The practices I have been writing about over the last two weeks– the ones that draw us into communion with God and those that lead us into a deeper acceptance of the totality of who we are–lead us to integration, into wholeness through healing our brokenness(the Spirit’s job)and through our surrender(our job) to the […]
This week I am writing about love from the point of view that the spiritual life consists of developing the capacity to love as God loves and to have integrity. (Next week’s blog will be about integrity.) God is love. How we define love—our own capacity as humans to love–is a very watered down […]
If the goal of the spiritual journey, as I wrote last week, is to know and to heed God’s voice within, then the journey will consist of doing those things which help us to know God so well that we always follow his inspiration for us. I have come to think of the spiritual journey […]
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 […]