Tag: faith
The friends of Christ
The friends of Christ love everyone sincerely but are not loved by everyone. The friends of Christ maintain the continuity of love until the end. The friends of the world, on the contrary, maintain theirs until they clash with each other over the world’s goods.”” A faithful friend is a strong defense, for when his… Read More ›
It was the faith of the local peasants
After abba Copres’ very instructive talk he took us to his little garden and showed us the palms and other fruit trees which he had planted. “It was the faith of the local peasants” he said, “which encouraged me to plant these in the desert. For I saw what great faith they had when they… Read More ›
The One Who Believed
If through faith Mary became the bearer of the Son given to her by the Father through the power of the Holy Spirit, while preserving her virginity intact, in that same faith she discovered and accepted the other dimension of motherhood revealed by Jesus during his messianic mission. One can say that this dimension of… Read More ›
Failure
Failure is not usually a once in a lifetime experience. It is a weight that has to be carried, unpleasant as that may feel. Faces presented to the world often hide an inner world that is filled with chaos, fear and pain. It is not the complete picture of course for any human, for along… Read More ›
Be Grateful for Doubt
The fact is that all the great spiritual models of the ages before us found themselves, at one point or another, plunged into doubt, into darkness, into the certainty of uncertainty: Augustine, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, John the Baptist, Thomas, Peter, one after another of them all wondered, and wavered,… Read More ›
Healing the blindness through the message of faith and the witness of love
St Raphael is presented to us, above all in the Book of Tobit, as the Angel to whom is entrusted the task of healing. When Jesus sends his disciples out on a mission, the task of proclaiming the Gospel is always linked with that of healing. The Good Samaritan, in accepting and healing the injured… Read More ›
Absurdity
When I was young, I came upon the quote: “life is absurd”. I am pretty sure it was from Camus, for I spent some time in my middle twenties reading him extensively, for a year or so. I think I kind of got it, yet as I get older this quote has become more and… Read More ›
God’s providence is present in every situation
In the mind of Saint John Cassian, anger and sadness are two principal preventatives of prayer: “The disturbance caused by anger or sadness is, above all things, to be eliminated at its sources.”‘ The reason for such emphasis is simple. Both anger and sadness represent a refusal on our part to accept a situation that… Read More ›
We are like Exiles
Amma Syncletica said, “We ought to govern our souls with discretion and to remain in the community, neither following our own will nor seeking our own good. We are like exiles: we have been separated from the things of this world and have given ourselves in one faith to the one Father. We need nothing… Read More ›
Faith and Trust
It was said of Abba Macarius the Egyptian that one day when he was going up from Scetis with a load of baskets, he sat down, overcome with weariness and began to say to himself, “My God, you know very well that I cannot go any farther,” and immediately he found himself at the river…. Read More ›