I write, speak, invest, network, and question to stimulate fruitful conversation. Let's talk about human flourishing! It begins with freedom. Holy leisure is the key to human being, freedom and generativity. Please join me in the adventure of realizing Christ!
Living Books
What actually is a ‘living book,’ and what makes them live? Living books are vital, interest-catching, windows into worlds. You can hear the author’s passion and his voice. For the Kansas Catholic Homeschooling Conference, I dug deeper into Charlotte Mason’s idea that living books are essential to authentic education. We found some surprising new ways to animate our home schools, and moved past book lists to discover more living books. I thoroughly enjoyed sharing favorites from my lifetime of reading and long home schooling experience.
It’s so important to realize that good reading stimulates prayer, conversation and creativity. We don’t just ‘read stories,’ but we ‘read life’ through books, so they really must be living books, as food must be living food. I hope that a whole Catholic revival will spring up from the roots homeschooling is sending down into such good soil. The liberal arts always have their end in the person of the learner, and so living books are critically important not just as ends in themselves, but because of their contribution to the cultivation of human personhood and freedom.
(Contact me to request a recording.)
The Holy Spirit Wants YOU!
Here’s an example of the lengths I’ll go to to create a new talk for someone. For the Women of St. Ignatius, I adapted three other talks (High Resolution Beauty; A Prayer, A Poem, A Person, A Place; and Let Yourself be Loved) to create one powerful blast of affirmation of womanhood.
The Holy Spirit wants women BEAUTIFUL, EFFECTIVE, and POWERFUL. I love the way these three words have layers and layers of meaning and associations. These ladies are really great listeners and just egged me on with their enthusiasm. I was so tickled when they invited me back to speak, as WOSI is a rare, responsive, receptive audience. I find myself pulling out all the stops and giving 110%.
I just love women who are becoming more and more fully realized as they mature. Just as Mary is a manifestation of what the Holy Spirit is doing in the world, women answering His call are showing us His glory. It’s such a pleasure to have something to give to women, knowing they are multiplying out into the world all that comes their way.
Here’s a great message about how we sometimes misunderstand what God is saying to us…so important to hear His real message!
Logs On Fire
St. Teresa of Avila had such great advice for us on how to pray. Her ‘method’ is simple, but profoundly helpful. I’ve noticed that the simple, interior hospitality toward God is the most helpful disposition to cultivate in order to avoid intellectual confusion and ideology that interferes with that sweet communion of the heart.
I love her imagery of having a little fire going within to warm us as we talk together. “A few little straws,” she says, are “of more use for kindling the fire, than any amount of wood” if those straws are laid down with humility.
I concentrated on Teresa’s third step in prayer – the response – and showed how superbly, elegantly perfect it is to insist on this last step whenever we talk about prayer. With that response, our free will grows, and with it our interior freedom. The more free we are, the more capable we are of responding, of acting in freedom, and thus, of loving God and responding to the world as He would. I had written an article for Canticle magazine on St. Teresa’s teaching about prayer, but hadn’t connected that method with an approach to freedom, or creativity.
Later, when I gave the first ‘Triangle Talk,’ I realized how critically necessary it is to carry out a resolution that embodies what Fr. Luigi Giussani calls the ‘judgment with heart in it.’ St. Teresa would have loved that phrase, I think, as her method involves both mind and heart in a way that generates a creative resolution to act.
Faces of Unity
Unity: one-ness, integrity, wholeness, continuity, undividedness, solidarity, relatedness and harmony of the parts of a whole, consistency; a quality: the attribute or characteristic or nature of something that is, that has being, that is real.
The word unity describes the relationship between things and thus it is specific to the perspective from which you view those two things; a living work of art, of beauty, that Christ is creating among us. Because its elements are alive – human beings – it is constantly a ‘new thing’, a dynamic thing formed of the movement between elements and not a static thing formed once and for all.
In this talk, I took the St. Paul’s plea to the Ephesians that they “maintain the unity of the Spirit” (Eph. 4: 1-3) and looked at four ‘faces’ of unity to see what that unity looks like with the different people in our lives.
1. Unity with Unbelievers
2. Unity with ‘Taskmasters’
3. Unity with Spouses
4. Unity with Self
This was an interesting topic to work on, and I like the handout I developed for it: Damned Lies and Divine Truths. If I give this talk again, I’d like to include mention of the spirituality of unity as understood by Chiara Lubich, foundress of the Focolare movement. I had a wonderful experience with Focolarini in Ottmaring, Germany during which they taught me priceless lessons from her insights into this crucial quality of community. The key, they say, to unity: identification with Christ forsaken.
Here’s a post about becoming small so as to create unity with another person, to facilitate loving communication.
Balance in Three Dimensions
How do you get from three wishes to magnifying God to lions and seeds and Holy-Holy-Holy to rubber bands, balls and balloons?? Well, I’ll tell you! You ask for this talk. It’s a lot of fun to give, and very hard to sum up in a short precis. I’m giving a picture of the glorious freedom of the children of God as fully real, fully realized, three dimensional, whole. To do that, I have to get my audience to speak that same language. We do that with concrete examples of three kinds of balance. I hate to say it, but you really just have to be there!
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