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

  • The Great Spiritual Migration
    In his book, The Great Spiritual Migration, Brian McLaren wrote,
    “Conversion involves repentance—a radical rethinking. It includes
    remorse—for harm done in the name of our faith. But conversion means more
    than being sorry; it means becoming different.”
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  • Evolution
    Pierre Teilhard de Chardin can light a fire in us. He wasn’t afraid of what
    science was revealing. Science, he said, reveals God to us. For him,
    evolution was the heart of spiritual life, and our job to lovingly grow and
    expand. “The heart of Teilhard de Chardin’s spirituality is truly linked to
    the transfiguration of ordinary life into an ardent adventure of the
    spirit,” writes Ursula King. “As Teilhard understood evolution as an
    increasing process of spiritualization, he was particularly interested in
    the awakening and rise of the spirit in the world.”
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  • The Divine Milieu
    Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit and paleontologist, is one of
    the heavyweight Christian mystics we need to know and integrate in our
    times. Teilhard died in 1955 but he left a vast body of work that
    profoundly named the earth as hallowed ground.
    Teilhard scholar Ursula King says, “For Teilhard the heart of God is found
    at the heart of the world, and the living, natural world is shot through
    with the presence of the divine, with what he eventually was to call ‘the
    divine milieu.’”
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  • Sacred Reciprocity
    What would happen if we actually saw all living beings as members of our
    community? How would our life change if we lived Thomas Berry’s plea to see
    the world as a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects?
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  • Thresholds
    In this year of change, we stand at both personal and collective
    thresholds. A threshold implies crossing into new territory. It is more
    than a transition–it is deeper. We have some obvious thresholds, such as
    our birth and death, and the significant passages in between. We also have
    the unseen spiritual thresholds, the times when we are guided into unknown
    territory and deep authenticity. Irish poet and priest John O’Donohue
    teaches that the word threshold comes from the word thresh: “To cross a
    threshold is to leave behind the husk and arrive at the grain.” As Meister
    Eckhart taught: “If you want the kernel, you must break the shell.”
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  • Embodied Spirituality
    So often we leave out the body, as if it has nothing to do with our
    spiritual life. Symeon the New Theologian, who lived over a thousand years
    ago as a Byzantine monk, teaches otherwise:
    We awaken in Christ’s body
    as Christ awakens our bodies,
    and my poor hand is Christ. He enters
    my foot and is infinitely me.
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  • Shining Like the Sun
    Thomas Merton experienced an inner realization of love when he was standing
    on an ordinary street corner: “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and
    Walnut, in the centre of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed
    with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and
    I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were
    total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness …. I
    almost laughed out loud …. And if only everybody could realize this! But it
    cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all
    walking around shining like the sun.”
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  • Sacred Breath
    Our very breath is our connection to all that is holy and unifying. Richard
    Rohr teaches that the first word we ever spoke was the name of God, and the
    last word we will speak at death will be the name of God. This teaching
    comes from the Hebrew word YHWH, usually translated at Yahweh, the sacred
    name of God. This name, he explains, is not to be vocalized but breathed,
    for it replicates the sound of an inhalation (YH) and exhalation (WH).
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  • Authentic Belonging
    What is true community and how might we start building it from inside out?
    Author Toko-pa Turner says loneliness is not the absence of people in our
    lives. It is, rather, our inability to communicate what we find important.
    Too often we have traded true belonging for surface participation. “The
    difference between ‘fitting in’ and belonging is that fitting in, by its
    very definition, is to parcel off our wholeness in exchange for
    acceptance.”
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  • We Are All Mystics
    We have all been touched by Mystery. These are the moments when we stop and
    see the grandeur of our world, or something simple, sacred and
    beautiful—the eyes of a baby or a night sky of endless stars.
    In his book Mystic Heart, Wayne Teasdale said our mysticism is our most
    precious wisdom:
    We don’t need to enter monasteries to become mystics or to cultivate
    our spirituality. We are all mystics! The mystic heart is the deepest
    part of who or what we really are.
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About Inner Sanctuary Podcast

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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).