Date Archives November 2021

Contemplative Prayer

Contemplative prayer can be traced to the desert fathers and mothers, early Benedictine monasticism, and early Catholic teachers like Saint Bonaventure and the Carmelites. But then, the teaching was largely lost. Almost no teachers taught contemplative prayer from the 16th century onward. If you learned the practice, you learned it on your own, following your own instincts and the guidance of the Spirit. In the 1970s, Thomas Keating and a handful of other monks re-introduced Centering Prayer into Christianity. They knew it was an excellent portal drawing us into the… Read More

An Unexpected Emergency in Flight

Yesterday on a flight as I was taking off from Peachtree-Dekalb Airport (KPDK) in Atlanta, a pilot who was cleared to land lowered his landing gear on his dissent as he had hundreds of times before. But this time, as his landing gear descended, it began making a horrible shaking noise. This is never good. He called the tower and reported that he might have an emergency on his hands. All of us in flight immediately tuned in. The controller called back to the pilot and recommended he do a flyby… Read More

Mistakes About God

Saint Thomas Aquinas taught that a mistake about understanding creation results in a mistake about understanding God. Theologian Matthew Fox wrote beautifully about this in his book, “The Tao Of Thomas Aquinas,” when he says that according to Aquinas, all the mistakes we make about nature steer us away from our understanding of divinity. Our pursuit of truth – evidenced in nature – shows us that everything is connected in a delicate web of life. Our interdependence allows us to be in community with deep compassion. Compassion, Aquinas says, is… Read More