#60 Part 1 of 2: John Dear on his newest book "Universal Love, Surrendering to the God of Peace": "We have more power as ordinary people than we realize".

About this episode

Fr. John Dear reflects on his new book 'Universal Love' and discusses themes of meditation, surrendering to God, and personal growth.

This week I reflect on my new book, Universal Love: Surrendering to the God of Peace . This is Part 1 of 2 episodes. In this first episode, I tell how the book came about. When the pandemic began, I joined the local gym and the young person who taught the class, whom I call Will, asked me to be his guru, so I started teaching him meditation. He called God, “Universal Love” and one day, Universal Love came to him in prayer and called him to be “ an extension of Universal Love .” Sections in the first part of the book include "The Difference Meditation Makes" , "To Hell With Spiritual Pride" , and "Experimenting with Nonviolence" . Over the years of spiritual direction and conversation that followed with Will, as we became friends and discussed all this, we also started doing writing practice at the local coffee shop on these themes, writings which one day turned into this book. In this episode, and the first part of the book, I reflect on the importance of daily meditation, letting go of control, living in intimate, trusting relationship to God, learning to surrender everything to God, and trying from now on, to do only God’s will, not our will. I conclude this episode with the…

People in this episode

Host: Fr. John Dear

Topics covered

• meditation
• spiritual direction
• surrender to God
• nonviolence
• personal growth
• relationship with God

Keywords

• Universal Love
• meditation
• spirituality
• nonviolence
• Archbishop Tutu
• surrender
• God
• personal growth

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Universal Love: Surrendering to the God of Peace

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