40 minutes of sitting
Sat for 40 minutes this morning. The breath keeps returning. The mind keeps leaving. There is no winning, only coming back.
The Commons
Public reflection, unhurried.
Chronological. No algorithm. No trending. Read slowly.
Hymns I do not believe
Went to a church service today out of curiosity. The hymns were beautiful. The theology still makes no sense to me. Both feel true.
Whereof we cannot speak
Wittgenstein said whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent. Maybe that is why religion makes me uncomfortable. It keeps speaking.
What do you do with all the hymns you still sing in the shower?
I haven't been to church in four years. I don't miss Sundays. I don't miss the politics. I don't miss pretending.
But this morning I was making coffee and I caught myself humming Be Thou My Vision and it undid me for tw...
Tao Te Ching, fourth reading
Finished the Tao Te Ching for the fourth time this year. Still do not understand it. That may be the point.
A secular defense of ritual
I am an agnostic who lights a candle every Friday evening.
I do not believe, in any metaphysically-committed sense, that the candle does anything. It is paraffin. It burns. I have checked.
And yet I find, after eleven...
Three traditions, one suffering
I have been sitting with suffering — mine, my family's, the ambient kind you pick up from the news — from three different chairs.
From the Stoic chair, suffering is a category error. The thing happened. The thing is now...
Structure and air
Stoicism gives me structure. Mysticism gives me air. I think I need both.
The grief is never about what you think it's about.
Year one I was angry. Year two relieved. Year three lonely. This year I am finally sad. Not sad about leaving — sad about the version of me who sang every verse withou...
What does it make you when you love the Psalms and no longer trust the pulpit?
Once you see the contradictions you cannot unsee them. But I still love the Psalms. What does that make me?
The Examen, as I actually do it
Ignatian prayer has a 500-year-old practice called the Examen. I was taught it at twenty-three and spent two decades doing it wrong — which is to say, doing it as an itemized audit of my sins.
Here is how I do it now, b...
Is awe enough?
Is awe enough? The standing-under-stars kind. Without a person behind it. I think maybe it is.
Can you love more than one tradition without betraying all of them?
I've been asked this three times in the last month — by a Jesuit I respect, a Zen teacher I respect, and my own wife.
All three answered differently. All three were kind about it.
I can't tell whether that's comforting...
A practice without a belief?
Can you have a practice without a belief? That is the question I keep circling.
Would Marcus Aurelius and Rumi have loved each other?
Marcus Aurelius and Rumi would have loved each other. Or hated each other. I cannot decide which.
Why do the most thoughtful religious people I know sound like the most thoughtful secular people I know?
My closest friend is an Orthodox rabbi. I'm an agnostic.
We disagree about everything a philosophy seminar would argue about. Metaphysics, epistemology, whatever.
And yet when we talk about what it actually means to li...
My spiritual director gave me When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön fifteen years ago, when I was forty.
I was appalled. I'd been reading the Desert Fathers since college. I did not need, I thought, the Buddhist versio...
On reading Rilke after I stopped reading Paul
Letters to a Young Poet found me the summer I stopped reading Paul.
"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves." I underlined it the first time as a concession — I cou...
Brene Brown, where the sermons used to be
Read Brene Brown today. Cried twice. Why is that where I find the language now, and not in the sermons I grew up on?
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. — Zen proverb (attributed)