A Prayer
Gracious Spirit, who has given me eyes to see the light that fills my room, give me the inward vision to see you in my lived experience. Gracious Spirit, who has made me to feel the wind upon my limbs,…
Prayer as Consent
If we are honest, most of us have to admit that prayer is often more of an obligation than something arising spontaneously from desire . . . the core of the misunderstanding lies in thinking of prayer as something that…
Conventional Divisions Abolished By Joy
The coming of Jesus has certainly confused our experience of spirituality. Our relationship to divinity, ever since, has become much more subtle. Gone are the well-defined walls that separated what is godly from what is merely human. Gone is the…
O Holy Night
O Holy Night! The stars are brightly shining, It is the night of the dear Saviour’s birth. Long lay the world in sin and error pining. Till He appeared and the Spirit felt its worth. A thrill of hope the…
Contemplative Responses to Our World
The capacity to pay attention to an afflicted person is something very rare, very difficult; it is nearly a miracle. It is a miracle. Nearly all those who believe they have this capacity do not. Warmth, movements of the heart,…
The "Anti-authoritarian Religion"
The orthodoxies that have been handed down to us in the monotheistic religions called for obedience to the commanding God. They threatened with punishment and enticed with rewards – images of hell and heaven resting on that authority . .…
The Trivialization of Life
The trivialization of life is perhaps the strongest anti-mystical force among us. Some people are literally obsessed by the compulsion to trivialize everything. . . . For mystical consciousness, it is essential that everything internal become external and be made…
Suffering Born From Beauty
“We’re all mystics!” That sentence contains in itself the right of every human being to beauty and vision….Mysticism is the experience of the oneness and wholeness of life. Therefore, mysticism’s perception of life, its vision, is also the unrelenting perception…