Inner Sanctuary Podcast

Inner Sanctuary Podcast

By Liz Rees / Knox United Church (Calgary)Health & FitnessMental HealthReligion & SpiritualityEducationSelf-ImprovementSpirituality
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Inner Sanctuary Podcast episodes

  • Who Am I?
    If we ask ourselves, “Who am I?” and really sit with the question, we may
    find ourselves without a clear answer. We think we should know. We think we
    should be able to define ourselves readily with some kind of singular
    identity. But that is not how we are.
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  • The Cosmic Dance
    One of Thomas Merton’s most compelling spiritual writings is his last chapter of New Seeds of Contemplation, entitled The General Dance. In it he describes the “silence of the spheres as the music of wedding feast” and the world and time as “the dance of the Lord in emptiness.”
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  • Blessed are Those who Mourn
    WIn his book A Sacred Voice is Calling, John Neafsey describes witnessing a group of very poor people praying in front of a statue of the crucified Christ in a church in Guatemala: “Each person, in their turn, went to the foot of the cross, and, as they prayed quietly about whatever was on their minds or in their hearts, they reached up and literally clung to the legs of Jesus…. I suspect that some of them were hanging onto him for dear life.”
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  • Eyes of the Heart
    What does it mean to see with the eyes of the heart? Mystic theologian Cynthia Bourgeault calls us to know and experience heart-centred spiritual perception: “According to the great wisdom traditions of the West (Christian, Jewish, Islamic), the heart is first and foremost an organ of spiritual perception. Its primary function is to look beyond the obvious, the boundaried surface of things, and see into a deeper reality….”
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  • The Spiritual Practice of Letting Go
    Letting go is happening all around us as we head towards winter. Trees are
    great teachers of release. If we want to find inner peace, we’ll have to
    apprentice to them.
    When we practice centering prayer, we are letting go. We are letting go of
    our thoughts and petitions and remaining in silent receptivity, and, most
    importantly, we are letting go of our personal agendas and maps. Thomas
    Keating wrote, “This prayer is a journey into the unknown. It is a call to
    follow Jesus out of all the structures, security blankets and even
    spiritual practices that serve as props for the ego.”
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  • The Light Within
    We all have trauma in our lives. None of us has been loved perfectly or
    loved others perfectly. We all carry unresolved pain and we all deserve
    tenderness and compassion.
    Dr. Gabor Mate, a renowned addiction expert who has spent many years
    working on the lower east side of Vancouver, says that the many forms of
    addiction in our society are coming from our endless search to relieve past
    pain and trauma and to externally fill a void we feel inside: “There are
    many, many addictions. Yes, there’s the addiction to drugs, but there’s
    also the addiction to consumerism, the addiction to sex, to the internet,
    to food. For each person there’s a different way of feeding the emptiness.”
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  • Wisdom
    Contemplative practice allows us to awaken this inner knowing, also known
    as wisdom. Thomas Merton names it Sophia, the feminine name for divine
    wisdom according to the Judeo Christian tradition. In his soul stirring
    writing on Sophia, he names wisdom as an “invisible fecundity” flowing from
    the depths of the divine: “I am awakened, I am born again at the voice of
    this, my Sister, sent to me from the depths of the divine fecundity.”
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  • Silence

    Ojibway writer Richard Wagamese wrote a lot about silence. In silence, he said, we touch truth and allow our hearts to shift: “There are motions of the heart that occur only in quiet rooms, in the splendour of solitude where nothing and everything exists at the same time. Being and becoming have their confluence in these moments of touching your essence. You feel yourself to be a part of the great wheel of creative, nurturing, loving, benevolent energy that is spinning around us all the time.”

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  • The Inner Journey, Together
    Contemplative community will allow us to journey together, stepping off the shoreline into the unknown, with others, in utter authenticity and drawing on collective wisdom. “We may not know exactly where the journey will take us,” says Newell. “We can know, however, that in opening to the journey we feel more alive, more true. In opening to the journey together we can be part of nurturing hope in one another .…”
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  • I-Thou
    How do we truly light the fire of love in our lives? We all know the core
    teaching of Jesus to love God with all our hearts and love our neighbors as
    ourselves, but has it become a pat phrase? How do we actually live it?
    Thomas Merton pulls us deeply into an ‘I Thou’ awareness that changes
    everything:
    Contemplation is not a trance or ecstasy
    not emotional fire and sweetness that come with religious exaltation
    not enthusiasm, not the sense of being “seized” by an elemental force
    and swept into liberation by mystical frenzy.
    Contemplation is no pain-killer.
    In the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing
    that he (she) no longer knows what God is;
    this is a great gain,
    because “God is not a what,”
    not a “thing.”
    There is “no such thing” as God
    because God is neither a “what” nor a thing”
    but a pure “Who,”
    the “Thou” before whom our inmost “I” springs
    into awareness.
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About Inner Sanctuary Podcast

From the publisher's feed

Welcome to the Inner Sanctuary podcast, a weekly program for everyone who wants to deepen their practice of meditation. With Liz Rees at Knox United Church (Calgary).