Christian contemplation thrown into the muddy highways of the world : encouragement : experiences : resources
Introduction To close Earth Month, there is a 50-year-old essay that I want to reproduce in its entirety. The reason for this is that I think the text is a precursor to many of the contemplative and eco-spirituality themes of Pope Francis, and it is found in one of the authors he has remarked to …
Continue reading “Aestheticism vs. Contemplation of Beauty: Arturo Paoli and Pope Francis”
Blessed John Soreth was a Carmelite of the fifteenth century who wrote an important commentary on the rule of that order. In it, he gives what I think is a good synthesis of a lot of pre-modern thought on Christian contemplation. I owe my knowledge of this summary to Saint Titus Brandsma: This treatment of …
Continue reading “John Soreth’s Three Loci of Contemplation in Perspective Today”
For Marcel Văn, as for Pope Francis, Christian contemplation is an experience of the beauty of God. We know him and at the same time love him with a love that wants to regard and respect the mystery of the person’s reality. This is tied up with many ideas about the contemplation of the beauty …
Continue reading “The Birth of “Our God-Given Aesthetic and Contemplative Sense” per Marcel Văn”
Earlier this week, Vatican News ran a story saying that Pope Francis will, this year and in preparation for the 2025 Jubilee, open up a school of prayer: The Pope himself, during this year, they announced, will set up a “School of Prayer.” “This School,” Archbishop Fisichella explained, “will be a series of moments of …
The new apostolic exhortation On the Climate Crisis Laudate Deum is not a document about Christian contemplation. Yet one way to read it is as a consolidation of exactly that. All the themes of Pope Francis’ vision of Christian contemplation, in all its main forms, are represented here, and indeed they serve as the summative …
Continue reading “Christian Contemplation Consolidated: A Contemplative Reading of Laudate Deum”
The Season of Creation coincides with what has, in recent decades and especially the past few years, become a period of greater frequency and severity of hurricanes, tropical storms, and post-tropical storms in the Canadian Maritimes, where I grew up and have come back to live. And not only this. We now have less snowy, …
Most Catholics are familiar with seven spiritual and seven corporal works of mercy. Although none of them is an act of contemplation, no small number of them might flow out of our contemplation, particularly of Christ in our neighbour. Feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, visiting the …
The Season of Creation is an ecumenical time running from what Pope Francis has designated the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, September 1, to the feast of Saint Francis of Assisi, October 4, and over this period, I’d like to offer some invitations—and challenges—to a form of contemplation that is just …
Continue reading “Contemplative in the Mud of the Earth this Season of Creation”
Some time ago, a reader wrote a comment about Pope Francis below one of my blog posts. The information was false and slanderous. Evidently, she had gotten her daily hysteria from one of the “news” outlets that has made it their task to, as the Holy Father has said, do “the work of the devil.” …
Continue reading “A Little Public Service Announcement on Docility”
Pope Francis is a great simplifier. When something could be complicated, his usual modus operandi is to see straight to what is essential, without losing the depths. This is exactly what I think he has done in the case of Christian contemplation, too. Starting from two disparate ideas, both of which are very simple, he …
Continue reading “Charles de Foucauld at the Foundation of Pope Francis’ Idea of Contemplation”
Contemplative in the Mud 