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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
A Quaker meeting, first time. I am told: sit in silence. If someone is moved to speak, they speak. Otherwise silence.
Forty-five minutes. Three people spoke, briefly.
I have spent four years in meditation halls. I have...
Once a month, on the new moon — which I did not learn from my tradition, and which I still feel a little silly doing — I write a letter to someone who hurt me in the old house.
I write the whole thing. Everything. Then...
