Tag: Jesus

What is truth?

Pilate said to him, “What is truth?”

The Gospel of John, 18:38

Is truth a light in the dark
or is it the dark itself?

Is it pain
or a drug-mask that covers pain?

If it’s a lone voice
on a noisy street corner
is it worth hearing,
stopping for?

If we jeer at it
does that make it less true?

What if most of us jeer?

Jesus said:
For this purpose I was born
and for this purpose I have come into the world –
to bear witness to the truth.

This he said facing crucifixion.
Truth was a big deal to Jesus.

What is truth,
to you,
to me,
to all of us?

Photo by Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash

Tags darkness, Gospel of John, Jesus, light, Pontius Pilate, what is truth

hope Other Writings Poetry

Hope completes Faith

If I do not hope in His love for me, I will never really know Christ. I hear of Him by faith. But I do not achieve the contact that knows Him, and thereby knows the Father in Him, until my faith in Him is completed by hope and charity: hope that grasps His love for me and charity that pays Him the return of love I owe.

— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island, Sentences on Hope

Faith without hope
is light without sight
warmth too far away to feel
music that can’t be heard
over the dry, drafty doctrine
that being correct is a higher calling
than simply being loved.

p.s. I’ve written about this before with similar sentiment. I wish I had learned this lesson much earlier in my life.

Tags doctrine, faith, faith without hope, hope, Jesus, No Man is an Island, sentences on hope, Thomas Merton

hope Poetry prayer

This is what we pray for

Hope seeks not only God in Himself, not only the means to reach Him, but it seeks, finally and beyond all else, God’s glory revealed in ourselves. This will be the final manifestation of His infinite mercy, and this is what we pray for when we say “Thy Kingdom come.”

— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island, Sentences on Hope

Ask for Me, and receive
that I have received you.
Seek Me, and find
that I have found you.
Knock and enter, knowing
that I knock and wait to enter.

You already have what you truly hope for:
the Giver of Life
asking, seeking, knocking
to give you Life.

Tags ask and receive, hope, Jesus, knock and it shall be opened, mercy, No Man is an Island, seek and find, Thomas Merton, thy kingdom come

love Poetry prayer

We have the greatest weapons

Post author By dw
Post date October 3, 2019
No Comments on We have the greatest weapons

We have the greatest weapons in the world, greater than any hydrogen or atom bomb, and they are the weapons of poverty and prayer, fasting and alms, the reckless spending of ourselves in God’s service and for his poor. Without poverty we will not have learned love, and love, at the end, is the measure by which we shall be judged.

Day, Dorothy. The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus (Plough Spiritual Guides: Backpack Classics) (p. 63). Plough Publishing House. Kindle Edition.

More powerful than power itself is the choice to set it aside.

Then Jesus said to him, “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. 53 Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? 54 But how then would the scriptures be fulfilled, which say it must happen in this way?”

Harper Bibles. NRSV Bible with the Apocrypha (Kindle Locations 76005-76007). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Photo by Christoph Schmid on Unsplash

Tags Dorothy Day, fasting, Jesus, loving others, nuclear weapons, poor, poverty, power, prayer, The Reckless Way of Love

hope Poetry

The God of those who can hope

Post author By dw
Post date September 22, 2019
No Comments on The God of those who can hope

Those who abandon everything in order to seek God know well that He is the God of the poor…the supreme expression of His justice is to forgive those whom no one else would ever have forgiven. That is why He is, above all, the God of those who can hope where there is no hope. The penitent thief who died with Christ was able to see God where the doctors of the law had just proved impossible Jesus’s claim to divinity.

— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island, Sentences on Hope

Perhaps,
in our darkest hour,
the difference between
hope and despair
is our willingness
to recognize
the God of love
hanging on the cross
beside ours.

Photo by Bobbie Wallace on Unsplash