Daily Meditations Archives - Page 259 of 351

TRADITIO DEFORMIS (Part II)

08/28/2015

By David Bentley Hart Throughout the book of Genesis, the pattern of God’s election is persistently, even perversely antinomian: Ever and again the elder to whom the birthright properly belongs is supplanted by the younger, whom God has chosen in defiance of all natural “justice.” This is practically the running motif uniting the whole text, from Cain and Abel to Manasseh and Ephraim. But—this is crucial—it is a pattern not of exclusion and inclusion, but of

TRADITIO DEFORMIS (Part I)

08/27/2015

By David Bentley Hart The long history of defective Christian scriptural exegesis occasioned by problematic translations is a luxuriant one, and its riches are too numerous and exquisitely various adequately to classify. But I think one can arrange most of them along a single continuum in four broad divisions: some misreadings are caused by a translator’s error, others by merely questionable renderings of certain words, others by the unfamiliarity of the original author’s (historically specific) idiom,

Voices of Wisdom (II)

08/26/2015

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You. And I hope that I

Treasures from our Subsequent Conversations (Part V)

08/25/2015

I read a lot “I read a lot. I was very studious. I read mystically. I took the time to do this whenever I could. I learned the Gospels of Matthew and Luke by heart and I learned half the Gospel of John. I also learned the Psalms. I studied the Fathers. I studied for many hours. I did spiritual work. And you should know that I did not know how to read. I had

The Desert Fathers and Mothers

08/24/2015

The men and women who fled to the desert emphasized lifestyle practice, an alternative to empire and its economy, psychologically astute methods of prayer, and a very simple (some would say naïve) spirituality of transformation into Christ. The desert communities grew out of informal gatherings of monastic monks, functioning much like families. A good number also became hermits to mine the deep mystery of their inner experience. This movement paralleled the monastic pattern in Hinduism

Thomas Merton: Thoughts in Solitude (Part II)

08/21/2015

Every spiritual director knows that it is a difficult and subtle matter to determine just what is the borderline between interior idleness and the faint, unperceived beginnings of passive contemplation. But in practice, at the present time, there has been quite enough said about passive contemplation to give lazy people a chance to claim the privilege of “praying by doing nothing.” There is no such thing as a prayer in which “nothing is done” or

Thomas Merton: Thoughts in Solitude (Part I)

08/20/2015

The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived. Like all life, it grows sick and dies when it is uprooted from its proper element, Grace is engrafted on our nature and the whole man is sanctified by the presence and action of the Holy Spirit. The spiritual life is not, therefore, a life entirely uprooted from man’s human condition

Voices of Wisdom (I)

08/19/2015

Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at

Lectio Divina with Saint Isaac the Syrian

08/18/2015

St Isaac the Syrian, or St Isaac of Nineveh, as he is also known, is one of the greatest spiritual writers of the Christian East. If one visits the monasteries of Mount Athos or Romania today and asks the monks whom they would recommend for spiritual reading, the name of Isaac will nearly always be among the first to be mentioned. His influence on Orthodox spirituality continues to be great. It is by no means

A Search for God

08/17/2015

The desert tradition offers a rich teaching of surrender, through contemplation, to the wonderful and always too-much mystery of God. The desert fathers and mothers are like the Zen Buddhist monks of Christianity; their sayings are often like koans that cannot be understood with the rational, logical mind. The desert mystics focused much more on the how than the what. Note that this is very different from the primary emphasis of Christianity in recent centuries–the