An intentional, Christ-centered community focused on hospitality, contemplation, and service
“The war here has been going on for more than four years. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled, and thousands more are dead, including many of my friends. My wife and I are among about 250,000 people trapped here in the besieged eastern section of the city. ” -Aleppo resident, Omair Shaaban
“My friends, Jesus is the Lord of risk, of the eternal ‘more’. Jesus is not the Lord of comfort, security and ease. Following Jesus demands a good dose of courage, a readiness to trade in the sofa for a pair of walking shoes and to set out on new and uncharted paths. To blaze trails that open up new horizons capable of spreading joy, the joy that is born of God’s love and wells up in your hearts with every act of mercy. To take the path of the ‘craziness’ of our God, who teaches us to encounter him in the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, the friend in trouble, the prisoner, the refugee and the migrant, and our neighbours who feel abandoned.”
-Pope Francis,
World Youth Day Prayer Vigil in Krakow, Poland, 2016
Night Sky: David Morrison, 2016
As a turbulent storm passes over our desert this early evening, we pray for the life or our world: especially with the people of Nice, France and all the places marked by violence. We pray the Kingdom of God will break like a calm over the restless sea:
“As long as one person on this earth suffers, you suffer too. It must be so or there is no validity to living in a place like this. A person does not go to a monastery to escape from the suffering of the world. We enter a monastery [or spiritual life] to discover that our own suffering is not (strictly speaking) our own. It does not belong to us. Rather, our individual suffering, is the suffering of the whole human family manifesting itself in and as our experience of it.” (Thomas Merton in a conversation with James Finley)
