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a noisy Church

“It is time to revolt against the dictatorship of noise that seeks to break our hearts and our intellects. A noisy society is like sorry-looking cardboard stage scenery, a world without substance, an immature flight. A noisy Church would become vain, unfaithful, and dangerous.”


Robert Cardinal Sarah with Nicolas Diat. The Power of Silence Against the Dictatorship of Noise. With an Afterword by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Translated by Michael J. Miller. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), p. 240.

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praying in the middle

“To sum up, in prayer there is the danger of falling into one of two opposite extremes. The first is ‘mythologizing’ (or making into an idol) the external forms, when prayer is reduced to the mechanical following of a rule or a method of praying. The second is the rejection of and allergic reaction toward all forms of prayer and asceticism. Those fall into this sad situation who do not know how to combine the external forms with sincerity of heart.”


Augustine Ichiro Okumura. Awakening to Prayer. Translated by Theresa Kazue Hiraki and Albert Masaru Yamato. (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1994), p. 52.

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a hermit’s dark night

“The solitary easily plunges to a cavern of darkness and of phantoms more horrible and more absurd than the most inane set of conventional social images. The suffering he must then face is neither salutary nor noble. It is catastrophic.”


Thomas Merton. “Notes for a ‘Philosophy of Solitude’.” (1960) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013), p. 72.

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What is the Church?

“The church is the single multi-ethnic family promised by the creator God to Abraham. It was brought into being through Israel’s Messiah. Jesus, energized by God’s Spirit, and it was called to bring the transformative news of God’s rescuing justice to the whole creation. That’s a tight-packed definition, and every bit of it counts.”


Tom Wright. Simply Christian. (London: SPCK, 2006), p. 171.

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Lectio divina at the center

“Every day we monks live in important spiritual practices, such as stability, attentiveness or mindfulness, meditation, silence, prayer, obedience, purity of heart, simplicity, openness, and many others. But lectio divina is the center of our monastic life. Monastic practices are not simply things to do. They are dimensions of the Spirit. If we cannot live these dimensions, we are not really monks.”


Alessandro Barban. “Lectio Divina and Monastic Theology in Camaldolese Life” in Belisle, Peter-Damian, editor. The Privilege of Love: Camaldolese Benedictine Spirituality. (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2002), p. 59.

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Cluttered Mental Attic

“Before long it occurred to me to do what historians are professionally equipped to do. Live with a cluttered mental attic; run a spiritual antique shop; resist the impulse to throw anything away. Hang on after the avant-garde rejects. Save, shuffle, classify, enjoy the relics. Eventually shapes emerge. One learns to live with contradictions and paradoxes, but what is new about that in theology?”  

Martin Marty in “Theology Today,” January 1972, p. 472.

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commonplace

“My life has always been more or less detached from the life about me. I have not been a hermit, but my temperament and love of solitude, and a certain constitutional timidity and shrinking from all kinds of strife, have kept me in the by-paths rather than on the great highways of life. My talent, such as it is, is distinctly a by-path talent, or at most, a talent for green lanes and sequestered roadsides; but that which has most interested me in life, nature, can be seen from lanes and by-paths better even than from the turnpike, where the dust and noise and the fast driving obscure the view or distract the attention.”

John Burroughs. “The Summit of the Years.” The Writings of John Burroughs. 15 vols. The Riverby Edition. (Boston and NY: Houghton Mifflin Co., The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1904-1913) Vol. 15, pages 1-2.

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Housekeeping note

This blog has both hiking posts and spirituality posts.

  • To read only the 2025 LEJOG Pilgrimage walk across Britain posts click the menu words “LEJOG Pilgrimage” at the top right
  • To read only the hiking posts, click the menu word “Hiking” at the top of the screen
  • To read only the spirituality posts, click the menu word “Spirituality”
  • To read all blog posts intermingled, click the menu phrase “Blog Posts”

And as a reminder, I’ve put a quick explanation of how hiking paths and the spiritual path intersect on the “About” page.