Hieropraxis

Contemplative prayer. The name makes it sound restful. The description makes it sound easy enough. Settling down in silence, just focusing on God. Repeating a phrase, like “Lord, have mercy” or the name of Jesus, to keep one’s attention on Him. It might sound a bit boring, but it doesn’t sound hard. Certainly it doesn’t sound hard enough to merit an athletic metaphor, right? ……….Read the rest of the article.

How do you starve a culture? ……….Read the rest of the article.

Time is one of the most valuable gifts we can give to another person… but it’s a gift rather than an investment. We invest in things when we expect a payoff; when we give we don’t expect a return. That’s now it is with time and relationships. There’s no way to know ahead what will come of the gift of time, except perhaps to know that something will come of it, somehow, in God’s time. ……….Read the rest of the article.

There doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to fashion. Consider jeans, so common as to be practically invisible. Ever wonder why jeans are the thing to wear, and not khakis? I don’t know; it’s just fashion. Or take shoes: when I first came to southern California, I was startled to see people wearing flip-flops everywhere (in the supermarket! in church!), but now I’m used to it. The SoCal crowd could just as easily wear sandals in town and reserve the flip-flops for the beach like they do on the East Coast; it’s just a matter of fashion.

It’s no big deal whether you go with the crowd on wearing jeans and flip-flops, or whether you prefer slacks and sandals. What is more of a big deal is that our culture is full of spiritual fashions, too. ……….Read the rest of the article.

Today I washed windows in my house. And as I did, I thought about how these windows are a lot like me. ……….Read the rest of the article.

I suspect that I’m not alone in feeling uncomfortable when I see someone on the street asking for money. Maybe it’s the reminder that even if all is well in my own world, there are others who aren’t making it. Maybe it’s because face-to-face it’s difficult to maintain the cool, distant sympathy I could feel when seeing a TV program or reading a magazine article on the homeless. Right there, on the street, what am I supposed to do? ……….Read the rest of the article.

When I started learning about the rosary, I was both interested and wary. Interested, because I’d been discovering that repeated short prayers like the Jesus prayer (”Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”) really did help me to open my heart to God’s presence in a way that was different from other ways of praying. Wary, because the prayer that is most repeated in the Roman Catholic rosary is the Hail Mary: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” I thought to myself: I committed myself to Christ as my Savior. Shouldn’t I be addressing my prayers to Him, not His mother? It was a question that led me to do some serious research on the theology and Scriptural basis of the Hail Mary - an interesting journey. ……….Read the rest of the article.

As a writer, I make connections. I observe, I reflect. My spiritual life is no exception. What is my relationship with Christ? How is God acting in my life? I look for meaning in just about everything; that’s who I am, who God made me to be. But I think that even in the midst of wanting to understand everything, I need to recognize that is is God who knows, not me. I’m not necessarily able to understand what He is doing in my life at this very minute - and maybe I don’t need to. ……….Read the rest of the article.

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