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"Sometimes the sorrow is not because of personal sin but has another lesson for me. Perhaps I notice my inevitable entanglement in structural sin, which harms the poor through unfair trade or the earth because of my contribution to pollution. This sorrow may help God show me a way to serve justice and peace better."
Evenings can be good times to pause and reflect over the past days. With our #AdventExamen series, we have now reached the fourth stage of the review prayer, where we focus on sorrow. Read the article: http://ow.ly/tNb230mZsWW #meditation #IgnatianSpirituality

Thinking Faith’s Advent series for 2018 will invite you to practise an ‘Advent Examen’, as we focus on the Ignatian prayer and explore how it can shape our lives, especially as we prepare for Christmas. In the first of the Examen’s five steps, we try to identify, in gratitude, the action of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Thinking Faith’s articles and reviews are written to help you do just this.
As you, the Thinking Faith readers who will join us in our Examen, reflect on an...d give thanks for the ways in which God is at work in your life, please consider supporting our work with a donation. With your contribution, we can continue to give those who are preparing to welcome God into our world the tools to recognise the ways in which He is already here. Thank you.
Donate today: http://ow.ly/5FRV30mZta0 #support #thankyou #donation
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The Gospel reading for this third Sunday of Advent, also known as Gaudete Sunday, tells us more about John the Baptist.
Reflect further with our articles: why does John the Baptist, depicted so often with a robust and masculine demeanour, not have what it takes to be a conquering hero of a king, but Jesus does? How was he a communicator of blessing? Read more: http://ow.ly/PANf30mZtMl #Scripture #nowreading #getready

Evenings are a good time to pause and reflect on the day that has passed, review what we have done, the people we have met, our feelings and what events may have caused them. St Ignatius of Loyola, in his Spiritual Exercises, encouraged a form of prayerful reflection on our experiences, known as the #Examen, as a way of discovering how God is at work in our lives.
Have you already discovered our series for this season, the #Advent Examen? About the first stage of this meditation, we learn what does Thanksgiving mean and why is it important: http://ow.ly/v9jr30mWsZy #IgnatianSpirituality #prayer

The call to rejoice recurs throughout the readings for the Third Sunday of Advent – does this joy lie beyond this world or in the here and now?
"We are not asked to separate our human aspirations from heavenly ones – how could we, if we believe in the incarnation and the resurrection of the body? Rather we are invited to recognise that what has its roots in the longings of time finds its answer in eternity. But equally the lessons of eternity are learnt amidst the things of time." http://ow.ly/w2Z730mYn41#meditation #Advent #nowreading

"The Examen helps us accept sorrow as part of an affirming relationship with God, avoiding unhealthy preoccupation with failure."
As we reach the fourth stage of our Advent Examen, the focus is on sorrow, but it is not about wallowing or self-condemnation, as Stephen Hoyland emphasises. The preceding steps of the Examen have created a context of gratitude in which our sorrow, when we engage with it properly, can create space for us to receive God’s love and can lead us to new ways of loving. Read more: http://ow.ly/yvM530mYmIy #IgnatianSpirituality #meditation

The inspiration for the challenging set of reflections 'A Shaking Reality: Daily Reflections for Advent' by a retired bishop came from Father Alfred Delp SJ’s Advent diary, written in Plötzensee Prison in Nazi Germany in 1944, just two months before he was hanged. Delp (1907-1945) penned a meditation entitled ‘The Shaking Reality of Advent’. In a tiny, three-pace space of a cell, with his hands in irons and an uncertain future ahead of him, Delp came to ‘a new and different understanding of God’s promise of redemption and release’. He described Advent as a time, ‘when we all ought to be shaken and brought to a realisation of ourselves’.
Read the full review of this book and 'Haunted for Christ': http://ow.ly/1TW330mWvyP #Advent #getready #readingsuggestion

Our Gospel reading today tells us more about John the Baptist. We have a number of articles reflecting on the role of the Baptist and how the Scripture's descriptions can help us better understand what a communicator of blessing in his life he was: http://ow.ly/rciP30mWuFn #Scripture #todaysreading

Examining your own experience might sound like a process of which you ought to be in control, but doing so in the Examen is not about trying to tell your own story. Instead, says Rob Marsh SJ, ‘we ask to hear a little of God’s story being woven from the fabric of our life.’ In third next stage of our Advent Examen, we take up St Ignatius’s invitation ‘to ask an account of my soul’.
Don't miss our new article: http://ow.ly/Sn2e30mWuq3 #IgnatianSpirituality #meditation #mystory

Conservative MPs are voting this afternoon on #TheresaMay's #leadership - what does a good #leader look like? https://www.thinkingfaith.org/tags/leader ship #LeadershipChallenge #NoConfidence

As Christmas approaches, we spend some time with those relatives of Jesus with whom Luke opens his gospel. One of the optional #Gospel reading for today is the visit of Mary to Elizabeth. John Moffatt SJ helps us to further investigate Jesus’s familial line...
"By naming Mary as Elizabeth’s cousin, Luke implies that Mary and her son, too, share something of the priestly spirit. As we have seen it is a spirit which not only leads people to God in offering sacrifice and praise, but also mediates healing, reconciliation and the forgiveness of sins. It is just such a ministry that John the Baptist will take from the Temple into the desert, and Jesus, in his turn, will take out into the streets." http://ow.ly/grpR30mWskg #Scripture #Advent #learnmore

As optional Gospel reading, we may hear the Annunciation today. When we contemplate this event, are we trying to understand, to penetrate, to grasp the transcendent mystery beneath what, on the surface, is very ordinary; or to recover a sense of the very ordinariness of the events which bore so much theological weight? http://ow.ly/e4IR30mWpTi #OurLady #Scripture #learnmore

Fr Denis Blackledge SJ recommends prayerful reading material for the Advent season:
'A Shaking Reality: Daily Reflections for Advent', by Peter B. Price, is a challenging set of reflections by a retired bishop, coming from Father Alfred Delp SJ’s Advent diary, written in Plötzensee Prison in Nazi Germany in 1944, just two months before he was hanged.
In 'Haunted by Christ: Modern Writers and the Struggle for Faith', Richard Harries shows how poets and novelists bring a freshn...ess and sharpness, hinting at the ‘ultimately elusive mystery of the divine’.
Read more: http://ow.ly/6grG30mVQgY #readinglist #book #Advent
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It is fifty years since the death of Thomas Merton, the finest spiritual writer of his generation and a prominent icon of interreligious dialogue. By a strange chance, an even more influential Christian writer, the Reformed theologian Karl Barth, died the same day – 10 December 1968. The circumstances of their deaths could scarcely have been more different. Barth slipped away peacefully at home in Basle aged 82, widely regarded by both Protestants and Catholics – and by no le...ss a figure than Pope St Paul VI – as the greatest Christian theologian since Aquinas. Merton was killed in a freak accident while at a conference in Thailand. He was aged 53; it was 27 years to the day since he had entered Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky in 1941.
Michael Barnes SJ writes more about their stories and researches: http://ow.ly/vvF530mVPpj #ThomasMerton #HolySpirit #faith #beinspired
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Christ, the Sun Rising over the Earth, is the love that illuminates what it is for us to be human. St Ignatius invites us to seek that experience in the second point of the Examen: ‘to ask grace to know my sins and rid myself of them.’ [Spiritual Exercises, §43]. We need the light of the Holy Spirit to help us know our sins, but even more importantly so that we might notice where Christ is present in our life each day.
We look backwards to notice God’s trace in each day, in o...rder to look forward to the future and be more ready to receive him as we meet him. #Advent is the season in which we look back at the history of how the chosen people have heard the Lord through his prophets, so that we can prepare to celebrate his coming among us in human flesh, and then to look forward in #hope to his second coming at the end of time. http://ow.ly/wasF30mVPUF #Examen #grace #IgnatianSpirituality
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Emily Dickinson, whose birthday we remember today, is one of those poets to whom readers always come via an editor. Her poetic output (1,775 poems) is such that only the most leisured or love-struck readers would ever attempt to read through her Complete Poems. Instead, we approach her via the guidance of someone who has stepped further ahead than us: at best, an editor who knows and loves both the poems and the context, social as well as literary, which gave them life; and a...t worst, those commercial editors who paste lines from her poems onto coffee cups or cute, flowery notebooks.
Kristin LeMay’s book puts her in the better company. 'I Told My Soul to Sing' is a spiritual autobiography that shares with its readers her relationship with Dickinson’s poems, and is a sensitive introduction to some of the little known (because less anthologised or selected) poems. Read more: http://ow.ly/QLP230mU44z #EmilyDickinson #poetry #Godinallthings
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It's Human Rights Day! On this day, in 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is a milestone document that proclaimed the inalienable rights which everyone is inherently entitled to as a human being.
In this article, Patrick Riordan SJ discusses the problems associated with rights-based citizenship and asks: how can legal and judicial systems best serve the #commongood? http://ow.ly/KGBe30mU3AM #HumanRightsDay #nowreading

On this day, in 1968, Thomas Merton, the famed spiritual writer, died. His writings are still as relevant as his life story is fascinating, particularly his treatment of ‘difference’, a word that ‘now commands an attention that would never have been possible fifty years ago,’ writes Michael Barnes SJ.
On this fiftieth anniversary of Merton’s death, particularly as it falls in Advent, let us contemplate with him the action of the Spirit: http://ow.ly/myM130mU2Uz #ThomasMerton #nowreading #spirituality

What do we learn about John the Baptist from the gospel passage about him that has been read today? As we continue our liturgical journey through Advent by hearing about this man who ‘was clothed with camel’s hair...and ate locusts and wild honey’, Peter Edmonds SJ looks at how each gospel writer’s portrayal of him can help us in a different aspect of our preparation for the coming of Christ: http://ow.ly/3Bw030mU2u1 #Scripture #todaysreading #JohntheBaptist

I find this very valuable, although I don't read all of the offerings.

Genuine, committed, honest page about Faith..Awesome.!!

Awesome.

5 Star information and presentation of our Christian Faith and moral issues

I find this very valuable, although I don't read all of the offerings.

Genuine, committed, honest page about Faith..Awesome.!!

Awesome.

5 Star information and presentation of our Christian Faith and moral issues

I find this very valuable, although I don't read all of the offerings.

Genuine, committed, honest page about Faith..Awesome.!!

Awesome.

5 Star information and presentation of our Christian Faith and moral issues