I know very few people for whom silence is complicity. Maybe that’s because I hang around with contemplatives a lot. For a lot of us silence speaks volumes.

Sometimes when I get anxious my wild, monkey mind roves about conjuring up ideas about what I might acquire in order to feel…

I think about her a lot. Don’t worry, my wife knows about Etty. She is not the object of my desire. She is my teacher. She has what I want…

Shortly before he died Jesus gathered his disciples together to say goodbye. He said to them, “Everything I’ve done and said has been so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. It’s all for joy.”

All anger comes from the fear that you're not loved enough. This is the meaning of the Cain and Abel story. Cain is afraid that there is not enough love to go around. He sees that Abel is…

Here is a list of the three most outlandish things I have ever heard. One, the fullness of the Holy Trinity dwells within you, me, and everybody else. Two…

The way to prevent violence and the wars that unchecked violence leads to is to unleash the love that lives inside of us all. God has planted love in every heart, but in a great many people that love is trapped behind the undealt with pain, grief, fear, and trauma of our lives.

If I struggle with being kind to my neighbor, it is because I have not yet accepted the infinite kindness of God that is constantly coming my way.

God is not more present in silence, but you are more available.

All anger is rooted in the fear that you’re...

Loss of any kind will inevitably do one of two things. It will constrict and harden your heart or loss will soften and enlarge your heart.

You have a silent center, a place within your actual flesh and blood body that is no place, where you and God are not other than each other, you are obscurely one, bound together in an infinite peacefulness.* The reason I say that it is a place that is “no place” is because you can't go inside yourself, get it, and remove it like a tumor.

Harper heard the sound of gravel crunching under the tires of Jim’s truck. He dreaded seeing the old man, but he was also glad he’d come. Jim was an old friend of Harper’s father. Though there was no promise made when Harper’s dad died, Jim seemed to take it upon himself to stay in touch.

Think of the one you love the most.

Now start describing her to all of us.

Harper woke suddenly, that is suddenly from a dead sleep he was wide awake. He hoped it was at least four in the morning. He didn’t want to get up, but he could see through to getting out of bed at four because the coffee maker was set to brew that early. He could get a cup and go out on the back porch and sit alongside the day as everything rose with the Sun. He hoped it was at least four, because he was sure he couldn’t get back to sleep.

In lieu of happiness he settles for the wooden rocker on the back porch where he listens to the frogs talk in their pond. His anger, an accumulation of so many seasons of sorrow, is absorbed by the sound of the trees creaking in the wind and for a little while the storm in his mind is held at bay, just barely. She’s finally leaving. He hates it, her leaving, with all his heart, but he knows she’s right to go.

The Bible is a storm. 

The text is a struggle of words

thrust into the shape of myriad stories.

Hail and high winds batter the reader 

with the confounding mystery of God 

and his recalcitrant, lovely people.

For followers of Jesus it all boils down to this: we want to be “rooted and grounded in love.” People who are “rooted and grounded in love” have been given the gift of a realization that their ground, the “root” of their being, is the love of God dwelling inside their actual body. Thus, their daily starting place is love. They come at the day before them from a place of rootedness in love.

The old man’s wife died suddenly after 60 years of marriage. His priest, a much younger man, asked if he could come over for a visit. “I’ll come to you," said the old man. “Meet me down by the creek?”

Mark 4:35-41

You’re in a boat out on the water. You are the boat and the water is your life. A storm kicks up out of nowhere or maybe it has been slowly building for years. Either way the wind and waves are like a wild animal battering your boat and body and racing around inside your chest. The fear and anxiety caused by the storm within and without are too much, you don’t know how you can go on.

Discouragement is a perfectly normal part of the spiritual journey. In the first half of the journey (which can go on for many, many years if not most of one’s life) we meet our discouragements with prayer, church attendance, and by reaching out to trusted friends for spiritual insight. We are consoled in our discouragement, and we carry on. This rhythm is just as it should be, and it is good.

“When the sins of others come to mind, the soul that wants peace should flee from such thoughts as she would run from the pains of hell.”

Julian of Norwich