SECULAR ORDER OF DISCALCED CARMELITES
England, Wales and Scotland

A very powerful message on prayer from the Early Church Father Tertullian in this morning’s Office of Readings.  ‘ Prayer is the one thing that can conquer God’, he writes.   This alone is a very beautiful thought – that we have the power to ‘conquer God’.  Then he goes on to a very beautiful paragraph: ‘ All the angels pray. Every creature prays. Cattle and wild beasts pray and bend the knee. As they come from their barns and caves they look out to heaven and call out, lifting up their...

‘What does it profit you to give God one thing if He asks of you another?  Consider what it is God wants, and then do it.’  This reflection is taken from Sayings of Light and Love by St John of the Cross, and it certainly resonates for me in my life.  I spent many years offering my life to God in the context of a certain vocation only to have it borne in on me that this was not to be my vocation.  Gradually I had to accept that God had other plans for my life; offering my life to Him was...

Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting up with E for lunch.  We first met many years ago as students.  At that time we were acquaintances and nothing more, though we shared an enthusiasm for the Lord as evangelical (born-again) Christians.  Our paths crossed again some years later after we had graduated, but still as acquaintances.  I had become a Catholic by then.  Years later our paths crossed yet again on one particular day when I happened to be giving a talk and E turned up.  Then more...