The afternoon of Christianity

Where might we experience Jesus today in a world that is seemingly too crowded with its own concerns to allow a space for him? The renowned spirituality writer Tomas Halik, in a recent book entitled The Afternoon of Christianity, makes this suggestion. As the world makes less and less explicit space for Jesus, we need…

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Melancholy and the soul

Normally none of us likes feeling sad, heavy, or depressed. Generally, we prefer sunshine to darkness, light-heartedness to melancholy. That’s why we tend to do everything we can to distract ourselves from melancholy, to keep heaviness and sadness at bay. Mostly, we run from feelings that sadden or frighten us. For the most part, we…

Dark Nights of the Heart

There are times when our world unravels. Who hasn’t had the feeling? “I’m falling apart! This is beyond me! My heart is broken! I feel betrayed by everything! Nothing makes sense anymore! Life is upside down!” Jesus had a cosmic image for this. In the Gospels, he talks about how the world as we experience…

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Love and Faith as fidelity

Several years ago, a friend of mine made a very unromantic type of marriage proposal to his fiancé. He was in his mid-forties and had suffered several disillusioning heartbreaks, some of which by his own admission were his fault, the result of feelings shifting unexpectedly on his part. Now, in mid-life, struggling not to be…

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Several years ago, a Presbyterian minister I know challenged his congregation to open its doors and its heart more fully to the poor. Initially the congregation responded with enthusiasm and a number of programs were introduced to invite people from the less-privileged economic areas of the city, including a number of street-people, to come to…

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Our Restless Selves.

During the last years of his life, Thomas Merton lived in a hermitage outside a monastery, hoping to find more solitude in his life. But solitude is an illusive thing and he found it was forever escaping him. Then one morning he sensed that for a moment he had found it. However, what he experienced…

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Jesus and the poor

I grew up a second-generation immigrant in the outback of the Western Canadian prairies. Our family was poor economically, subsistence farmers, with the necessities but seldom with much more. My father and mother were charitable to a fault and tried to instil that in us. However, given our own poverty, understandably we did not have…