We do not, and cannot, by definition, know much about the kingdom to come. But the “One Who Came Among Us” not only came to reassure us of the gift of the kingdom that is yet unseen but to proclaim the presence of the kingdom is already among us—even when we cannot see it and we cannot hear it. Sometimes we cannot see much evidence of the kingdom that is already here. How do we find it, not lose sight of it, and even share its message of hope with others in the darkness? In Punching Holes in the Dark, author Robert Benson helps us discover strength in the gifts of the Spirit and encourages us all to start punching holes—as hard as we can, as often as we can—to let the Light of the world sneak i
What does it mean to pray without ceasing? Is it really that important to pray as the early Church did? In this installment of The Ancient Practices series, Robert Benson presents a structure for our lives where we can live in continued awareness of God’s presence and reality. A pattern for worship and prayer that is offered to God at specific times throughout the day, the daily office is meant to be prayed by all the faithful so the Church may be continuous and God’s work in this world may be sustained. Yet it is highly personal too—an anchor between the daily and the divine, the mundane and the marvelous. Says author Robert Benson, “At some point, high-minded discussion about our life of prayer has to work its way into the dailyness of our lives. At some point, we have to move from talking about prayer to saying our prayers so that the marvelous that is possible has a chance to appear.” In Constant Prayer is your gateway to deeper communion with God. Expect something new to unfold before you and within you while heeding this ancient call. The Ancient Practices There is a hunger in every human heart for connection, primitive and raw, to God. To satisfy it, many are beginning to explore traditional spiritual disciplines used for centuries . . . everything from fixed-hour prayer to fasting to sincere observance of the Sabbath. Compelling and readable, the Ancient Practices series is for every spiritual sojourner, for every Christian seeker who wants more.
One man's story of his journey through spiritual uncertainty to a newfound understanding of his relationship to God. For those who have questioned their Christian faith, Robert Benson offers an account of his sojourn in a season of trouble and his journey back to God. In this spiritual self-portrait, Benson's experiences--battling depression and re-examining the deep Christian faith in which he has been immersed since childhood--become poignant testament of one believer's struggle with the mysteries of faith's road.
“I am not ever going to get to go home, am I?," she said one day. This is the story of moving Miss Peggy to a new place to live, to a new way of life, to a new kind of reality. All of which became necessary because Miss Peggy had begun to live a life colored by dementia. All of us who love her have begun to live that new life with her. Some of that story is here as well. In Moving Miss Peggy we also meet the story of siblings, grown apart over years, with nothing in common except for a mother who in wrestling through her own challenges gave each grown child the gift of a deeply felt reunion, long years after any of them suspected there was a possibility of reconciling grace. Written with grace, candor and bittersweet humor, Moving Miss Peggy tells a story that many others are now facing, bringing strength and wisdom and inspiration to readers. We learn (and learn again) along with Miss Peggy and her family some of the very basics for living life well.
The story of a small garden large enough to hold everything in life that really matters. “These days the portion of Eden for which I am responsible is fairly modest. . . . It is a small house in a small garden in a small neighborhood. But it is large enough . . . Large enough to hold everything dear.” Digging In tells the story of the author’s move into an early twentieth-century cottage with a long abandoned back yard, and the work that he and his family had to do to bring a garden to life there. It is the story of the way that the garden became the ground upon which deeper relationships with his family, friends, and neighbors began to blossom and grow. Written in the gentle, revealing prose for which Benson is acclaimed, this is a lyrical and wise book, beautifully evoking the wonder of planting and seasons, humorously recalling the challenges and the struggles of the labor itself, and carefully observing the simple truths and timeless joys that were there to be found.
The Body Broken is an honest and moving meditation on the Gospel imperative to love one another as brothers and sisters, even as we choose to live and express our faith in differing ways. A lifelong Christian and seeker, Robert Benson has shared the prayers, rituals, conversations, and practices of many different denominations. His broad range of ecumenical experiences have led to moments of great joy and deep fellowship, but they have also opened his eyes to the misunderstanding and the intolerance that constantly threaten to dismember the whole Body of Christ. Benson writes longingly about the things of the faith that bind us together and gracefully about the things that keep us apart. He recounts his own journey from Nazarene to Methodist to Episcopalian and introduces us to the people and the differing expressions of faith he encountered along the way. We meet ordinary folk, including Benson's family and childhood friends, as well as legendary religious thinkers as Henri Nouwen. Some of the stories--particularly the ones about his own brother's suicide--are heartbreakingly painful; others bring to light the joy and grace of Christian love as found in acts of common worship and compassion. Although Benson acknowledges that there are--and always will be--very real differences in the ways that Christians seek to live out their faith, he reminds us of the essential beliefs that we share about God and our common dependency on God's mysterious mercy and grace, even as we look for God as through a glass darkly. In poetic prose that is reminiscent of the writing of Frederick Buechner and Annie Dillard, Benson illuminates, with wit and wisdom and humility and passion, one of the most difficult challenges that face the Church. The Body Broken is a powerful, important examination of the intolerance and divisiveness that have become an all too familiar part of the Church and a gentle, poignant call for a Christian community that embraces a spirit of love and unity even as it honors our differences.
I can remember the words people said that meant so much to me and my own sense of who I was and who I might become.... You know you have heard such a sentence when you hear inside a corresponding Yes. The Yes is an echo of sorts, or at least it is the same voice as is the Echo that you have come to count on. Such a sentence takes your breath away.... It tells you something about yourself that you suspected or hoped, something you glimpsed but were too shy or uncertain to name aloud." To Hear and Live Your Calling When one day a friend wondered if he was being called to a certain field of work, he asked Robert Benson, "Do you think I am?" The Echo Within is Robert's illuminating answer, a thoughtful, honest, profoundly-affecting account of his own search and failings and eventual discovery of the Yes he describes-what it is one truly is called to do and be. Written out of a lifelong search and response to the callings on his life, The Echo Within explores: *how to love the work you do, and the process of doing it. *ways to sense God's pleasure in your pursuits, both in the pursuits and in you. *whether you fall into your vocation as a destiny or you chart that course. *how to begin living with added dimensions of meaning and purpose. Through the ups and downs of the changes inherent in family life, professional choice, and spiritual experience, Robert shares with wisdom, humor, and heart what he's learned-and how you can discover your calling too. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
“I am not ever going to get to go home, am I?," she said one day. This is the story of moving Miss Peggy to a new place to live, to a new way of life, to a new kind of reality. All of which became necessary because Miss Peggy had begun to live a life colored by dementia. All of us who love her have begun to live that new life with her. Some of that story is here as well. In Moving Miss Peggy we also meet the story of siblings, grown apart over years, with nothing in common except for a mother who in wrestling through her own challenges gave each grown child the gift of a deeply felt reunion, long years after any of them suspected there was a possibility of reconciling grace. Written with grace, candor and bittersweet humor, Moving Miss Peggy tells a story that many others are now facing, bringing strength and wisdom and inspiration to readers. We learn (and learn again) along with Miss Peggy and her family some of the very basics for living life well.
I taught undergraduates for forty-five years (the last thirty at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee), and for most of those years I spent as much time as possible outside. I hunted as much as I could, and I fished some. I also spent time in the woods of Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi just walking around looking at things that caught my eye and trying to understand. Outdoor life and academic life for me have been intimately connected, and this collection of essays explores that connection. The essays in Wedding the Wild Particular make plain the sheer delight I have taken in the primary world and the degree to which that delight has enriched my academic vocation. They make what I believe is a coherent argument for the importance of natural literacy in the intellectual life." --Robert Benson
Living Prayer is the story of Robert Benson's quest across ecumenical and denominational lines in search of windows into the mystery of prayer. Weaving a narrative about his experiences while seeking a prayerful life, he demonstrates how prayer can enter the fabric of one's existence so that life itself becomes prayer. In the manner of Madeleine L'Engle and Kathleen Norris, Benson makes the ordinary events of life seem mystical and the mystical seem ordinary. He illustrates the full power of prayer, illuminates the reasons we are drawn to pray, and bears witness to the grace of leading a life attuned to the voice of God.
A lovely Caribbean island and its people awaken in author Robert Benson a sense of place and home. The islanders’ warmth and welcome prompt a new understanding of ideas of beauty, community and spiritual belonging. “We live in a world where such welcome and gentleness and civility are increasingly rare. Most of the conversation between strangers is terse and quick and far too often, it is cold and rude. It can even be that way, more often than we care to admit, among people who are not strangers. And such is the way of the world that we live in that we are almost stunned by welcome whenever it breaks out around us, and we are certainly drawn to the people and to the places where we find such welcome in abundance.”
In the spirit of Field of Dreams, a remarkable book about baseball and the meaning of life. A game between the Iowa Cubs and the Nashville Sounds at an AAA park in Nashville provides the lens through which Robert Benson explores the game of baseball and the meaning of life in The Game. It is an ordinary week night game in the early part of the season between two teams that will finish far out of first place in the Pacific League. But Benson shows us how in this average game of baseball, just as in our everyday lives, the routine plays-the seemingly minor yet vital moves, empty of bravado-eventually win the game. In beautifully measured prose, Benson links events in his life to the innings in this baseball game. Married to a woman who can quote baseball stats with the best of them, and with two children who share his love for the game (his teenage daughter made the decision early on that she would be the first woman to play for the Yankees), Benson explores the ways in which baseball has always somehow shaped and defined his life. The Game is an extraordinary testament to the everlasting wonder and magic of the great American pastime.
In the spirit of Field of Dreams, a remarkable book about baseball and the meaning of life. A game between the Iowa Cubs and the Nashville Sounds at an AAA park in Nashville provides the lens through which Robert Benson explores the game of baseball and the meaning of life in The Game. It is an ordinary week night game in the early part of the season between two teams that will finish far out of first place in the Pacific League. But Benson shows us how in this average game of baseball, just as in our everyday lives, the routine plays-the seemingly minor yet vital moves, empty of bravado-eventually win the game. In beautifully measured prose, Benson links events in his life to the innings in this baseball game. Married to a woman who can quote baseball stats with the best of them, and with two children who share his love for the game (his teenage daughter made the decision early on that she would be the first woman to play for the Yankees), Benson explores the ways in which baseball has always somehow shaped and defined his life. The Game is an extraordinary testament to the everlasting wonder and magic of the great American pastime.
Lord of the World is a prophetic science fiction novel by Robert Benson that centers upon the reign of the Anti-Christ and the End of the World...A masterful apocalyptic science fiction tale woven by a master of the genre, Robert Benson!
The Latin word "venite" is an invitation given to pray the prayers of Christ. It is an invitation to pray the ancient prayer, until life becomes a prayer without ceasing. Best-selling author Robert Benson brings together deep-rooted and traditional prayer practices of the Church in a volume for laypeople who want to practice daily prayer throughout the year in their own solitude. Venite offers a means of framing one’s day in the rhythm of the ancient daily prayers of the Church, and allows for participation in those rhythms by beginning the day with prayer to sanctify it; by ending the day’s work with psalms, prayers, and thanksgiving; and by committing oneself to the darkness and silence of the night with confession, forgiveness, and confidence. Like The Book of Common Prayer, Venite is a daily book of connecting to God for people of all Christian faiths. Crossing denominational lines in spirit and in practice, it is divided into seven parts: Office, Seasons, Days of Remembrance, Canticles, Psalter, Lectio, and Prayers. Easy-to-use and follow, Venite is an uplifting and enlightening book for all experienced in or new to sacred daily prayer.
The following pages contain in all abbreviated form sermons preached in Rome in the Church of St., Silvestro-in-Capite, during the year of 1911. Some of them were also preached in the Carmelite Church in Kensington in 1910; and all of them, With others, in the Church of our Lady of Lourdes, New York, in 1912. The author apologises for the the much compressed form in which they are printed here; but he has sought to suggest rather than to develop the thoughts of which he treats.Part 1 is Christ in the Interior Soul. It considers the Friendship of Christ, then the purgative and illuminative ways of the spiritual life. Then we move to Christ in the Exterior, which considers His holy presence in the Eucharist, the Church, the priest, the saint, the sinner, the average man and then the sufferer.“IT seems inconceivable at first sight that a relationship, which in any real manner can be called a friendship, should be possible between Christ and the soul. Adoration, dependence, obedience, service, and even imitation all these things are imaginable; but until we remember that Jesus Christ took a human soul like our own – a soul liable to joy and to sorrow, open to the assaults of passion and temptation, a soul that actually did experience heaviness as well as ecstasy - the pains of obscurity as well as the joys of clear vision - until this becomes to us, from a dogmatic fact apprehended by faith, a vital fact perceived by experience, a full realization of His friendship is out of the question.” Yes, Jesus is our Friend!“And, extremely often, the first sign that the Way of Purgation has been really entered, lies in a consciousness that there is beginning for her an experience which the world calls Disillusionment. It may come in a dozen different ways.” This may sound strange, but indeed there are trials in the spiritual life. “She may, for example, be brought face to face with some catastrophe in external matters. She may meet with an unworthy priest, a disunited congregation, some scandal in Christian life, in exactly that sphere where Christ seemed to her evidently supreme. She had thought that the Church must be perfect, because it was the Church of Christ, or the priesthood stainless because it was after the Order of Melchisedech; and she finds to her dismay that there is a human side even to those things that are most associated with Divinity on earth.” There are other things that can disillusion us, but Monsignor Benson helps us through these trials. “The next stage of Purgation lies in what may be called, in a sense, the Disillusionment with Divine things. The earthly side has failed her, or rather has fallen off from the reality; now it begins to seem to her as if the Divine side failed her too. A brilliant phrase of Faber well describes one element in this Disillusionment - the "monotony of Piety."”Let us not suffer the shipwreck here described: “The way of the spiritual path is strewn with thewrecks of souls that might have been friends of Christ. This one faltered, because Christ put off his ornaments; this one because Christ did not allow her to think that His graces were Himself; a third because wounded pride still writhed, and bade her be true to her own shame rather than to His glory. All these stages and processes are known; every spiritual writer that has ever lived has treated of them over and over again from this standpoint or from that. But the end and lesson of them all is the same - that Christ purges His friends of all that is not of Him; that He leaves them nothing of themselves, in order that He may be wholly theirs; for no soul can learn the strength and the love of God, until she has cast her whole weight upon Him.”
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.