Last updated on 19/11/2022
Lorraine Cavanagh is an Anglican priest, theologian and a sincere practitioner of Christian path. Her journey is about cultivating and helping others to establish personal relationship with God, outside of any dogmatic concept or structure. It’s about spirituality, and not about church. She is also a writer and a podcast host.
In this interview Lorraine shares with us her thoughts on the problems of modern Christian religion, the common misunderstandings about major Christian concepts and helps us better understand some fundamental metaphors of Christianity. We speak about the practice of prayer and the importance of silence, and ask her many more quirky questions, while she kindly and lovingly shares her wisdom with us.
Show notes
- Lorraine’s remarkable experience – the choosing of the Path
- True meaning of Mission and Evangelism in Christianity
- Reasons and consequences of the spiritual experience
- Institutionalised religion and what increasing spirit of managerialism does to it
- Misunderstanding of the conecpt of Prophecy
- Hard questions and the mechanism of prayer as a tool to address them
- Depression, dark night of the soul and the purpose of it
- Metaphor of Jesus dying and how death is not the end of the story
- God, Christ and Holy Spirit experiences
- Importance of scielence
- Difference between contemplative life and activism?
- Calling, destiny, providence and the weaving together
- Abuse of power in the context of religion and the chronic loneliness of the human condition
- Lorraine’s books
You can find out more about Lorraine’s work at https://www.lorrainecavanagh.net/
Books
If you are interested in the books we talk about in this episode, here are quick links for you to discover more.
Excellent! What a stimulating dialogue between Lorraine and Nathan, linking topics with ease and flow, like Apartheid, Trump and the Toronto blessing.
I do believe there is a purpose in suffering, reading Thich Nhat Hanh’s books has helped me understand that ‘there’s no happiness without suffering’. Like you said there are choices and she said, destiny.
Thank you!
Thank you very much for your feedback, Clare. We’re really glad you enjoyed this conversation!
It was a huge privilege to do this interview. Many of the questions we talked around are of enormous significance to people today and to the uncertainties of the times we are living in. I hope it will be widely shared and that there will be opportunities to re-visit some of the issues discussed, especially in the context of Covid-19
Dear Lorraine, thank you so much for your time and energy. It was very valuable to us and it’s great to see that hundreds of people listened to this episode in a meanwhile.
Kind greetings!
I was lovingly challenged by the clarity of Lorraine’s story and her Christian faith and the sense of each person doing something different for the Kingdom. I found Lorraine’s faithful walk with God and the clarity that “the purpose is held in the Cross – God sending his son to embrace our humanity it to bring that humanity back to Go to God – to give it shape, love and meaning. As long as we remain open to Christ in our suffering that purpose is being worked out. The challenge of the person of Christ coming int he flesh living in the Spirit and embracing the human condition and death. We’re people of the resurrection. So much wisdom: death is not the end of the story. God doesn’t need anything from us – rather we need a God who is a human God too. I was fascinated by her faith journey and the centrality of Christ to her life – her “lode star”. Lorraine is great at expressing her faith without it being in exclusive terms. Jesus is God reaching out to humanity – Jesus is the Saviour.
I was challenged by Lorraine’s personal experience and clarity on the person of Christ towards the end of your interview. Very inspiring!
Thank you for sharing you thoughts, Mike. We are really glad you enjoyed this episode!