Before Dorothy Day became the politically radical editor of the US newspaper The Catholic Worker, she was an atheist and a communist. She became pregnant during this time, and, theologian Matthew Fox says, “she was so overcome by the beauty of bearing a new living being inside her that she converted to Christianity. Why? ‘Because I had to give thanks to someone’, she said. God is the One to whom we render our thanks.”

The world is “in a place of tremendous crisis... [and of] incredible ignorance, compared to the truth that the mystical life has been trying to share over the centuries,” believed one of the greatest spiritual teachers of our time, Trappist monk Fr Thomas Keating OCSO. However, he also believed it is a time of tremendous opportunity, because “we are on the edge of another axial period,” moving to a higher, reflective consciousness “that leads us ultimately into divine consciousness”, and becoming one with an “ocean of love”. In this interview, one of the last he gave before his death in October 2018, he talks to author, psychotherapist and teacher of meditation, Loch Kelly. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAy2X-8vgrM

COVID-19 has imposed solitude on many, but Anglican solitary Maggie Ross has chosen this as a way of life. From the age of five, she knew she was destined to live a life “preoccupied with God”. Now 79 and living in Oxford under vows to former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, she spoke to Roland Ashby before the pandemic about her two profound and magisterial books on silence,* and what she calls “deep mind” and the “beholding” of God.

We all carry woundedness within us.

This thought has come into sharper focus for me over these last few months, spending, as we all have, much time in solitude and isolation imposed by COVID-19. Spiritual writer Eckhart Tolle calls our woundedness, our accumulated hurts, the “pain body”, which can have a crippling effect on our lives, and adversely affect those with whom we live, unless we can learn to let go and forgive.

The universe exists for the sake of joy. So believed Thomas Aquinas, Dominican polymath and one of the Church’s greatest theologians, according to US author and scholar The Reverend Dr Matthew Fox. In this zoom video, Dr Fox, a former Dominican and now Anglican priest who has spent a lifetime studying Aquinas and translating his works, speaks to Roland Ashby about his latest book.

For several months now I have been waking up in the morning feeling slightly depressed. The solitude imposed by COVID-19 has created more opportunities for negative thoughts to arise, and what seemed to be safely buried in the past - mistakes and failures and humiliations, as well as hurts (both given and received) – suddenly reappear as if they happened yesterday - with all the freshness and immediacy, and therefore pain, that that entails.

As I struggle to come to terms with Melbourne’s second lockdown, I am starting to look at our family dog Bessie with new, and envious, eyes. Her simple joy in life has not wavered throughout the pandemic. Each morning she greets me with gusto as she gleefully anticipates her first walk of the day. Each day, it seems, offers a new banquet of olfactory delights. And surely that’s a smile I discern as she leaps through long grass, or frolics in fresh puddles.

One of the most shocking aspects of the brutal treatment by police towards George Floyd, which caused his death, was that it was so brazen, and so calmly and routinely carried out. This suggests a fundamental and intrinsic problem of the police seeing him as less than human. Hence the resurgence, and necessity, of the Black Lives Matter campaign.

Statements by British PM Boris Johnson about his recent brush with death suggest he may have undergone something of a spiritual awakening. This would not surprise St Benedict, sometimes described as the father of Western monasticism, who in the sixth century advised his monks to “Always keep death before you”.