Ronald Rolheiser, OMI, it concerns the way we channel the deep longing at the core of our beings. Designed for either a small group faith-sharing experience or personal reflection, Longing for the Holy guides participants in exploring the implications of the central mysteries of faith—the Incarnation, the Eucharist, and the Paschal Mystery—for spirituality.
Attending to the cultural challenges that keep us from realizing our true desire, it considers the important themes of church community, justice, sexuality, the practices of the spiritual life, and being a mystic of the everyday. Buy Now. Longing for the Holy offers spiritual insights of Fr. The Holy Longing is a bracing alternative to religious posturing.
Truly incarnational, Ronald Rolheiser grounds his vision of the spiritual life in hard real-life experiences and tells tough truths. In the end, it is the hard truths of compassion, forgiveness, and action in the world, that give us a true and lasting hope.
A much needed antidote to the consumerist view of religion, this book is both a delight and a challenge to read. He is never sentimental—and all the time he is absolutely grounded in reality. Its insights are just what all of us need at this moment of history. It blends the old and the new in ways that few other authors can do. Weakland, O. Start earning points for buying books!
Uplift Native American Stories. Add to Bookshelf. Read An Excerpt. Category: Religion Category: Religion. Mar 11, ISBN Add to Cart. Buy from Other Retailers:. Paperback —. About The Holy Longing Ronald Rolheiser makes sense of what is frequently a misunderstood word: spirituality. Also by Ronald Rolheiser. See all books by Ronald Rolheiser. Product Details. Inspired by Your Browsing History.
Sacred Fire. Ronald Rolheiser. Words of Life. Adam Hamilton. Contemplative Prayer. Thomas Merton. The Hope of Glory. The Wounded Healer. Henri J. The Cloister Walk. Kathleen Norris. Reaching Out. The Ragamuffin Gospel. He looks up to see her and invites her to taste it. The taste of the sauce is so exquisite that Ann can do nothing but exclaim repeatedly: "Oh my God! Now you know. To eat good food is to be close to God.
I'm never sure what that means, but it is true! This scene reminds us of an essential connection between beauty Primo's finely crafted multicourse meal , joy the merrymaking that ensues throughout the meal , and God to whom the exclamations of delight are directed. The knowledge he talks about may not be saving knowledge, but it is part and parcel of God's revelation of himself to his world.
What a great gift we can offer our neighbors when our acts of beauty, such as a finely made meal, lead to sweet, true joy. Order Insofar as beauty is marked by unity, when we make something beautifully we offer to others a vision of unity, or order.
Such a vision can minister to the souls of people torn by fragmented schedules and broken relationships. At Hope Chapel, we hang at the beginning of Advent two 9-foot-high, 6-foot-wide banners that feature the archangels Michael and Gabriel.
They make for fierce, strange creatures, vibrantly colored in reds, purples, oranges, yellows, and greens. Angular in form, they hover protectively over the congregation. At the base of the banners, the colors brighten to hint that dawn approaches with the coming good news. Once a year, the banners act to "reorder" our sense of time, to reorient us to the time of Emmanuel. What time is it at Advent? It is the time that God has come; that he is here defending us and speaking now; that he will one day make whole all that is damaged around us and in us.
The order of spiritual time represented in the banners nourishes us frazzled, occasionally faint of heart congregants. The angels' visual reminder puts us at rest: all shall be well, the Lord is near.
Surely we need that reminder at least once a year. More Beauty But beauty is actually much wilder than simply evoking in us a desire to have more "units" of beauty. No, we want, as C. Lewis keenly observed, to pass into beauty. In other words, we want to bathe in Mozart's music. We want to become a part of the Swiss Alps. We want to receive our spouse into ourselves.
We want not merely to behold the Bread of Life; we want to eat it, and in so doing, find ourselves truly known. Psalm states, "One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek … all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord, and to seek him in his temple. All the days of my life. That's a long time and quite an exceptional desire.
But I don't think the psalm-ist intends to exaggerate. He has encountered the Source of all beauties. How can he not want this beauty forever? God has redeemed us so that we may worship him never-endingly as the glorious, tri-personal Source of beauty. God has also purposed to transform all of creation's brokenness, as theologian Jeremy Begbie reminds us, "into something of infinitely expanding, superabundant beauty.
My street is not without signs of beauty. One family grows tall vines in its front yard that yield luscious red tomatoes. Every March, Texas Mountain Laurels grace us with sweet grape-scented flowers. Human doings. God doings. These signs gladden my heart.
They beckon me away from the ugliness in my own heart. We evangelicals uphold the true and the good of our gospel, and rightly so.
But there is also a great work to be had in expanding beauty upon the earth. To place beauty in the lives of our neighbors is to place a forestalling effect in their hearts against the downward drag of sin into ugliness, both moral and material.
Sometimes our beauty-making works will be an indirect witness to God, as with Mel Gibson's movie Braveheart and its depiction of self-sacrificing love. Sometimes our works will be very direct testaments: Gibson's Passion of the Christ is just that. But always, the effect of beauty upon us will be the same—to evoke longing for the Source of all beauties. Our privilege as those who walk with Jesus is to be able to say to our neighbors, with the Holy Spirit's guidance: "That longing you feel in your heart for something greater than yourself?
That is a longing for God himself. He truly can satisfy your deepest desires. To do this work does not mean we neglect the true proclamation of God or the practical love of our neighbor. It means we infuse all things with the presence of beauty—our discipleship and our public parks, our grocery stores and our popular novels, our meal-makings and mission projects—knowing that we are doing gospel work, proclaiming the full revelation of God.
My final prayer is this: that you and I would become, in all we say and do, messengers of a Greater Beauty, living signposts of that First Brightness, holy irritations against all that is ugly, so that at least once throughout the course of our neighbors' day, they will, with God's grace, long for him and perhaps even find him—the everlasting desire of all nations. Click for reprint information. David Taylor also manages a blog. Previous Christian Vision Project themes were culture in and mission in Have something to add about this?
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