Spirituality

Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection was a seventeenth-century Carmelite lay brother who spent most of his religious life working in the monastery kitchen, washing pots and pans, preparing meals, doing unglamorous work that nobody noticed. Yet he wrote one of…

We have come through the drama. The Advent waiting, the Christmas celebration, the Lenten fasting, the Holy Week intensity, the Easter explosion of Alleluia, and Pentecost’s fire. The liturgical calendar has given us months of high-intensity spiritual experiences — preparation,…

Prophets don’t speak their own opinions, preferences, or agendas. They speak God’s Word. This means listening to God must come before speaking for God. Consider Elijah, the great Carmelite prophet. After his dramatic confrontation with the prophets of Baal, he…

We have just celebrated Pentecost, the birthday of the Church, the moment everything changed. Picture the scene: The apostles are huddled in the Upper Room, scared, hiding, confused. Their leader is dead. Their dreams are shattered. They don’t know what…

When a proposal to shoot an episode of a new show Trading Places at the Carmelite Priory, Boars Hill, Oxford, landed on our prior’s desk last autumn, the initial reaction in our community was predictable: polite bemusement. A television crew?…

When we hear “praying in the Spirit,” most of us think of something we can feel — hands raised, voices passionate, maybe tongues, certainly energy. We think of prayer that moves us, prayer we can sense happening, prayer that creates…