Pursuing an authentic experience of God and reality

05/12/2026

The Techniques and Target of Meditation

At the outset its important to distinguish between two essential aspects of meditation: Target - the purpose, goal and experience of meditation Techniques - the specific things you do to achieve the goal This is important because we can get lost in techniques, forgetting why we are meditating at all. Keeping sight of the purpose and goal of meditation is what keeps our practice dynamic and powerful....

At the outset its important to distinguish between two essential aspects of meditation: Target – the purpose, goal and experience of meditation Techniques – the specific things you do t…

03/01/2022

The pain that many Ukrainians are suffering in this dark hour is terrible and we stand with them in faith and prayer. We ask for God’s comforting presence to surround them and for the Spirit to breathe courage and hope into their hearts.

I sense their suffering will not be in vain and that a great dawn is breaking that will bring healing, peace and righteousness into this troubled but beautiful world in which we live.

What I’m dreaming about and praying for is:
1. That Ukraine finally comes out from under the shadow of Russia and is able to develop as a flourishing democracy aligned with Europe, as its people wish it to be.
2. That the cancer of Putin’s regime falls and is surgically removed so that the Russian people can also be free of autocratic and thieving leaders.
3. That a strong lesson is learnt by China’s autocratic regime in its ambitions to do with Taiwan what Putin tried with Ukraine, and for free nations to stand more strongly with the isolated but democratic Chinese island.
4. That the demise of Putin sends a clear “unveiling” message to all around the world that have been moving down the harmful path of alt-right populism and Christian nationalism centered around charismatic "strong man" leaders; that people see what the end game of supremacy and selfishness really looks like.

On a less serious note, it is great to see some South African talent getting involved in the Ukraine effort as this video shows.

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10/22/2021

These words from a sermon by Pope Francis on October 16th, 2021 contain echoes of the One who walking the earth 2,000 years ago. In my view, this sounds like what Jesus might say today, though it i…

10/20/2021

What’s happening to you in centering prayer? You’re connecting directly to God at the level of the heart, in your spirit nature. Your mind is not involved because you have chosen this very direct p…

10/11/2021

This short chapter entitled “Distractions” is from Thomas Merton’s book, “New Seeds of Contemplation” and is a very encouraging perspective of the value of distracting…

10/04/2021

I’m teaching this course on centering prayer in a different way from the 2019 course that is available on my website. Here, in each section, I am touching on the practice of centering prayer itself…

09/27/2021

The centering prayer practice is simple to do – that’s not the challenge. It’s almost impossible to do it incorrectly. The only hard part is maintaining your belief in its effecti…

09/14/2021

Centering prayer is one of the most beautiful things that I’ve discovered in my life. That’s not because it is beautiful in itself as a practice, but because it’s one of the clearest, simplest and …

08/30/2021

Martin Luther during a plague in Germany:

“Therefore I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance infect and pollute others, and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me, however, I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely, as stated above. See, this is such a God-fearing faith because it is neither brash nor foolhardy and does not tempt God.”

I’ve been pondering why some of the most regressive thinking in society - especially as we’ve seen in America in the last few years - seems so often to come from quarters of Christianity that claim to have the best, most Bible-based, understanding of God.

In this there are some challenging lessons for us Christians if we want to be serve our Lord and be the “the light of the world” rather than a self-focused, persecution-complexed sub-culture that, as the historian Paul Johnson wrote about the church of the Middle Ages that “lay like a log across the river of progress.”

Could it be that we have lost the essence of the heart of Christ in pursuit of our own rights to “freedom” and tribal political preferences? Let’s search our hearts.

When the essence of the Christian faith - transforming experience of the living Christ though daily surrender of selfish attitudes - is substituted for Christianity as philosophy, culture, institutions and money making enterprises, we get a whole different “gospel.” Have these infected us?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said in chapter 1 of his great book “Discipleship” that if Christ were walking the planet today, many that now claim to follow Him would probably not, while many that don’t follow Him now probably would.

Let’s continue to follow Christ dear sisters and brothers!

Credit to David French for the Luther quote

08/29/2021

“For there is only one thing that can satisfy love and reward it, and that is You alone. “This then is what it means to seek God perfectly: to withdraw from illusion and pleasure, from worldly anxi…