I’d like to make a confession. On Sunday mornings, I sit in church internally spinning out a reactive, biting critique of the service, how hollow and performative it is, how the sermons charge us to do justice and love kindness and walk humbly without ever addressing how, feeling mightily superior about the vibrancy of my prayer […]
Creative Bypassing: Grist for the Mill Read More »
Well, friends, my decades-long obsession with revision has reached a new extreme. I’ve shamelessly messed with another author’s work. Is this even allowed? When my mother died, her study group was preparing to read Teilhard’s Divine Milieu. I picked up her beat-up paperback copy just as I began a two-year formation program in contemplative Christianity. One day my teachers
Celebration on the Altar of the World Read More »
Perhaps because my first big writing project gave me room to articulate my sexual longings, come out bisexual, and figure out the implications for my Christian faith; perhaps because I’m drawn to spiritual and therefore intimate subjects, my first drafts (and often second and third) I tend to write for no one but me. Of course
Writing in the Cloud of Privacy & Unknowing Read More »
Ask what I’m learning in the Living School and I’ll blather incoherently, enthusiastically, and at great length about the Christian mystical tradition, the significance of contemplation, and a complete overhaul of my faith. I was doing just that at Easter dinner a few weeks ago. My father-in-law asked, and all eleven relatives at the table
Faith and the “Poopy Growth Mindset” Read More »
A few years ago, I set off on a journey to the heart of Christian contemplation, both in practice and with studies. I began doing Centering Prayer, a form of meditation rooted in monasticism and the teachings of the mystics, and reading works from the mystical margins of Christian tradition—St. John of the Cross, Meister
God as Being, Being as God Read More »
Writing, I suspect, is one way we can inhabit that liminal space right before prayer becomes prayer.
Writing as Listening Read More »
This, I suspect, is the great invitation of entering Shadowland. In the face of real darkness, we can now reorder our lives according to our values, and live these values to the utmost.
Entering Shadowland Read More »
While I utterly reject the notion that I was born a sinner, I struggle daily with the falseness that masks what I’m sure is my real essence.
Contemplation is our central task as writers, and as human beings.
Message from the Page: “Would you please pay attention?!” Read More »