Faith itself sometimes needs to be stripped of its social and historical encrustations and returned to its first, churchless incarnation in the human heart. -Wiman

I learned more about Christianity from my mother than from all the theologians in England. -John Wesley

“Given the way creation unfolds, how it builds to ever higher and higher works of art, can there be any doubt that Eve is the crown of creation? Not an afterthought. Not a nice addition like an ornament on a tree. She is God’s final touch. She fills a place in the world nothing and no one else can fill.” -Eldredge

Your weekly visit to the Father’s House must transform your daily house.

I don’t know how young men, husbands, fathers make it today surrounded only by a subculture of theirs peers. They are an impoverished and impotent breed.

Solitude

Sin is a solitary confinement, but solitude is a refinement.

The desert fathers and mothers knew, as should we, that the empire would be an unreliable partner. They recognized that they had to find inner freedom from the system before they could return to it with true love, wisdom, and helpfulness. This is the continuing dynamic to this day, otherwise “Culture eats Christianity for breakfast” to paraphrase Peter Drucker, and our deep transformative power is largely lost. –Rohr

“There are many who live in the mountains and behave as if they were in the town, and they are wasting their time. It is possible to be a solitary in one’s mind while living in a crowd, and it is possible for one who is a solitary to live in the crowd of his own thoughts.” -Syncletica

Solitude is a courageous encounter with our naked, most raw and real self, in the presence of pure love. Quite often this can happen right in the midst of human relationships and busy lives.

The man who abides in solitude and is quiet, is delivered from fighting three battles: those of hearing, speech, and sight. Then he will have but one battle to fight–the battle of the heart. – Anthony the Great

The trouble–and the opportunity–in solitude is that there is no one around to blame for our moods and our difficulties. We are stuck with ourselves. “The desert is, preeminently, a place to die. The desert offered no private therapeutic place for solace and rejuvenation. One was more likely to be carried out feet first than to be restored unchanged to the life one had left.” -The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality

The desert monks were hardly naïve despisers of culture. What they fled with greatest fear was not the external world, but the world they carried inside themselves: an ego-centeredness needing constant approval, driven by compulsive behavior, frantic in its effort to attend to a self-image that always required mending. Ironically, in the fleeing they ran smack dab into the very thing they sought to avoid. – Belden Lane

The world of things is a transparent two-way mirror, which some of us would call a fully “sacramental” universe. -Rohr

The biblical prophets, by definition, were seers and seekers of Eternal Mystery, which always seems dangerously new and heretical to old eyes and any current preoccupations with security. It is ironic that you must go to the edge to find the center. But that is what the prophets, hermits, and mystics invariably know. – Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi

Sometimes we are forced into directions that we should’ve found for ourselves.

Jesus often reclined at meals with people; he stopped along the road to chat; he touched them, embraced them. He called them by name, and they him. Jesus is always closing the distance.