There are so many

guaranteed cures for everything that there's no reason for any of us not to live to be 250 years old or older. If they only worked...

Edible Gold: The gourmet and the alchemist

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One person

doesn't like Fr. Rohr.

Fr. Richard Rohr

While I struggle, myself, with the whole Enneagram idea, I do wish people would look at Centering Prayer in more detail (or in ANY detail) before condemning it and labeling it.

The biggest criticism about Centering Prayer is that they say it has a 'mantra' that you say over and over, which makes it like Transcendental Meditation. The truth is, it's not a mantra but what the people who teach it call a 'holy word', that you pick yourself, and it isn't repeated over and over but is only used when you find your mind being distracted or you find thoughts coming into your mind that take your mind's focus off of being open to God. You use it then to re-focus your mind and to once again agree with God to allow yourself to be open to His communicating with you. (When I say this I don't mean hearing His voice or anything, but the idea of letting God's Holy Spirit get in touch with you. Normally God has to clout us over the head to communicate with us. In this case we're actually saying 'please Father, I want to hear you'.) These are two very different things.

But don't tell anyone who believes that it is new age any different. If something was good enough for the Council of Trent, it's good enough for them. For a lot of people there hasn't been a valid new prayer form since the Rosary...

(I remember our pastor telling us one time about a situation in which he had been criticised for a 'new age' prayer. Until he showed the people where it came from in the Divine Office, mind you.)

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Indeed!

Teresa of Avila Called an Antidote to New Age Deceits: Spanish Bishop Notes Advance of "Pseudo-mysticism"

I have always loved St. Teresa of Avila. When, at that point in my life, I started taking my faith seriously, there was no Catholic book industry in the way there is now. What there was, and what I appreciated, where the writings that were left by many of the Church's Saints. That's how St. Teresa became a favourite of mine. Both she and St. John of the Cross, writing as Christian mystics, produced terrific, yet difficult, works, which meant that they had to be worked at to be understood. The learning process was a struggle, but the rewards are surely worth it...

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I've always been

more than a little nervous about Reiki...

Reiki and the Catholic Church

I'm not surprised that some nuns have taken it up as a 'ministry'. Since Vatican II many nuns have been looking for their place in a changing Church. They've been independent and, for the most part, able to choose what they want to follow, and that has led some down some pretty unusual paths. I'm also not surprised that the Vatican wants to study the state of religious orders in the U.S..

Some of the more, say, fringe, practitioners of Reiki claim to be able to do Reiki over the telephone. I'm from Missouri, so to speak...

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Spiritual gurus

or New Age cult leaders?

Dying for Spiritual Enlightenment

"The recent Sedona sweat lodge tragedy highlights some dangers in our obsession with self help"

If all this self-help stuff worked, given the numbers or books and gurus out there, you'd think that everyone would be 'well'. It's a pretty well known fact that many people go from one self-help program to another, never really finding the help they need or desire, despite their sincerity. Perhaps they're not all they claim to be?

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A good article

about a tragic event...

Mocking a Religion

Everything is fair game to the New Age practitioners...

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R.I.P. - Elizabeth Clare Prophet

Elizabeth Clare Prophet dies at 70; former leader of religious sect

"She was the head of the Church Universal and Triumphant, which gained notoriety in the late 1980s for its followers' elaborate preparations for nuclear Armageddon."

I heard her speak sometime in the 1970's, in a venue where I was working. I thought them weird then, and I still think they're off...

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Oh, no!

At the Body, Mind, and Spirit Expo

This is quite good:

"The whole expo felt like a bad shopping trip where shoppers and sellers were all piecing together a mix and match vision of reality. I also found listening to people who were capable of distorting their cognition in such whimsical ways nearly impossible to understand. I mean, if I could get in touch with the Devic Kingdom, wherever that is, I could definitely use a fat, chipper gnome to remind me of my grocery list, or help me find overdue library books, or drive when I got too drunk (if that’s not asking too much to ask of a gnome), but I just don’t know how to go playfully crazy in the direction of woodland fairies and jolly gnomes."

But this saddens me:

"I listened to some Franciscan Nuns explain that they came from the same order as Franciscan Priests as I ate their homemade mustard on pretzels."

What on earth were Franciscan nuns doing there? How awful!