The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests…
The Spirituality of Connections
Of all the social changes in the last several decades, nothing has surprised me more than the recent rise of interest in spirituality. For many in Western societies, a hunger for the sacred has emerged out of the bankruptcy of…
Abandoned to a Greater Compulsion
God rewards the soul that focuses on Him with attention and love, and God rewards that soul by exercising a rigorous compulsion on it, mathematically proportional to this attention and love. We must abandon ourselves to this pressure, and run…
Culture’s Habitual World of Meritocracy
The key to entering into the Divine Exchange is never our worthiness but always God’s graciousness. Any attempt to measure or increase our worthiness will always fall short, or it will force us into the position of denial and pretend,…
The Violence of Activism and Overwork
There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself…
As Beauty Bids
Beauty bids all things come to itself (and thus we call it beauty). Just so, it gathers all things trembling fully to itself. We speak of it as beauty …
Nouwen: The Power of the Spirit
In and through Jesus we come to know God as a powerless God, who becomes dependent on us. But it is precisely in this powerlessness that God’s power reveals itself. This is not the power that controls, dictates, and commands. …
Live Your Spirituality
The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived. …