Category Archives: Coherence

The so-called spiritual search is circular in nature. It begins with a self winding its way through the world and it ends there, too. Whatever the way, it always delivers us to where we began: this. This this right here. When most of us begin the search, we are unhappy. Life is confusing and unfair.Continue reading “On Happiness, Seeking, and Justice”

As languaging self-reflexive primates, we like to explain things. More to the point, we like stories that explain things – why the sun appears in the east and disappears in the west, why the North Star appears so consistently still in the sky, how people came to exist, why they have to die, what happensContinue reading “On Spiritual Story-telling: Our Stories Matter”

All is in movement . . . – Chuang Tzu This is one of the insights that recurs across time and geography: life is change. Life is always changing. Change is the one constant. We can’t count on anything save not being able to count on anything. Because this insight appears so regularly in soContinue reading “On Change and Constancy”

Because we are not alone but together, and because our identity is not separate from this alone-but-togetherness, language matters. It is how we communicate; how we experience both self and other and – in a sort of meta-level way – the collective itself. Absent language, what would be? So we want to go slowly andContinue reading “Bringing Forth Love”

What does it mean to perceive a coherent unified world, filled with people and animals and plants and oceans? Are trees observers too? Are stars? What does it mean to ask what something means? Does meaning matter? And who or what is so curious? What is really going on here anyway? These are deep questionsContinue reading “Where the Deep Questions Go”

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”