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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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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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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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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…