![The woman shows a white woman with curly brown hair smiling. She is a priest and is wearing her priestly garbs.](https://sojo.net/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/headshots/laurel_mathewson.jpeg?itok=tBjn0e3q)
Laurel Mathewson is pastor of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in San Diego.
Posts By This Author
My Spiritual Director Told Me I Needed a Silent Retreat
THE INTERIOR CASTLE, the best-known text of 16th-century Spanish saint Teresa of Ávila, is a tour of the inward ways we relate to God, with varying intensity, awareness, and intimacy. In Spanish, the book is simply Moradas, or “Dwellings,” a title I find more appealing and helpful than the English title, mostly because “dwellings” sounds approachable, universal, and less precious.
Teresa was a grounded mystic. She is down-to-earth in her prose, her witty and candid teaching, and her lived experience. It could be argued that every “true” mystic or saint is grounded or has some element of both the active and contemplative life. Teresa strikes me as remarkably and robustly balanced, in a way that her basic reputation as a mystic sometimes betrays. She is notably resolute in both her defense of the reality of “supernatural” prayer experiences and her insistence that this loving movement of God to an individual must then extend into the world rather than curve in on itself. What we might call her grounded nature even extended into her prayer dialogues with Jesus: Once, when complaining honestly to Christ about her many struggles, she heard a response to this effect: “Don’t be troubled; so do I treat my friends.”
Her tart response? “I know, Lord — but that’s why you have so few friends!” In many of her waking days, she worried that Christ has so few “good friends,” and tried to encourage her contemporaries to become better friends of God. But she is clear-eyed and honest about the things that stand in the way of that friendship, from within and without.
New Barriers Will Prevent Communion Across the Border
This past Sunday, Oct. 5, was World Communion Sunday.
Going with Your Gut
I often "miscue" in reading the story of the Good Samaritan.
'Lord What Shall I Eat? How Much Should I Weigh?'
A reflection on healing our relationship with food.
Things You Can Do
1) Organize. If a presidential candidate is coming your way, ask him or her: How are we going to cut carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050? What's your plan?
2) Organize.
Pop Culture Christianity
Since the box-office success of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, there's been a lot of hoopla about the big, previously neglected "Christian audience" (and how to cash in on it).
A Stream of Light
As we stepped out of the cathedral, wind blew snow from the rooftops, past the lit windows of the Cotswold-like cottage beside the cathedral.
What Can I Do?
1) As a citizen:
Join the trade justice movement
Go to the "get involved" or "take action" links on the following Web sites:
- U.S.
School of Shame
Last November, a record 22,000 people gathered at the gates of the Fort Benning Military Reservation in Georgia to protest the military training school, for soldiers from Central and South American
Declaring Peace With Iraq
More than 133 people, many of them prominent religious leaders, were arrested on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol in September.