If you want to know how to love people, first things first—listen to them deeply. Ask about their lives, what their hopes and dreams are, what it costs them to live as they live. Ask about their faith, if they have any. And when you have a real sense of the person before you, then […]
There is a quote from Shakespeare that has always rung so true to me that for a long time I thought it came from the Bible: “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, that thou canst not then be false to any man.”[1] Today I am writing […]
We are born into this world a pretty complete package of personality, soul and spirit. We are created uniquely, each with certain talents and gifts and challenges, with an agenda, a potential, for our lives which is the province of the soul and the Indwelling Spirit to realize. And we are born into a human […]
“I so want this with all my heart amen” wrote one of my readers, SW, in October this year, in a comment on “The Promise of Isaiah.” She was expressing a deep longing for her whole self to be restored to the Lord and for living a purposeful life. Interestingly, that deep longing is the […]
The way of prayer is to be attendant on God in all that we do. This takes a deep listening for God’s “still, small voice” within, a back and forth with God about what we’re to do now and how we’re to do it. It’s a 24-hour a day attunement to the Divine. […]
Life is lived on two levels in this world whether we are aware of the second one or not. Our lives are like the ocean in which all the waves, choppiness, white caps and agitation take place in the top fifteen feet; below this surface busyness flow long, slow currents, for us, the longer arcs […]
An article by Cindy Brandt[1] that I read a few weeks ago reminded me that when Jesus called his disciples, he said to them, “come and see.” He invited them to experience what he was offering. He held out a promise, a potential that they could taste and feel. And, obviously, when they did “come […]
Our souls are the gold, pure and simple, of our selves and the pathway to the truest part of ourselves, the created self. Do you know that only about 20% of the gold on earth has been mined? Most of the rest lies in the earth’s core. [http://facts.randomhistory.com/2009/03/09_gold.html 5/26/14] Like gold, our souls need […]
Each person has an inner lens through which s/he views the world. The lens can be clouded with prejudices, assumptions, preferences, self-serving attitudes or it can be clearer, able to see reality more truthfully. The source of these things that can cloud our vision of reality can be our religion, our culture and even the […]
A contemplative life is not as we might imagine it—dull with nothing to do but ponder and reflect. What the word contemplative usually conjures up for us is someone, probably a cloistered monk or nun—who has nothing to do all day long except think about God. There actually are contemplative orders of religious people that […]