Blog

New Year Resolutions are, by design, made to be broken. There is no practical or compelling reason to leave one’s present comfort zone in life. Why would you or should you? Few of us choose to change until we are compelled or forced. We might choose change if it promises something better than we have today. But that change is usually immediate. The invitation to change is often unexpected and unsought. Jesus says to Peter, “Come, follow me.” The story says that he dropped everything and went. The invitation was… Read More

Here is a story that never happened, but that doesn’t make it less true… One night four rabbis were visited by an angel who awakened them and carried them to the Seventh Vault of the Seventh Heaven. There they beheld the sacred Wheel of Ezekiel. Somewhere in the descent from Paradise to Earth, one Rabbi, having seen such splendor, lost his mind and wandered frothing and foaming until the end of his days.  The second Rabbi was extremely cynical: “Oh I just dreamed Ezekiel’s Wheel, that was all. Nothing really happened.”  The… Read More

One of my favorite experiences is taking people flying in a small plane. Sitting next to me in the cockpit, they can see all the screens, buttons, maps, and gears. They hear the radio calls and listen to the weather reports. They have the same experience that I do as the pilot, except they have no context for understanding what it all means. If they’ve never flown in the cockpit of an airplane before, they don’t know what the buttons do. They don’t understand the coded language of the weather… Read More

One evening the New Testament professor from Princeton Seminary visited a high school youth group. As he was speaking about the baptism of Jesus, one adolescent boy sat aloof in the back, slouched in a chair, staring at his tennis shoes.  After the professor finished speaking about the significance of Christ’s baptism as a revelation of God’s presence in Jesus, the high schooler said without looking up, “That’s not what it means.” Glad that the student had been listening enough to disagree, the professor asked, “What do you think it means?” “The… Read More

In my ongoing collaboration and friendship with Buddhist teacher Isa Gucciardi, I am discovering that Buddhism offers wonderful gifts to Christians. Where Christianity tends to obsess about doctrines and dogma, dragging us down rabbit holes of endless narrow debate, Buddhism stays focused on the “how.” How do we live holy lives? How do we open ourselves to wisdom? How do we learn to love?  The Dalai Lama offers a beautiful teaching when he says, “My religion is kindness.” Jesus said something similar when he said, “I give you a new commandment, that you… Read More

Contemplative prayer can be traced to the desert fathers and mothers, early Benedictine monasticism, and early Catholic teachers like Saint Bonaventure and the Carmelites. But then, the teaching was largely lost. Almost no teachers taught contemplative prayer from the 16th century onward. If you learned the practice, you learned it on your own, following your own instincts and the guidance of the Spirit. In the 1970s, Thomas Keating and a handful of other monks re-introduced Centering Prayer into Christianity. They knew it was an excellent portal drawing us into the… Read More

Yesterday on a flight as I was taking off from Peachtree-Dekalb Airport (KPDK) in Atlanta, a pilot who was cleared to land lowered his landing gear on his dissent as he had hundreds of times before. But this time, as his landing gear descended, it began making a horrible shaking noise. This is never good. He called the tower and reported that he might have an emergency on his hands. All of us in flight immediately tuned in. The controller called back to the pilot and recommended he do a flyby… Read More

Saint Thomas Aquinas taught that a mistake about understanding creation results in a mistake about understanding God. Theologian Matthew Fox wrote beautifully about this in his book, “The Tao Of Thomas Aquinas,” when he says that according to Aquinas, all the mistakes we make about nature steer us away from our understanding of divinity. Our pursuit of truth – evidenced in nature – shows us that everything is connected in a delicate web of life. Our interdependence allows us to be in community with deep compassion. Compassion, Aquinas says, is… Read More

We spend much of our conscious life crafting narratives in our heads of the things other people think about us. We spend our early developmental years supposing we are the subject of others’ attention, judgment, and envy. We believe our identity is in what we do, how we look, who we are seen with, and what we own. Then, mercifully, we grow up. We discover a deeper intuition, a wiser voice within ourselves that doesn’t care about the drama of others’ opinions. It knows that our value is not in… Read More

In my recent studies in social transformation and trans-personal psychology, I’ve felt echoes of my theological training. It seems that the approaches of human development, psychology, and spirituality all suggest that over time we grow in awareness and awakening. These approaches suggest that we move from a dualist mindset (the world is about me vs. you) to one of interdependence and unity (the world is about all of creation). We move from the illusion of separation to the recognition that all in the universe are united “in God.” The way… Read More