LivingWithTheQuestions.com was an outreach of Saint Nicholas Mission that offered daily reflections, meditations, and other resources to enhance, challenge, and inform the spiritual journey.

Given the very small number of hits the site received during its final year of operation, we decided to discontinue LivingWithTheQuestions.com when the domain name expired on October 28, 2008. The daily devotional material may be accessed via our parish website: www.themissionparish.com.

The material that does not update daily—or no longer updates daily—has been archived here while the Advent and Christmas reflections can be viewed at our Advent and Christmas Reflections site.

Please address any questions, comments or concerns to david@themissionparish.com ...

I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet

Reading Spiritually About Spiritual Things
(Henri J. M. Nouwen)

Reading often means gathering information, acquiring new insight and knowledge, and mastering a new field. It can lead us to degrees, diplomas, and certificates. Spiritual reading, however, is different. It means not simply reading about spiritual things but also reading about spiritual things in a spiritual way. That requires a willingness not just to read but to be read, not just to master but to be mastered by words. As long as we read the Bible or a spiritual book simply to acquire knowledge, our reading does not help us in our spiritual lives. We can become very knowledgeable about spiritual matters without becoming truly spiritual people.

As we read spiritually about spiritual things, we open our hearts to God's voice. Sometimes we must be willing to put down the book we are reading and just listen to what God is saying to us through its words.

God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.

—Dag Hammarskjold
in WORD FOR THE DAY
shared with us by www.gratefulness.org

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.

—Alexander Solzhenitsyn
in Gulag Archipelago
shared with us by Mirabile Dictu

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We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided in Section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in reviewing the included information by virtue of their perusal of the various educational pages and links from this web site.

If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

For further information on fair use, go to:

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