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A mandorla is that almond-shaped segment that is made when two circles partly overlap.
What can one do when the banished elements demand a day of reckoning? Then it is time for an understanding of the mandorla.
When the most herculean efforts and the finest discipline no longer keep the painful contradictions of life at bay, we are all in need of the mandorla. It helps us transfer from a cultural life to a religious life.
You can give another person a precious gift if you will allow him to talk without contaminating his speech with your own material.
It is a miracle to listen to someone (even oneself) say, “Perhaps this, perhaps that, maybe, it follows that, I wonder if”—all like a dog chasing its tail. But gradually, the two disparate circles begin to overlap and the mandorla grows. This is healing.
So pastoral care isnt just listening without healing -it seems profoundly healing in this regard
Whenever you have a clash of opposites in your being and neither will give way to the other (the bush will not be consumed and the fire will not stop), you can be certain that God is present.
We dislike this experience intensely and avoid it at any cost; but if we can endure it, the conflict-without-resolution is a direct experience of God.
In your own poetic struggles you may make only the tiniest sliver of a mandorla that will vanish a few minutes later. Where is the inspiration of yesterday that was so thrilling? But if you repeat this often enough it will become the permanent base of your functioning.
It can be hoped that by the end of your life the two circles will be entirely overlapped.
When one is truly a citizen of both worlds, heaven and earth are no longer antagonistic to each other. Finally one sees that the...
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This is the true fulfillment of the Christian goal, the beatific vision so priz...
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The criticism may be made that the mandorla is only a private experience and totally divorced from practicality. But the I Ching, in hexagram #61, says, “If a wise man abides in his room his thoughts are heard for more than a thousand miles.” If one makes mandorla in the privacy of his interior life, it is heard for more than a thousand miles.
