I was chatting with a friend recently about dating, and specifically about why dating these days is so difficult. He brought up the point that our particular cultural moment's great diversity in approaches, attitudes, and goals people have in relationships makes it difficult to know where we stand at any given time. While theoretically everyone … Continue reading The Rule of Saint Paul, or, What’s Love Got to Do with It
Love is the natural state of the universe, and love of God first and foremost, since, after all, God is love. This is a basic assumption of the Christian faith, and yet, loving isn't easy for us. Most of us are, more of than we'd care to admit, counter-examples for this assumption about the world. … Continue reading A Drop of Water Poured into Wine: The Four Loves of St Bernard of Clairvaux
I’m not sure whether it’s saving the best for last, or the most difficult for last, but we’ve finally come to the end of this series on character strengths as good spiritual fruit, and today’s topic is both among the best and the most difficult to talk about: Love. Love lies at the heart of … Continue reading Love
(I’m going to start this post with a warning: This will be a bit more personal than what I have normally been posting here. But, I think something that I stumbled across in the course of the long and convoluted journey I describe below may be interesting or helpful, and I think there really isn’t … Continue reading A Skyline of the Heart
This week was the first full week of Lent, and so I wanted the practice for this week to be a specifically Lenten practice. And, since I first encountered it twelve years ago, no practice has jumped out at me as being ‘more’ Lenten, than the Lenten Prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian. The famed … Continue reading Lenten Prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian
