bible and theology on Disconnection

Maleness and femaleness is the fundamental way we carry our relational design. Interestingly, the English word sexuality comes from the Latin word sexus, which means “being divided, cut off, separated...

One way to recognize whether we suffer from this disconnection is to look at our concern for people who are dirty... people who are "other"... people who don't fit the core group's i...

If you don’t come apart for a while, you will come apart after a while.

Scripture also speaks of “discernment of spirits” and encourages us to “test the spirits to see whether they are from God.” This aspect of discernment helps us to distinguish the real from the phony, ...

On retreat we stop avoiding the pain of the disconnect between our deepest desires and the way we are actually living. We have time and space to reflect on our life rhythms to see if they are really w...

The ancient Greek word for intimate fellowship is koinonia. In the church, we can suffer from what might be called koinonitus: fellowship turned in on itself; cliques and enclaves and tight-knit group...

If you yourself do not cut the lines that tie you to the dock, God will have to use a storm to sever them and to send you out to sea. You have to get out past the harbor into the great depths of God, ...

Psychologists tell us that one of the most difficult conditions a person can be forced to bear is light deprivation. Darkness, in fact, is often used in military captivity or penal institutions to bre...

The absence of boundaries creates nonorder, and nonorder is not the end of exclusion but the end of life.

This is an age where our sense of spiritual possibility, transcendence, and the presence of God has been drained out. What’s left is a spiritual desert, and Christians face the temptation to accept th...

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.

Remember this. When people choose to withdraw far from a fire, the fire continues to give warmth, but they grow cold. When people choose to withdraw far from light, the light continues to be bright in...

No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof. If no o...

One of the dangers of living in a constant state of distraction is that we never go to the bottom of our pain, our sadness, our emptiness, which means we never find that rock-bottom place of the peace...

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off.

One rare but powerful item of discipline is the requirement that the recruit of the company undertake a personal experience of solitude at least once a month. This is patterned consciously on the expe...

Christianity can be such a pretty faith. God calls us to wonderful things, to noble deeds, and to be a people of love. We are meant to be kind, joyful, brave, and good. These are attractive qualities ...

[With respect to rejecting the sacraments] Nothing is more odd than for the faithful freely to do without the assistance handed down by the Lord or allow themselves to be deprived.

We cannot have communion with Christ till we are in union with Him; and we cannot have communion with the Church till we are in vital union with it.

[Describing many of his friends] Something that doesn’t have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It’s more like stomach...

Let the soul thank God when she experiences his loving endearments, but let her not repine when she finds herself left in desolation. It is important to lay great stress on this point, because some so...

The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from a Christian community may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; in the poor brother Christ is knocking at the door.

A few years ago Christian friends of ours, after several years of marriage, came to see Esther and me to explain that their relationship had reached an impasse and that they could see no alternative b...

Good Father, we thank you for inviting us to your table. You invite us to your heavenly feast, but we don’t show up to the party. Rather, we ignore your invitation, we get distracted by other work we ...

When you feel abandoned by God yet continue to trust him in spite of your feelings, you worship him in the deepest way.

In the sacrament of communion, we celebrate our union with Christ and also with the family of God.  As we do this, we come up against the human struggle to live in unity, which plays out in many place...

Persecution is simply the clash between two irreconcilable value-systems.

My argument is that friendship is the way across and through the lines that have separated us for so long. Friendship is discipleship in action. God calls us into a deep friendship with Himself and wi...

I can lose my job; I might be released from a position. My career can come to an end when I retire from the organization I work in. But my vocation comes from God; it remains and is not in the end som...

What really characterizes consumer culture is not attachment to things but detachment. . . . People do not cling to things; they discard them and buy other things.