Paraphrasing Francis Thompson’s The Hound of Heaven, I fled the image of the Crucified Jesus “down the nights and down the days…I fled him, down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind…” Always knowing that one day I would have to embrace the Crucified Jesus. Now very late in life, I find myself […]
Spirit Wilding
June 13, 2012 by
On April 19, 1989 the newspapers reported that a gang of young thugs had assaulted and raped a young woman jogger in New York‘s Central Park. According to a police investigation, the culprits were gangs of teenagers who would assault strangers as part of an activity that became known as “wilding.” You can imagine my surprise […]
Incarnation—Eternal Process
November 17, 2011 by Leave a Comment
We have to identify some misconceptions about the Incarnation. Otherwise, we will not appreciate God’s action in eternity, in creation, in history, in the present, in the hereafter. The source of our misconceptions is that we relate the Incarnation to a single event in history (Christ’s birth and life), and thus pigeonhole the Incarnation. Rather, […]
Crucified Lover
November 17, 2011 by Leave a Comment
Jesus’ mission came to a shameful, horrific end. How we explain his passion and death can either cloud Jesus’ triumph of love for us and weaken our response to his love, or it can transform us into tremendous lovers of Jesus. It has taken the Christian establishment almost 2000 years to come up with a […]
Eros-driven Jesus
November 17, 2011 by Leave a Comment
In the article, Divine Eros, I described my newly discovered perception of the Holy Spirit as Divine Eros. Divine Eros is the Spirit of Love directing arrows at my heart to awaken it to the possibilities of love. For me that was a peak experience, seeing the Spirit as well as myself in a whole […]
Jesus’ Holy Partnership
November 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment
The Holy Spirit’s presence and activity in Jesus’ life have not yet received the attention they once claimed in the early Church, according to Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM Cap., preacher in the papal household. For example, we tend to look upon Jesus’ baptism in the river Jordan as a minor episode in his life and […]
Jesus’ Tutor
November 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment
In the Conspiracy of God, author John C. Haughey, SJ states that we must pay attention to the role of the Holy Spirit in Jesus’ developing self-understanding: “A Jesus who is imaged as having made it without the Spirit generates a piety in which the Spirit is superfluous for all practical purposes.” Growth in Understanding. […]
Compassion through Contemplation
November 9, 2011 by Leave a Comment
The Scriptures do not disclose Jesus’ life of contemplation. But how else can we explain Jesus’ intimate closeness to God? In Jesus Before Christianity, Fr. Albert Nolan, O.P. states: “It is generally agreed that somewhere at the heart of Jesus’ mysterious personality there was a unique experience of intimate closeness to God—the Abba experience…we know […]
The Real Jesus
November 9, 2011 by
So much has been written about Jesus over 2000 years that one is tempted to ask, “Will the real Jesus stand up?” Perhaps the best way to understand Jesus is not through our minds but through our imagination. In literature we read of kings and princes who disguise themselves as nobodies so that they can […]
