Living in reality begins when we stop resisting the life we actually have and release the fantasy of a life without difficulty. So much of our suffering comes not from what is happening, but from our insistence that it shouldn’t be happening.
Continue reading “When Holiness Takes Root”
Watching the sunrise at Red Rocks in Colorado already feels like a liturgy written into the earth itself, but waking at 4:00 a.m. to get there adds its own kind of devotion. As I stepped out of bed in the dark, an unexpected anticipation rose in me—almost as if creation itself had extended an invitation. To sit there in the Amphitheatre as the first light spilled over the sandstone felt like participating in something God began long before I arrived, a quiet companionship with the generosity of creation.
Continue reading “The Rise of Generosity”
For eight years now, I’ve walked beside my husband through the slow, unrelenting landscape of chronic illness. It has been hard in ways I never expected—watching the body of someone you love weaken, learning to navigate fear and fatigue, holding space for the things that matter when so much feels fragile. And yet, even in the heaviness, there has been a strange and holy gift: the tenderness of walking each other home, one day at a time.
Continue reading “Held in the Long Journey”
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”
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.
Pentecost reminds us that the Holy Spirit comes to make us truly rich — not in possessions or accomplishments, but in the gifts that endure: faith, hope, and love. These are the treasures that shape a life rooted in God and open us to His transforming fire.
Continue reading “Rich in the Spirit 🔥”
Pentecost always reminds us that the Holy Spirit does not descend to create spectators — the Spirit creates ambassadors. People who step into the world carrying courage, clarity, and compassion that are not their own. This week, Pope Leo XIV offered a striking echo of that truth as he welcomed new ambassadors to the Holy See and urged them to become instruments of the peace our world aches for.
Continue reading “Ambassadors of Peace”
John 16:29–33 gives us a strikingly honest moment. Jesus tells his disciples that they will falter yet not be alone because the Father is with them. And then he offers the promise every heart longs for: “In me you may have peace… Take courage, I have conquered the world.”
Continue reading “The Courage of Presence”
It takes real effort to hold a contemplative posture in this world. Not because God is distant, but because everything else is loud. The pace, the pressure, the constant pull toward productivity—these forces scatter us before we even notice. Contemplation asks us to slow down, to return, to begin again.
Continue reading “Returning to the Quiet Center”
Smitten With Goodness 