Spiritual Experience & Disciplines Archives - Page 6 of 84

October 26, 2023

In my world, it is common for people to tell stories of being saved or of having gone through terrible experiences and now being beyond them with the message that you too can get out of your troubles. I have often been asked to share

The final salute

October 26, 2023

Hal Smarkola was eating lunch with three friends on the patio of a Mexican restaurant in San Antonio when his phone rang. It was a warm, mid-September Friday, and he recognized the number right away. Mary Thorsby, executive director of a nearby home for people

Choose Beauty in a Technocratic Age

October 24, 2023

Our world is starved for authentic beauty. We spend our days staring at screens that shape our perception of reality. Through the rapid development of technology, we have in many ways given ourselves over to unreality. We no longer look up and look out at

Behold the Man

October 23, 2023

It’s sometimes said, though perhaps not often enough, that one of the evils of our day is the loss of a sense of sin. Pope Pius XII famously said as much in a radio address to catechists in 1946. Pope Francis has echoed this same

John Paul II’s prayer to Mary, Queen of Peace

October 22, 2023

In 2001, the world became a new battlefield, with the terrorist attacks that rocked New York City. It started a war on terror that has never truly stopped. When responding to such violence, St. John Paul II prayed a short prayer to Mary, Queen of Peace,

The Role of Mary in Mental Prayer

October 19, 2023

Popular devotion is very important for contemplative prayer. Holy images, beautiful churches, holy shrines, rosaries, and Eucharistic Adoration are given to us to dispose us to a deeper encounter with God. Mary is of special importance. Different cultures have developed different expressions of Marian piety.

The Rosary Has Changed History, and It Can Happen Again

October 17, 2023

Salve, Regina, mater misericordiae; Vita, dulcedo et spes nostra salve. It was night. Throughout the Italian peninsula the monks, friars and nuns were kneeling in the monasteries, friaries, convents and abbeys in which they’d lived. They were surrounded by candles emitting circles of light which

We Swim in the Shallows, But We Were Made for the Depth

October 12, 2023

When Wendell Berry, the American agrarian writer, finally agreed to a documentary about his thought and writing, he refused to be “on camera.” We do hear his voice on occasion but more often the voices of others. I loved the movie immensely, but one of the most

You Have Just Enough Time

October 5, 2023

“I don’t have enough time.” I have said this countless times over the years. I have thought it many times more than I’ve said it. But I have not ever seriously considered that thinking or speaking this way reflected poorly on God. Until the other

Mother Angelica: Holiness Is To Struggle Day After Day

October 3, 2023

Here’s what St. Paul is trying to tell us: We’re cracked pots that hold the treasure of God’s divine life within us. (Don’t go looking for “crackpot” in Scripture! I’m saying we’re “cracked pots.”) An earthen vessel is a thin little thing, fragile and imperfect.