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Explore My Reflections
Following the contemplative rhythm of Lectio Divina
Moving from Attentive Reading (Lectio)
To Reflection (Meditatio)
To Prayerful Response (Oratio)
And finally into Silent Resting in God (Contemplatio)
Grappling With Divinity invites a slow unfolding of Scripture, Spiritual Wisdom, and Lived Experience.
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A Portion Of Heaven: On Sabbath As An Invitation Into Eternity (Lectio Divina)
What if the restlessness you can’t shake isn’t a flaw to fix, but a sign of something you’ve stopped accepting? This reflection sits with an old desert saying about the kingdom of heaven and asks what it would mean if heaven were less a place we reach and more an invitation we keep declining…
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Grace Receiving Grace: John of the Cross and the Gift of Contemplation (Lectio Divina)
What does it mean to receive the gift of contemplation — and why can we never force our way into it? Drawing on St. John of the Cross’s teaching that contemplation, the highest wisdom and language of God, can only be received in a spirit that is silent and detached from discursive knowledge and…
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Standing in Your Own Shadow: On the False Self, Desolation, and the Light That Remains (Lectio Divina)
The Holy Spirit, this post argues, does not cause our desolation — and does not withdraw when we fall into darkness. But if God’s love and light are never absent, what is the shadow? This reflection traces the logic of the false self as the one who turns away from the light and stands…
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Desire God Alone: The Cloud of Unknowing and the Freedom of Letting Go (Lectio Divina)
Life moves at a pace that can feel impossible to keep up with — and sometimes impossible to catch up to. This Lectio Divina begins there, with a soul that knows it is out of step and, in a moment of recollection, discovers that God’s love has never moved at that pace at all.…
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Perhaps We Only Need to Wake Up: On Understanding, Surrender, and Spiritual Awakening (Lectio Divina)
Thomas Merton writes that when understanding fails, it is not a tragedy — it is simply a reminder to stop thinking and start looking. This Lectio Divina takes that claim seriously. The Meditatio traces a tension most contemplatives know well: the honest effort to seek God through thought, study, and desire, and the slow…
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The Opening and the Entering: Love Calling to Love (Lectio Divina)
Meister Eckhart teaches that God’s longing for us outpaces our longing for Him by a thousandfold — and that the opening He makes for us and the entering we make into Him are not two movements but one. This Lectio Divina takes that claim seriously: if our desire for God is already a response…
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I Cannot Have You Without You: On Longing, Powerlessness, and the Prayer Beyond Prayer (Lectio Divina)
Karl Rahner names it plainly: to present your life before God as a single prayer is completely beyond your strength. This post begins there — with a soul that has tasted divine presence, cannot unknow it, and cannot manufacture it again. The Meditatio moves through the full weight of that paradox: the insatiable thirst…
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The Useless Hour: On Prayer, Surrender, and the Freedom of Doing Nothing With God (Lectio Divina)
On a morning stacked with obligations — an event to host, a class to teach, a daughter to get on the bus — something interrupts the momentum. Not a solution. A stillness. Henri Nouwen calls prayer primarily a “useless” hour, and this reflection takes that claim seriously: what does it mean to sit down…
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Going By a Way You Do Not Know: Faith, Darkness, and the Unseeable Horizon (Lectio Divina)
The spiritual journey often begins in darkness — not knowing where we are going, led by a voice we cannot hear, consoled by a presence we cannot feel. Drawing on James Finley’s reading of Merton, this reflection moves through the cloud of witnesses who walked the same way before us: Abraham setting out for…
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Given Freely and Eternally: Spiritual Gifts as Participation in God (Lectio Divina)
We do not get to decide our spiritual gifts — not what they are, not how they come, and not what shape they take in us. This reflection traces the movement from gift received to gift poured out, asking why hoarding grace leads to desolation, and why the gifts were never ours to claim…
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The Calm We Cannot Make: St. John Chrysostom on Tears, Confession, and Peace (Lectio Divina)
What if the peace you keep trying to manufacture was never yours to make? St. John Chrysostom describes the calm that follows tears the way a violent storm gives way to stillness, and this reflection sits with the ache of falling short of the peace Christ asks us to carry — and the distance between…
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Whitewashed and Withholding: Origen on the Mercy We Refuse to Give (Lectio Divina)
What if the reconciliation you keep postponing is the very thing standing between you and the God you’re trying to reach? Origen names a righteousness that’s dead on arrival — polished outside, hollow within — and this reflection sits with the mercy we’d rather hoard than pass on, and the depths waiting for those who…
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Before We Cry Out: Julian of Norwich and the Prayer God Prays in Us (Lectio Divina)
What if the prayer you’ve been struggling to find words for was already being prayed before you knew how to ask? Julian of Norwich names a goodness that does not wait for the right words, the right posture, or even the right understanding of what is happening — it comes down to meet us in…
