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Not the Sweetness, But the Giver: John of the Cross and the Freedom Beyond Consolation (Lectio Divina)
What do you do when the sweetness you’ve been chasing in prayer starts to feel like the whole point? St. John of the Cross has a warning for anyone who mistakes God’s gifts for God Himself — one that reaches all the way down into what it means to actually let go.
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The Altar of Silence: On Contemplative Prayer as Love’s Own Offering (Lectio Divina)
There’s a moment in prayer when silence stops feeling like absence and starts feeling like it’s asking something of you. Contemplative prayer is not only stillness — it is an offering, one that asks you to stop holding anything back, even the part of you that wants credit for having given it. What happens…
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Stillness Recollecting Stillness: The Longing Beneath Our Longing (Lectio Divina)
Stillness cannot be forced, willed, or manufactured. It preexists everything we think, say, and do — and it remains long after all of it fades into memory. But this post doesn’t stop at stillness as ground. It asks something stranger and more beautiful: what if stillness is not waiting to be found, but waiting…
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Don’t Wait To Pray: A Contemplative Reflection On Prayer And Time (Lectio Divina)
God created time for us — not because we are the center of the universe, but because he loves us and wants to be with us. And yet we keep waiting: for our schedules to free up, for conditions to feel right, for the resistance to pass. This Lectio Divina, drawn from James Finley’s…
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Beneath the Threat of Nothingness: Contemplative Prayer and the God Who Fills Every Void (Lectio Divina)
Contemplative prayer invites us into the darkness — into the silence and emptiness we most fear. Drawing on Meister Eckhart’s Sermon 4, this Lectio Divina reflection traces the movement from fear to trust: the fear of being alone and unloved, the surrender of everything we cling to, and the discovery that the vast emptiness…
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The Ceiling Was a Floor: From Zen to Christ Through the Cloud of Unknowing (Lectio Divina)
What happens when the tradition you love most can no longer hold you? In this deeply personal Lectio Divina, Robert Van Valkenburgh traces his spiritual journey from the Zen Buddhist tradition — which spoke to him before he had words for what it was pointing toward — through an existential crisis and dark night…
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An Excess of Presence: On Spiritual Darkness and the Gift of God’s Grace (Lectio Divina)
Some days God feels farther away than others. The fog of spiritual dryness settles in, and the mirror through which we see his reflection grows dark and unpolished. In this Lectio Divina reflection, Robert Van Valkenburgh draws on Pseudo-Dionysius’s Mystical Theology and the Mary and Martha passage from Luke’s Gospel to explore what we…
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Recollected Into God: Teresa of Ávila on the Soul’s Return to Wholeness (Lectio Divina)
We are not born broken. We are created in the image and likeness of a God whose first intention was love — whose first and last Word is Love. Born of and for love, we were born whole in a broken world. And yet, one injury and insult at a time, one hope and…
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God’s Soil: On Sabbath Rest and the Soul’s Emergence (Lectio Divina)
What does it mean to truly rest — not merely in sleep or idleness, but in the deep Sabbath stillness where the soul quietly emerges? Drawing on Mark Buchanan’s insight that all living things thrive only by an ample measure of stillness, this Lectio Divina traces the arc from body to mind to soul,…
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The Daily Rendezvous With God: On Freedom, Longing, and The Gift Already Given (Lectio Divina)
What does it mean to receive a gift you were created with? This Lectio Divina reflection, drawn from James Finley’s meditation on our creation as the beloved, explores the freedom God gave us — not as distance, but as the space in which the gift of infinite union can be freely received. Moving through…