What is your story, the one you cling to in spite of all evidence to the contrary, the one that justifies your life as you live it and keeps you in the same old place? Each of us grows into a story that we develop in our childhoods that can stay operative in us sometimes […]

I am just about at the end of preparing for a move from Charlotte to Baltimore. Now when I think of the word attachment, I just laugh. A move does that to you –it points out clearly everywhere you are attached. I am attached to my house here. In fact I love it. I am […]

If we meditate on the cross as the intersection of heaven and earth and of God and man, then we would say that the vertical axis is God/heaven and the horizontal one is man/earth. It is at the intersection of the two axes that all our decisions and actions become clear. Here is the dilemma […]

       While I was on retreat this summer I heard about Rev. Walter Ciszek, a priest who is being considered for sainthood. One day in the library I picked up his book, He Leadeth Me, [Ignatian Press, San Francisco, 1973] which describes what he, a Polish-American Jesuit priest, learned from being a prisoner […]

I will be leaving this afternoon for a long retreat, returning at the end of July. I will not be posting my blog on my website during that time, but you can read it on Facebook at By the Waters. There you will find that I break the essay into five pieces and post one […]

       I have been writing in recent weeks about how to take on yourself and your shadow—what to do with grief, anger, fear and anxiety, the week of 6.3.13, with our dreams and desires, 6.10.13, and with not identifying with the way we think and feel, but just observing ourselves, 6.17.13. You’ll find […]

       Instead of identifying with all that you think and feel, try this: step back slightly from your own inner experience of your mind and self and see your own thinking from the point of view of an observer. Try to hold what your mind offers you with less attachment. Instead of “I […]

         I’ve written before about seeing my life as an airplane in which God is the pilot of the airplane and I am the co-pilot. There is a lot of back-and-forth between us as I surrender to the direction God has set and as I comment on what is happening in my life. My […]

       Unexpressed grief does not go away. Suppressed anger has to come out somewhere. Fear, too, and anxiety, reside in our psyches—mind, body and spirit—until we are ready to examine them and to express them, then to decide whether these emotions are to rule us or not. Each of these emotions when we […]

How do we live lives of integrity, where the inside self and the outside self are the same, when we live in a culture that advocates “looking good” above all else? How do we learn to love when all around us the message is “me, me, me.” How can we be at peace, when all […]