Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, August 3, 2025 Reading this Gospel story 5 words stood out to me. I had never thought much about them. “This is a lonely place.” And because it was, Jesus decided not to send the crowds away as night drew near. He chose to help them then and there. He refused to turn them away. He fed them all. I am sure there is not one among
FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT Mary like any Christian contemplative had to learn to walk by faith. We can believe that the great faith she needed to give her fiat to the message of the angel had been prepared by series of acts of faith developed throughout Mary’s life as she contemplated God’s message unfolding in her life before the Annunciation. We see her deep spirit of contemplative faith when we examine Lk 1:37, “For nothing
Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, January 9, 2022 Think of it! It took 13.5 to 15 billion years or so (depending on where you date the Big Bang) little by little to make the cup of coffee you wish you had this morning. 13 billion years since the Big Bang and then came… Keurig! Have you ever thought of that? (Thank you Fr. Keating.) Keurig as a triumph of creation! Creation is
By Fr. Stephen Freeman, August 24, 2015 It is a commonplace that you “cannot put God in a box.” It is an affirmation of the transcendence of God and of the limits of human understanding. It is also a common rhetorical ploy to shut down a theological discussion. But, let’s think a little more about the box. I am deeply averse to statements that begin: “God cannot.” They are often little more than bad theological
God comes into the world in always-surprising ways so that the sincere seeker will always find. Is sincere seeking perhaps the real meaning of walking in darkness and faith? It seems to me that many scientists today are very sincere seekers. In fact, today’s scientists often seem to have more in common with the mystics than do many religious folks who do not seek truth but only assert their dogmas and pre-emptively deny the very possibility of other people’s
Logos and Creation The fundamental cosmic intuition of the Christian spiritual path is that creation is the manifestation of an order that at one and the same time transcends it, sustains it from within and manifests itself through it. This intrinsic, transcendent, immanent order is the Logos — the eternal son of God. The term ‘Logos’ in Christian theology marries, through the revelation of St. John’s Gospel and the Epistles of Paul, its Greek philosophical
Guest writer and CAC faculty member James Finley continues exploring insights on the true self and false self that he gleaned from Thomas Merton. In ways known only to God, the one seeking God in silence unexpectedly falls through the barriers of division and duplicity to discover, as Merton writes, that: . . . here, where contemplation becomes what it is really meant to be, it is no longer something infused by God into a
Christmas is about Emmanuel, God with us. The accent is on the immanence of God. We cannot understand the miracle of the immanence unless we understand the glory of the transcendence, and the other way around. “In the poorest of the poor we see Jesus in distressed disguise.” So said Mother Teresa as she and her nuns ministered to the abandoned babies and dying aged whom they gathered in from the streets of Calcutta. Disguise
FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT Mary like any Christian contemplative had to learn to walk by faith. We can believe that the great faith she needed to give her fiat to the message of the angel had been prepared by series of acts of faith developed throughout Mary’s life as she contemplated God’s message unfolding in her life before the Annunciation. We see her deep spirit of contemplative faith when we examine Lk 1:37, “For nothing
For the Christian the world is not an orphan; nor is it simply an emanation of the absolute. Springing fresh from the hands of the living God, there it stands, desired by God, rejoicing and delighting in him with the joy described in the psalms and in the book of Job, when the morning stars sang together – a ‘musical commandment’, a ‘marvelously composed hymn’, as St Gregory of Nyssa said in his commentary on
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