SACRAMENTAL LIVING

“…when we pray for the living, the very heart of our prayer is for the forgiveness of their sins. Not because we’re aware of some rules which they have broken, but because the forgiveness of sin, the restoration of communion with God, is the source of every good thing, without which nothing can be good or well. When we pray for those who have died and the forgiveness of their sins, we are asking the same thing, for their communion with God, whether broken or impaired, to be m

“Understood accurately, asceticism is about Beauty; it’s about attempting to be the sort of artists who won’t betray what they have seen of the beautiful. For example, we don’t fast in order to be good, but rather so that our devotion, our eros for Christ’s Beauty, will be absolute. Moral effort only matters when it expands that ascetic effort into the arena of Goodness. Moral struggle has to be an amplification of asceticism, never a substitute. It has to be the working out

“So there is always the law of God or the law of destruction in our human mind and heart. That would be a teaching of St. Paul in the letter to the Romans, very clearly, the seventh and eighth chapters. There’s always another law working in a human being. We’re never simply autonomous. So when people ask, “Was it me or was it the devil in me?” or “Was it me or was it the Holy Spirit in me, or Christ in me?” Sometimes people ask that. St. Paul says, “When I do good, I can do a

“If we look inside ourselves and try to see our tendencies, we will easily notice that we already have a developed habit of condemning...

“Christ then appears through shut doors in the midst of them and tells them one thing: ‘Peace be with you.’ For these to be the first...

“Prayer is strange stuff. As a purely mental event it can be indistinguishable from the running dialog that goes on in our heads all the...

“So we see dramatized in Genesis the bitter “fruit” of an approach to the interpretation of spiritual realities that attempts to be...

“What is spiritual renewal? It is when you are no longer weighed down by the burden of past traumas and mistakes, your present is filled...

“Has the world always been such a mad dash and so busy, or is something just wrong with me? But it’s not the outer disquiet that troubles...

“Sin and passion are inextricably linked, but they should be considered separately. We call sin a person’s action which violates one of...