Here is a quote from Augustine that I read some years ago. At the time I know it was speaking to my spiritual condition, but I did not quite know how to make the application to my walk with God. Here is the quote. “My soul is like a house, small for you to enter,…
Today is Father’s Day. There are many men who are literally fatherless in our culture and many more who feel fatherless, both emotionally and spiritually. Tom Wolfe maintains that “the deepest search of life” is the search to find a father. “The deepest search in life, it seemed to me, the thing that in one…
Surrender is not something that comes easily for men. It is something we will practice only as a last option. It is generally assumed that control is more of an issue for men then women. Surrender for men observes David Benner “feels like failure and defeat” whereas for women surrender is associated “with abuse and the use…
Do you often feel like a failure in prayer. Listen to the words of a cistercian monk, Michael Casey, “Prayer cannot be measured on a scale of success or failure because it is God’s work – and God always succeeds. When we believe we have failed in prayer, it is because we decided what shape…
Within every man is an inner cauldron of desires, or as David Benner describes it a, “inextinguishing burning bush that is at the core of our being.” Our desires keep us “molten.” They are what keeps us moving and awake. Like an unquenchable fire, there is within a restlessness that keeps us from ever getting our deepest…
The Christian mystic Hildegrad von Bingen thought of herself as being “a feather on the breath of God.” I read this quote in David Benner book “Soulful Spirituality.” In this very helpful book on the spiritual life, Benner is making the point that the Spirit of God invites us to live “in the place of…
Parker Palmer in his book ” A Hidden Wholeness” has a quote from Douglas Wood about the jack pine. “Jack pines….are not lumber trees (and they) won’t win many beauty contests either. But to me this valiant old tree, solitary on its own rocky point, is as beautiful as a living thing can be….In the…
I have quoted from David Benner often on the blog site. He has been a great help in my spiritual formation. He helped me to see that personhood is not an accomplishment, but rather a gift. It has been difficult to realize how much of who I have thought of myself to be, has been of my own…
One of the author- pastors I admire is Tim Keller, pastor or Redeemer Presbyterian church in Manhattan, N.Y. He has had an amazing impact on the secular minded residents of that city. He was interviewed by ABC news journalist, Christiane Amanpour on ABC’s “This Week” aired on Easter Sunday. He agreed with Amanpour that secularism and religiosity…
I am writing this blog on Good Friday. Good Friday is “good” because of what God did for us on the cross. Good Friday brings us face to face with the great dilemna of our personal sin. We are found guilty with no way to rid our selves of the guilt. We cannot by our own…