Transfiguration as Mystical
O Lover, The gospel reading at the head of the second week of Lent was the Marcan take on the transfiguration of the Christ (9:2-10). Ever within Your Presence, whether with or without my...
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May the Lover “Submerge You”!
[“May God make known to you, . . .who he is and how he deals with his servants, and especially with his handmaids—and may he submerge you in him. Where the abyss of his...
“When Gods Die”
[Jack Welch, OCarm, When Gods Die: An Introduction to John of the Cross. Paulist Press, 1990.] O Lover, Part of my encounter in the mid-1990s with the spirituality of Juan de la Cruz was...
“Shall We Gather at the River?”
[“And he showed me a crystalline river of the water of life . . . coming forth out of the throne of God and of the lamb” (Apoc 22:1).] O Lover, All of it...
“Theophanic Nature Mysticism”
O Lover, Francis of Assisi (c.1181-1226) exemplified “theophanic nature mysticism,” writes Bernard McGinn, the historian of Christian spirituality. As a devotee of the Feast of the Epiphany (“show time!”) and, serendipitously, the father of...
The Apophátic Heart
[Si comprehéndus, non est Deus (“The deity understood is not God”) is found in Sermon #117 of Augustine (354-430).] O Lover, Of late an emerging insight has been surfacing in my voyage into fuller...
“A Feather on the Breath of God”
[The text and musical score of the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum composed in 1151-8 by Hildegard von Bingen, OSB (1098-1179) includes the phrase “I am a feather on the breath of God.”] O Lover,...
O Drawer!
O Lover, As well You know, I have occasionally flirted with wildly varying spirituality hypotheses involving everything. One such variant has been that You simply are not, at least no more than as projected...
“I Am the Lord and There is No Other”
O Lover, In chapters 43-45 of II Isaiah the prophet, engaging exiles in the Babylonian and Persian empires, has You repeatedly proclaiming that there are no gods but You. An example would be 45:18:...
Musings on “Night Vision”
O Lover, In the recent 2nd Sunday of Advent homilist Fr. Daniel Groody, CSC, an international authority on immigration and faculty/administrator at Notre Dame, cited an image which remains with me. He related how...