Thoughts On This House

Kay Lindahl, an author and founder of The Listening Center, writes of the inherently sacred nature of reflective listening:  Perhaps one of the most precious and powerful gifts we can give another person is to really listen to them, to listen with quiet, fascinated attention, with our whole being, fully present. This sounds simple, but […]

Sikh activist Valarie Kaur has made a commitment to listen to those with whom she disagrees. Here she describes some of the practices that makeit possible:   Deep listening is an act of surrender. We risk being changed by what we hear. When I really want to hear another person’s story, I try to leave […]

Father Richard shares his experience of how challenging it is to hear each other without agenda or defensiveness:    Can we take responsibility for the fact that we push people to polarized positions when we do not stand in the compassionate middle? I think of how often, during my talks, someone raises a hand and […]

“Jesus said, “Remain in me, as I remain in you. Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can […]

Father Richard’s Franciscan tradition prioritizes putting love into concrete action while drawing on Divine Love as our Source:   Love won’t be real or tested unless we somehow live close to the disadvantaged, who frankly teach us that we know very little about love. To be honest, my male Franciscan seminary training didn’t teach me how […]

Rosemarie Freeney Harding (1930–2004) was a spiritual leader in the Black Freedom Movement of the 1960s. Her Mennonite faith shaped her commitment to radical hospitality, healing, and transformation. She describes the interracial community she and her husband Vincent formed at Mennonite House in Atlanta:   One of my first tasks as a young organizer in the […]

Catherine de Hueck Doherty (1896–1985) was a Russian baroness whose family emigrated to Canada to escape the collapse of Russia’s tsarist monarchy. Eventually, she gave up everything in her commitment to live “the gospel without compromise.” She served the poor and promoted interracial justice through her work at Friendship House in New York City. She […]

Sister Thea Bowman (1937–1990), a Franciscan Sister of Perpetual Adoration, addressed the United States Catholic bishops in 1989. She sang several lines of the African-American spiritual “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child / A long way from home.” Embracing her Black, Catholic, female identity, she said:   What does it mean to be Black and […]

Father Richard begins his book The Universal Christ by quoting English mystic Caryll Houselander (1901–1954), who experienced Christ in the faces of people around her while riding the subway and walking through London. From that mystical experience, she knew:  Christ is everywhere; in [Christ] every kind of life has a meaning and has an influence on every […]

This week’s Daily Meditations feature writings of twentieth-century women mystics. Each one shares her experience of God as unconditional and unsurpassed love from her unique background. Father Richard Rohr believes this is true for all mystics:    People who know God well—mystics, hermits, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator. […]