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Other Writings

No safe place

sliver of light falling on hair of woman in the dark

 

Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of humankind…this means that we are never safe, that there is no place where we can hide from God, no place where we are safe from his power to break in two and recreate the human heart.

Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, “The Face in the Sky”

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Poetry

Walking with grief

man walking in rain with black umbrella

In Common

So many grieving
Damage recent and long past
Near and far away

dw
Copyright © 2018

For those of us who grieve, Andy Raine of the Northumbria Community has written,

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Other Writings

The good thing about weakness

hands holding head of infant

 

We will see that we are human, like everyone else, that we all have weaknesses and deficiencies, and that these limitations of ours play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us.

— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

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Categories
Catechism

A plan of sheer goodness

I am not a Roman Catholic; reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church is not something that would have ever occurred to me to do. But I kept running into Catholic writers, one after another, who wrote about faith and life with a richness I hadn’t seen before: Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton, James Martin, and Jean Vanier to name a few.  So I spent several years looking into Roman Catholicism in depth, which included reading through the Catechism…twice.

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Other Writings

The sound God’s voice makes

lone person in totallyl white, snowy emptiness

 

Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God’s voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him.

Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, “Message in the Stars”

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