us Forward”
Lately I’ve found myself lingering over the how necessary it is to look to Jesus to show me how to live. I’ve always been fascinated by the three moments in the Gospels when Jesus speaks in Aramaic—the everyday language of His people. Mark’s Gospel preserves these words with such care, almost as if he wants us to hear the tone, the breath, the intimacy of Jesus’ voice as He restores life and opens what has been closed.
Continue reading “Calling Us to Life”
If God’s vision is big enough for everyone, then the work of freedom can’t stay abstract. It has to take shape in the small, ordinary places where we live, speak, choose, and relate. Liberation is not only a sweeping theological idea; it is a daily practice of becoming the kind of people who make God’s wide welcome visible.
Continue reading “Freedom in Daily Life”
Justice is often imagined as something sharp and demanding, a virtue that draws lines, names wrongs, and insists on truth. But in the spiritual life, justice is also a widening of the heart. It is the virtue that clears space within us so God can dwell more freely.
Continue reading “The Spacious Work of God”
There comes a moment in every spiritual life when we realize that the inner sanctuary we carry is not a marketplace of anxieties, ambitions, and self‑concerns, but a Holy of Holies. And nothing changes until that realization dawns. As long as the soul is treated like a place of traffic, we will tolerate the noise. But once we recognize it as the dwelling place of God, we begin to drive out whatever does not belong.
From this truth flow two inseparable movements of the spiritual life:
self‑renunciation and dependence on the Holy Spirit. We cannot live fully in Christ without surrender, and we cannot surrender without cultivating a deep interior silence where God can speak.
Many people try to practice recollection without detachment, or detachment without recollection, and wonder why the effort feels strained. But the two are not parallel paths; they are one path with two expressions. Find a recollected person, and you will find someone detached. Seek one who is detached, and you will find someone recollected. To grow in one is to grow in the other.
Interior silence is not the absence of sound but the absence of inner grasping. Detachment is not indifference but freedom from the compulsions that crowd out God. Together, they create the spaciousness where the Spirit can guide, shape, and renew us.
Anyone who tries—even for a single day—to practice recollection or detachment discovers quickly that the work is doubled. To quiet the heart is to loosen its attachments; to loosen its attachments is to quiet the heart. This is the hidden rhythm of transformation.
And perhaps this is the invitation for us today is to treat the soul as the sacred place it is, to let silence soften us, to let detachment free us, and to let the Spirit lead us into the life we were made for.
Smitten With Goodness 