Tag: humility
What we are
The “Song of Songs” is a beautiful book of erotic poetry, describing what many find hard to accept, longings infinite, emotions strong, our beauty alluring to the eternal, which is presented or revealed to us as a love sick suitor running after the beloved. Each human an object of desire by the infinite, perhaps the… Read More ›
What is Success?
A few years ago a man who was compiling a book entitled Success wrote and asked me to contribute a statement on how I got to be a success. I replied indignantly that I was not able to consider myself a success in any terms that had a meaning to me. I swore I had… Read More ›
Prayer, self-knowledge, and union with others
Self-knowledge and humility go hand in hand and necessary if one’s prayer is to take fruit. Putting on the ‘Mind of Christ’ can be at times arduous, yet it also leads to great joy. People who take their relationship with God seriously know that when speaking of prayer it has different shades of meaning. Prayer if… Read More ›
Sunday Chapter talk on humility
You can’t escape the journey that is our lives. If it is attempted things usually get worse. That goes for life in the secular world as well as for those who are in religious and monastic life. Below is a talk I presented to the community at Sunday Chapter on an aspect of Humility as… Read More ›
Inside the Faces of Pride
Pride is something most of us understand to a certain extent. Or, at the very least, we think we know what it looks like when we see it. Whether seen in business leaders, politicians, celebrities, or neighbors, there is a type of pride that almost all of us recognize. You can characterize it as bombastic,… Read More ›
A figure from the far past, Dr. Miller
When I entered the community in 1971, a lot of the monks would talk to me about Dr. Miller. He used to be a doctor who had a very good relationship with the Monastery and would take care of the needs of the monks. I am not sure how it worked, how often he came… Read More ›
A lady really down on herself
I was talking to one of our retreatants a few months ago. She is very devout, loving and a caregiver. Yet when we talked she was really hard on herself, filled with revulsion and would not allow anything positive to be said of her. So as she was finished I asked her if she thought… Read More ›
Seeking God Perfectly
This is what it means to seek God perfectly: to withdraw from illusion and pleasure, from worldly anxieties and desires, from the works that God does not want, from a glory that is only human display; to keep my mind free from confusion in order that my liberty may be always at the disposal of… Read More ›
The Silence of the World is Real
Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else. They constantly defile the silence of the forests and the mountains and the sea. They bore through silent nature in every direction with their machines, for fear that the calm world might accuse them of their own emptiness. The urgency of their swift movement… Read More ›
Renouncing Resentment
The problem is to learn how to renounce resentment without selling out to the organization people who want everyone to accept absurdity and moral anarchy in a spirit of uplift and willing complicity. Few men are strong enough to find the solution. A monastery is not necessarily the right answer; there is resentment in monasteries… Read More ›