The crux of the Life of the Spirit is this: to know God’s voice within and to heed it. Everything else in the spiritual life is about how we get there. My premise, my belief, is that we have this capacity to know God built into us and that our fulfillment lies in activating that […]

       I attended a hospital chaplaincy board meeting a few weeks ago, the first I could make, meeting a lot of new folks.  At lunch I sat next to a man in his late thirties or early forties who works in professional development at the hospital. He talked about his work, about how he coaches […]

  Last week I wrote about the prodigal son and his reception from his father, about sin and imperfection and about shame and love. Now I want to talk about how to “return home” to our Father/Mother/God who wants to celebrate us as we return to our natural home in God. The prodigal son(and daughter) […]

         I don’t believe in sin. Let me tell you why. First I had an overdose of hell-fire-and-damnation preaching in my childhood, so I am naturally—now—very skeptical about this kind of teaching.  But more than that, I have had a sea change in how I think about God and how God looks at us […]

       The soul is a mysterious, hidden, innate part of ourselves that persists in quietly promoting an alternative way of living to us, one that focuses on congruency, integrity, purposefulness and meaning. It calls us to live out our deepest longings and creativity. For us to listen to the yearnings of the soul is like […]

        Prayer often means a set time for talking to God or offering up a specific request to God, a ritual or discipline that is daily—praying over a Biblical passage, for instance. Prayer can be a one-way form of communication sometimes when we toss prayers God’s way and a two-way street at other times, especially […]

       Psalms. Intercessory. Spoken. Silent. Formal. Informal. Wordless. Invocations. The Lord’s Prayer. Jesus away from the crowds. There are probably more ways of praying than I am listing here, but when I think of prayer I think of communion, of being in the presence of, of talking to, of listening, of being with, of attending […]

Reviewing the last four weeks’ blogs on healing, the first thing I notice is that all different kinds of people need healing in the accounts of Jesus’ healings: yes, the blind, the deaf, and the lame, the poor and outcast, but also a synagogue leader, the son of a royal official, friends of Jesus and […]

  Healing of the dead and dying is the fourth category of healing Jesus does as reported in the Gospels. Jesus heals the daughter of Jarius, a synagogue leader, who has either just died(Matthew 9:18) or is close to death(Mark 5:23-9) and the son of a royal official who is close to dying in Capernaum […]

I’ll be returning to the series on healing on August 27th.  May you have a fine and blessed week, enjoying the last days of summer, counting all your blessings in family, nature, love, and caring.  In faith and love, Pat