I am reading God and You: Prayer as a Personal Relationship by William Barry. Barry is a thoughtful Jesuit whose project frames prayer as akin to a deep and abiding friendship. Even as he acknowledges prayer’s breadth – petitionary, contemplative, emotional, mental et cetera – he maintains its ground is in the nature of mutualContinue reading “Allowing the Mystery”
Author Archives: Sean
On Being Done with A Course in Miracles
I wonder sometimes if we are ever really finished with anything. I took Modern American Poetry with Lorrie Smith in the late 80s; I never took it again. And yet its effects are never not swirling through what I call “my life.” As a writer, a reader, a man, a father, a husband, a teacher,Continue reading “On Being Done with A Course in Miracles”
The Limits of Knowing
The tower of knowing reaches higher and higher into the sky. Its foundations support apparently infinite extension. Each floor includes the beginning of a staircase that ascends to yet another level. We build this tower faster and faster. We build machines to speed up the process even more – through automation, efficiency, scalability. And yetContinue reading “The Limits of Knowing”
On the Experience of Mental Prayer
We want to be spiritual experts, masters of A Course in Miracles, Christian gurus unto those in despair and loss. And yet over and over we find that we are in despair, we suffer loss. We are the lost, we are the forsaken. Faced with this poverty we go back to the start we maybe neverContinue reading “On the Experience of Mental Prayer”
On Bodies and A Course in Miracles
I am not a body. I am free (W-pI.199.8:7-8). There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach (W-pI.132.6:2-3). The Course makes no claim to finality, nor are the Workbook lessons intended to bring the student’s learning to completion. At the end, the reader is left in the hands ofContinue reading “On Bodies and A Course in Miracles”
A Course in Miracles: Letting Go
A Course in Miracles often strikes me as a fringe-y element of a fairly typical cultural drift currently happening in Christianity. There is a move away from rigid standards and institutional practices and toward something a bit more mystical and flexible and generous, somewhat like Buddhism in its transplanted western expressions. More heaven and lessContinue reading “A Course in Miracles: Letting Go”