tim radcliffe the dominican

"preaching is not just the reporting of facts about God. It gives us God's word which breaks the silence between God and us."

"Prayer can look like the struggle to reach up to a distant God. . . . but we do not break the silence. When we speak we are responding to a word spoken to us. We are taken into a conversation which has already begun without us . . ."

"Meister Eckhart once said,"We do not pray, we are prayed. . . .Our words are God praying, praising, blessing in us."

"Dominic's preaching began in the south of France not far from here, against heretics who despised the body and who thought of all creation as evil. He was confronted with one of those waves of dualistic spirituality which have periodically swept Europe. Augustine, whose rule we have, was caught in another such movement when he was a Manichee as a young man. And even today much of popular thought is profoundly dualistic. Studies have shown that modern scientists usually think of salvation in terms of escape from the body. But the Dominican tradition has always stressed that we are physical, corporeal beings. All that we are comes from God. . . . .We hope for the resurrection of the body. The journey that each of us must travel is, in the first place, this physical, biological one, which takes us from the womb to the tomb. It is in this biological span of life that we will meet God and find salvation."

" Perhaps we are made in the image and likeness of God because we share God's creativity. We are his partners in creating and recreating the world."

"And faced with death, we again long for the words of the angel to announce a new fertility. For all of our lives are open to God's endless newness, his inexhaustible freshness. The angel comes time and time again, with new annunciations of good news."

"But ultimately our lives do not have meaning in themselves, as private and individual stories. Our lives only have meaning because they are caught up in a larger story, which reaches from the very beginning to the unknown end, from Creation to the Kingdom."

"If there is no place for my unrepeatable story, then I will be merely lost in the history of humanity."

"Chesterton wrote, "Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again." And the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead, for grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, 'Do it again' to the sun; and every evening,'Do it again' to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike, it maybe that God makes each daisy seperately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in nature may not be a mere recurrence, it may be a theatrical encore."

"As Simon Tugwell wrote,'I do not think about my friend when he is there beside me; I am far too busy enjoying his presence. It is when he is absent that I will start to think about him."

a sermon on the rosary, October 1998