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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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The Soul’s Sole Longing: On Surrender, Resistance, and Returning to Love (Lectio Divina)
What happens when a soul that has turned toward God tries to turn away? Teresa of Ávila’s words open this reflection: the struggle is fierce, and in the end, struggle is of little avail against the Lord’s desire. Drawing on the Rahnerian insight that grace and freedom are equally gifts of God, and on…
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Listening for the God of This Moment: On Prayer, Presence, and Renewal (Lectio Divina)
Every morning, Robert Van Valkenburgh sits in the same chair, faces the same window, and prays to the same God. Same woods. Same birds. Same silence. And yet each morning is a different morning. Each morning he is a different person. And each morning, God’s face is not the same. This post moves outward…
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Love Much: Teresa of Ávila on the Soul’s Deepest Longing (Lectio Divina)
Teresa of Ávila warns that progress in the spiritual life depends not on how much we think, but on how much we love. But what does it mean to follow love when your appetites are shouting, your desires are divided, and the whisper of Love is barely audible beneath the noise? This reflection begins…
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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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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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Not a Stranger on the Road: Julian of Norwich and the Love That Raises Us (Lectio Divina)
Have you ever been called toward something — only to be redirected, then found again exactly where you least expected? In this Lectio Divina reflection, Robert Van Valkenburgh follows one such movement of grace: drawn to Julian of Norwich, detoured through St. Francis de Sales, and then surprised by Julian’s words arriving through a…
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The Wellspring of Joy: God, Love, and the Light That Darkness Cannot Overcome (Lectio Divina)
What does it mean to say that God is the source of all joy — and that the Evil One is defined by sorrow? Drawing on St. Francis de Sales’s portrait of the Evil One as a being of pure sadness who would draw all others into his misery, this Lectio Divina reflection traces…
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All Manner of Not-God: On Sabbath, Restlessness, and the Soul’s Hunger for God (Lectio Divina)
What drives us to labor — and what are we really searching for? Drawing on Beatrice of Nazareth’s account of the soul’s great torment of longing, this Sabbath Lectio Divina traces the spiritual root of all human desire: our soul’s yearning for infinite union with infinite God. Along the way it names the compulsions…
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Did Not Our Hearts Burn: The Many Faces Of God (Lectio Divina)
Where does God meet us? Not only in the dramatic moments of Scripture — wrestling with Jacob at the ford of the Jabbok, speaking to Moses from a burning bush, leading Israel through the wilderness — but in the ordinary movements of our days. In this Lectio Divina reflection, Robert Van Valkenburgh draws on…