Reflections

The reconciling force of an adventuring cat (a mostly true story) by Paula Pryce - photo by James Wheeler Pip went missing. Then in his own way, Jeremy did too. Jeremy was the young man who loved and fed her. He lost himself with the loss of Pip, but after a while, something unexpected happened. Jeremy learned that reconciliation only really comes when we give everything away. It began like this: Jeremy moved back home. He had long been a nomad, searching out holy places in t

She’s 7.5 lbs, about a year old according to our veterinarian’s office that scanned the stray dog after she came into our lives earlier this week. No chip, no collar, unclaimed days later. My wife named her Mia. Cradled in my arms and lap, I note her slow breath and feel the comforting beat of her heart. We are connected in this moment of stillness...

When I was 11 years old, my dad—then a programmer analyst at UVic—told me about this new thing called “the internet,” which he had just started playing around with at his office. (I later learned that the ’net had been around since the 1960s, but only at the dawn of the 1990s was it beginning to gain global traction.) There was this tool called “email” that allowed you to send an electronic “letter” almost instantly to somebody else, anywhere in the world, who also had a comp

And yet for some time now, the Divine has been seeking my hand. I can sense her corporeal warmth, as though the Queen of Heaven is opening her arms to me in invitation...

Fr Thomas Keating taught “Divine Therapy” through “opening to the Presence and Action of God within”.  His core contemplative practice is Centering Prayer; mine is Energy Healing.   As a contemplative method, energy healing helps us connect with the present moment and encourages transformation. With mindful intention, practitioners can support holistic wellness and spiritual growth, following the modelling of Jesus.   Let’s reflect on a couple of sessions.

Discussing the ineffable with the devotedly non-religious can be tricky. For my efforts to engage them, I’ve found that their alternative perspectives can sometimes elbow me out of blind spots. Sometimes unsettling, but ultimately always welcome. That happened at a dinner party I recently hosted. It all started with spidey senses and flying fish.

Be freeway now cascading over sun-bleached hills into the restless city digest the swelter the  glare of glass and steel...

As I sit here looking through my living room window in the early morning, gathering my thoughts for the day, I’m watching the birds in my yard—just sitting there, being birds. And I’m reminded again of the importance of beingness, of living from the true identity, the true self we were created to embody.

Revulsion is not my instinctive response when someone confides their image of Love. But when she said, “I think of Love—big, universal Love—as couch grass,” I grimaced. Because I detest couch grass.

Tools for Carrying the Burdens of a Hostile World. By Paula Pryce photo by Yassir Abbas   Part Two:  Intentional Suffering   Traffic in Boston is mythic. People racing, gesticulating, and jockeying in whatever way possible. Rules are optional, it seems, and civility? Well – I’ve often thought Boston traffic to be the perfect microcosm of the get-ahead society. Here are a few of the images seared into my mind: A father with a carload of toddlers drives onto the sidewalk to jum

Every night at 8 p.m., after the war began, Pope Francis called Holy Family Church in Gaza. Every night until he drew his last breath, Francis faithfully picked up the phone and checked in. I haven’t been able to get this picture out of my head....

Illuminated by a near-full moon, several women and I made our way along a forested lakeshore across from a Midwestern Benedictine monastery. We had crept out that night to extend our Wisdom School lessons in intentional living to the serious work of play. A half hour of twisting climbs and descents brought us to a rustic altar and wooden benches that the monks had built high on a rocky outcropping. There we stripped to skin, scrabbled down, and leapt into black silky folds of

By Barbara Cecil I write to fellow travelers, who, like me, are wending their way into the living heart of silence…to women and men of all ages from far and wide, who are drawn to an inner stability that is not subject to the tempest of these times…  to those opening their lives to a creative force awaiting expression just behind chaos and disturbance.  I offer a few stories (out of untold myriads that could be highlighted) about ways an abiding ocean of latent potential, bor

Over the centuries, people just like us – ordinary, wise, imperfect – have found themselves in similar trouble:  doubting ways of knowing that had once felt dependable and secure, and yet becoming reticent when the lay of the land changed.  Often without warning, people just like us find themselves on a threatening road, so incomprehensible that they cannot fathom its boundaries....

I was touched by how Heather Ruce opened the daily Pause of meditation and Centering Prayer earlier this month.  She spoke of a great wave surrounding us, permeating us, which is itself the flow of God. The name God is shorthand (a nickname) for this unfathomable, ever-present, source of love.  More and more, as the disconnected world we have constructed collapses, I find myself orienting deliberately in this pervasive energy...

Many have said that this Advent feels different. The soft hopefulness diminished, the growing light muted. Instead a cavern of tangled serpents seems to be at our feet.  A roiling world with dragons all around...

Holdfasts. Such a lovely name; such an unglamorous appearance. By the time a holdfast shows up on the beach, it is dead: brittle and broken, a woody knot no longer holding fast to anything. Nothing to play with...

By Therese DesCamp – photo by George Meier Our hands imbibe like roots, So I place them on what is beautiful in this world. And I fold them in prayer, And they draw from the heavens light. – St. Francis of Assisi, as interpreted by David Ladinsky As the forest fires burned a few kilometres away last summer, as dams broke around the world, wars escalated and political rhetoric sharpened, I struggled to find a quiet heart. My practice — reading, scripture, meditation, prayer —

The Church has begun the Great Fast of Lent, our Forty Days of preparation for the Mysteries of Holy Week, for our entering with Jesus into the journey of death and resurrection. Our participation includes an outer fast – putting less food into our bodies, if our health allows – to help us listen for the Divine...

Bringing together silence and sound, chant offers a contemplative path that leads us through Advent’s winter shadows.  Chants, ancient or contemporary, draw us across a threshold into deeper quiet and give us courage, so that like the shepherds who rose out of fear to peer up at shining angels, we dare to step from familiar dark into unknown light.  Here, Susan J. Latimer, an Episcopal priest and musician, tells us how chant can give us courage, heal us, and help us become mo