life on Mysticism

Simone Weil, a French philosopher, theologian and activist around the time of World War II, wrote a remarkable essay in which she connects the discipline of schoolwork with that of prayer. She argues ...

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? Back to Bethany The trans-Jordan village of Bethany was the place in which Jesus’ ministry began. It is now the place in which our text...

A genuine faith resolves the mystery of life by the mystery of God.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in a...

The Boundless Mystery we call God is continuously at work in the life of every one of us. In everything that happens to us, God is always seeking to draw us—and all creation—into greater fullness of l...

To receive spiritual direction is to recognize that God does not solve our problems or answer all our questions, but leads us closer to the mystery of our existence where all questions cease.

For prayer exists, no question about that. it is the peculiarly human response to the fact of this endless mystery of bliss and brutality, impersonal might and lyric intimacy that composes our experie...

The mystery of the universe, and the meaning of God's world, are shrouded in hopeless obscurity, until we learn to feel that all laws suppose a lawgiver, and that all working involves a Divine ene...

Writing about ministering to postmodern skeptics, Don Everts and Doug Schaupp share a helpful insight into the mystery of God's movement: The first lesson they have taught us about the path to f...

When we understand every single secret of the universe, there will still be left the eternal mystery of the human heart.

Theophan the Recluse…is well recognized in Eastern Orthodoxy, specifically the Russian Orthodox tradition. Theophan was a complex and intriguing personality, but today we know him mostly because of hi...

To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we...

Myth becomes myth not in the living but in the retelling.

Awe encourages us to think of God as a transcendent presence: someone outside and beyond our own small concerns and our own vulnerable lives. Awe opens us up to the possibility of living always on the...

There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier...

Pentecost . . . The Holy Spirit fills the disciples and they speak in tongues they likely do not understand themselves. It is an uncontrolled public witness – uncontrolled by human agendas – as well a...

Holy Spirit, pour out upon us wisdom and understanding, that, being taught by you in Holy Scripture, our hearts and minds may be opened to receive all that leads to life and holiness. Through Jesus Ch...

[These thoughts come from a journal entry of about 10 years ago when I was experiencing a deep and dark night of faith] I have found insight and wisdom for my journey with Christ in the writings of J...

Ancient Lens What's the historical context? A Hard Saying The difficulty of this saying was used by opponents of the early Christians to justify persecution, yet the early church still rallie...

Recently, when I was in London, I went to the National Gallery. It was a weekday, but it was still crowded with people wearing headsets, staring at famous paintings, listening to a narrator explain th...

Ancient Lens What's the historical context? A Hard Saying The difficulty of this saying was used by opponents of the early Christians to justify persecution, yet the early church still rallie...

Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is gooder than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good new...

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.

In embarking on the journey, we must leave the world of certainty. We must courageously journey to a strange place where there are a lot of risks and much is at stake, a place where there are new prob...

In the midst of a busy schedule of activities—healing suffering people, casting out devils, responding to impatient disciples, traveling from town to town, and preaching from synagogue to synagogue—we...

A pilgrimage is a way of praying with your feet. You go on a pilgrimage because you know there’s something missing inside your soul, and the only way you can find it is to go to sacred places, places ...

Introduction This is a well-known passage full of well-known phrases, and yet reading and meditating on the text continues to offer fresh understandings and applications. John 3:1-17 is the account o...

Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message. To see all that is offered us at the windows of the soul, and to reach out and rece...

It is a quotidian mystery that dailiness can lead to such despair and yet also be at the core of our salvation. . . . We want life to have meaning, we want fulfillment, healing and even ecstasy, but t...

Now we are no longer primitive. Now the whole world seems not holy….We as a people have moved from pantheism to pan-atheism...It is difficult to undo our own damage and to recall to our presence that ...