When ‘prayer warriors’ tried to get me to join them in ‘intercession’, to ‘come against’ the forces of evil in ‘spiritual warfare’, I used to make myself scarce. When I was in Afghanistan, I met a friend who had been asked to host a party of American ‘prayer warriors’ who said they’d been led by […]

Contemplation is a process of ‘developing an awareness of and availability to God’.  It involves a conscious ‘waiting upon God’ and a ‘willingness to yield to God’. It is essentially a ‘creative response to life in the light of the love of God’. Contemplation is the centre of the community and the catalyst for community […]

Parker Palmer, the Quaker community worker says: ‘contemporary images of spirituality tend to value the inward search over the outward act, silence over sound, solitude over interaction, quietude over engagement and struggle.’[i] Palmer says ‘if one is called to the world of action, the(se) images can disenfranchise the soul, for they tend to devalue the […]

Practising compassion, like Christ, involves developing an ‘ethos’ that is strong but gentle with people. An ‘ethos’ that is strong but gentle with people is not characterised by power that is exercised over people, but by power that people exercise over themselves. An ‘ethos’ that is strong but gentle with people is an ‘ethos’ that […]

Our word ‘compassion’ comes from ‘com’ meaning ‘with’, and ‘passion‘ meaning ‘suffering’; so to practise ‘com-passion’ actually means ‘being willing to share in the suffering of others with others.’ John describes Jesus as the ‘logos’ – or the final word – in any discussion about compassion. Paul writes: ‘You should have exactly the same attitude […]

The heart of Christian mysticism is compassion. Jesus does not talk of God as ‘Yahweh’ or ‘Adonai’ – but as ‘Abba’ – or ‘Papa’. Some of us may have been abused by an earthly ‘Papa’ and may find it easier to relate to God as our heavenly ‘Mama’ rather than our heavenly ‘Papa’. But whatever […]

It is the mysticism rather than the monasticism of the monastics that we should embrace. Mysticism from the Greek ‘mystikos’ (meaning ‘an initiate’)  is ‘the knowledge of, and especially the personal experience of, states of consciousness, i.e. levels of being, beyond normal human perception, including experience of and even communion with a supreme being’.[i] A […]

Certainly we need to recover our sense of purpose and redouble our resolve to follow in the footsteps of Jesus undergirded by deep theological reflection and action. And we can learn best how to do this from monastics like Basil, Benedict, Aidan, Francis and Nilus.  However, I think we need to critically reflect on the […]

Let me begin a critique of monasticism with a couple of reflections that come from people who have observed the unhelpful role monasticism has played in other religions. A Confucian critique of monasticism insists there is no basis for monasticism in the Confucian tradition. It asserts monasticism encourages the ‘unnatural renunciation of pleasure’, ‘un-filial self-immolation’, […]

When the New Monastics emerged is difficult to date accurately. ‘Some communities now identified with new monasticism have been in existence since the 1970s and 80s. Other communities – such as the Simple Way where I stayed earlier this year – were formed in the mid-90s.’ The terminology of New Monasticism is thought to have […]

The Legend Mother Teresa was born Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje, Serbia, on August 26, 1910. She was the youngest of five children born to an Albanian couple, Nikola and Dronda Bojaxhiu. Though her elder brother Laza said they were well-off as a family, two of their siblings died. And Nikola their father was killed, probably […]

Mary MacKillop was born in Fitzroy in 1842 into a Scottish migrant family. Mary was the eldest of eight children, and their father – who had attended Scots College in Rome – educated the children at home. Having squandered most of the family fortune, the MacKillops were dirt poor. So at the age of fourteen, […]