Tag: ignatian spirituality

Lass auch Dir die Brust bewegen, Liebchen, höre mich!

13th March 2021 / Julian Maddock / 0 Comments

Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
Mary Oliver: In Blackwater Woods

I was listening to Radio 3 over breakfast on Wednesday. Bryn Terfel was interviewed and asked to recommend a recording. He chose Schubert’s Ständchen sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau partnered on the piano by Gerald Moore – “the definitive recording for many people,” the presenter said. Listen to it on YouTube, or BBC Sounds at about 1’12” in.

It’s only your imagination

3rd March 2021 / Julian Maddock / 0 Comments

By their fruits ye shall know them.
Matthew 7.16

A person is walking along the street and a thought comes to her: “I ought to phone my Auntie Julie. I know it is boring, and I never know what to say, but she must be lonely stuck in her flat with no visitors.”

Praying together

1st January 2021 / Julian Maddock / 0 Comments

a review and an invitation

Breakup

In September 2010, I started on an 8-week, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) class. My father had died on Easter Day, I was struggling to hold it together as a hospital chaplain, and, though I was blind to it then, my marriage was about to end. I had long wanted to do one of these courses since dipping into Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book, Full Catastrophe Living, but when I signed up for it two months earlier, I had not anticipated that this course would frame the nexus of disintegration that brought 2010 to an end.

Audio prayer: What do you desire?

17th May 2020 / Julian Maddock / 0 Comments

Sanddune, Norfolk — Sand dune, Hunstanton (photo by Julian Maddock)

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
WB Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree

Thoughts in a time of plague

10th May 2020 / Julian Maddock / 2 Comments

Desert, Newberry Springs, CA (photo by Julian Maddock)

I wrote a short piece for the London Centre for Spiritual Direction‘s May newsletter. Then a few days later I was invited to give a reflection at a Holy Communion Service on Zoom. I used the original piece as a springboard to engage with the scripture. Here is the delivered product.

This time of plague is a desolation for many: loss of work, loss of income, loss of health, loss of life; traumatic, dangerous front-line work; and decimated support services. Those of us not so endangered still suffer desolation. There is overwhelming uncertainty: where will we be next year, or next week!? How are we to live now? What is God’s call now?

Audio Prayer: Revisiting a God moment

19th April 2020 / Julian Maddock / 0 Comments

There ain’t no good thing ever dies
I’m gonna take it with me when I go
Tom Waits: Take It With Me

I have often talked about ‘repetition’, as Ignatius of Loyola calls it, in these writings, e.g. “Where to start?“, “The Kingdom of Heaven“, and “Repetition“. He invites us to revisit significant moments, “noting and dwelling upon the points where I have felt greater consolation or desolation or greater spiritual relish.” [62] When we do this, we become infused with the graces and insights given to us. This changes us. This is conversion, incrementally, daily.

Annunciation

15th December 2019 / Julian Maddock / 0 Comments

We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself? And what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I also do not give birth to him in my time and my culture? This, then, is the fullness of time: When the Son of God is begotten in us.
Meister Eckhart

Tag: ignatian spirituality

Lass auch Dir die Brust bewegen, Liebchen, höre mich!

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It’s only your imagination

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Praying together

Breakup

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Audio prayer: What do you desire?

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Thoughts in a time of plague

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Audio Prayer: Revisiting a God moment

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Annunciation

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