This Week's Reflection
Environmental Stewardship
 Organic Farming
Lawn Revisionism
Environmental Stewardship
Urban Hermit
Philosophy
Urban Hermit Philosophy
Madeleva Manifesto
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| The Urban Hermit |
| Catholic Lay Spirituality, Homily Reflections, and Ecofeminist Lifestyles |
Welcome, People of God!
May you be edified by the homily hints, musings and reflections of this site. I write from the point of view of a Catholic woman, restricted by the current rules of my Church from full participation but nevertheless attempting to do good through the Church.
I believe that we are on the edge of a revitalized spirituality of the laity, a spirituality that centers itself in the world and consequently centers the Church in the world.
It's a spirituality of conscious and conscientious awareness of choices made by individuals that affect their own spiritual, mental, and physical health and that also affect the people and the world about them.
It's the spirituality of the hermit, a person of prayer whose calling is to enflesh every moment with consciousness of the loving presence of God and thereby change the world. It goes beyond the "vocational" call of a job as parent, teacher, manager, priest, carpenter, secretary, entrepreneur.... The hermit is called to live in God, to pray unceasingly, to love completely. The call is to who and how we are and who God wishes us to become, not to what we do for a living.
Our call to be hermits is not a call to abandon the world but a call to embrace it and shape it. It's a call to what Socrates called the "examined life," intentionally chosen and directed to the love God requires of us. As such, the hermit life involves questions of environment and equality, questions of freedom and economy, questions of need and wealth. For women, it's a commitment to a discipleship of co-equals in an integrated lifestyle.
However you conceive of your movement toward and in God--whether you prefer the metaphor of journey, way, path, pilgrimage, flight, resting, struggle, or something else--I invite you to use whatever pieces of this site you find useful, without cost.
God bless!
[Copyright Beverly A. Bingle 2000. All Rights Reserved.] |
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