Once, at the end of a field trip to the Atlanta Masjid of Al-Islam, the imam ended his meeting with students by saying, 'Our deepest desire is not that you become Muslim, but that you become the best...
One of the main things that tip people toward garden-variety depression, she says, is a low tolerance for sadness. It is the inability to bear dark emotions that causes many of our most significant pr...
Who would stick around to wrestle a dark angel all night long if there were any chance of escape? The only answer I can think of is this: someone in deep need of blessing; someone willing to limp fore...
Our shadows are often behind us, where others can see them better than we can.
Pema Chödrön did not become one of my teachers until I had almost finished writing, but she diagnosed the problem so well that I can no longer say it without her help. We are all so busy constructing...
Plato once said that pain restores order to the soul. Rumi said that it lops off the branches of indifference. The throbbing vein / will take you further / than any thinking.14 Whatever else it does,...
This is not a how-to book, but if it were, the only instruction would be to become more curious about your own darkness. What can you learn about your fear of it by staying with it for a moment before...
Religions are treasure chests of stories, songs, rituals, and ways of life that have been handed down for millennia - not covered in dust but evolving all the way- so that each new generation has some...
Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead.
Salvation is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk, regardless of how they got there or whether they know God's name. Some...
To see takes time, like having a friend takes time. It is as simple as turning off the television to learn the song of a single bird. Why should anyone do such things? I cannot imagine—unless one is w...
So of course when it came time to decide what to do with my life, I decided to go to seminary. What else do you do when you are in love with God?
Spending extended amounts of time inside other religious worldviews has loosened the screws on my own, which is beginning to seem like a good thing. Disowning God has been a great help to me. Owning m...
Susan B. Anthony. I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, she once said, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
What if I could learn to trust my feelings instead of asking to be delivered from them? What if I could follow one of my great fears all the way to the edge of the abyss, take a breath, and keep going...
When my friend Matilda lay dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease, she said that she had been prepared all of her life to choose between good and evil. What no one had prepared her for, she lamented, was to ch...
The problem with every sacred text is that it has human readers. Consciously or unconsciously, we interpret it to meet our own needs. There is nothing wrong with this unless we deny that we are doing...
The whole purpose of the Bible, it seems to me, is to convince people to set the written word down in order to become living words in the world for God’s sake. For me, this willing conversion of ink b...
The wind smelled like the moon. I went up there so many times in the weeks that followed that I no longer remember which night it was that God finally answered my prayer. I do not think it was right a...
We wanted More. We wanted a deeper sense of purpose. We wanted a stronger sense of God’s presence.
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