People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place.

The shape of evil is much more superficiality and blindness than the usual list of hot sins. God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything.

His Kingship, precisely because it is so broad, so total, is doomed to be rejected by anybody who is still into tribalism, or small belonging systems. We don’t really like the big Kingdom if it...

Once you see that your skin and your gift are two sides of the same coin, you can never forget it. It preserves religion from any arrogance and denial.

This seems to have been St. Augustine’s very notion of “memory,” not just nostalgia for some past moment, but connecting past, present, and future in one complete contemplative knowing.

Life is all about practicing for heaven.” p 101.

When you get your,’Who am I?’, question right, all of your,’What should I do?’ questions tend to take care of themselves

I know.” A true mystic will ironically speak with that self-confidence but at the same time with a kind of humility. So when you see that combination of calm self-confidence, certitude, and humility all at...

right” or often enough to convince an unready or unwilling God. Wrong, wrong, wrong!19 minutes ago

Often it takes outer authority to send us on the path to our own inner authority.

Seventy times seven” is a medicine for a healing community, not for a community with all the answers beforehand and all the appropriate punishments afterwards.

Sacramental listening reminds us that current suffering isn’t the end of the story. God loves us deeply, and the vision for the future is vaster and more magnificent than we could ever imagine. In these...

True spirituality is not taught, it’s caught. Once our sails have been unfurled to the Spirit, henceforth our motivation for the journey toward holiness and wholeness is immense gratitude.

Much of what is called Christianity has more to do with disguising the ego behind the screen of religion and culture than any real movement toward a God beyond the small self, and a new...

Our first experience of life is primarily felt in the *body.* … We know ourselves in the security of those who hold us and gaze upon us. It’s not heard or seen or thought it’s...

Much of the work of midlife is to tell the difference between those who are dealing with their issues through you and those who are really dealing with you.

The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator.

In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you. But they also have much less power to control you or hurt you.

If the mystery of the Trinity is the template of all reality, what we have in the Trinitarian God is the perfect balance between union and differentiation, autonomy and mutuality, identity and community.

People who have been initiated “broke through in what felt like breaking down”.

Self-help courses will only help you if they teach you to pay attention to life itself.

Perhaps the True Self–and the full Christ Mystery (not the same as organized Christianity)–will always live in the backwaters of any empire and the deep mines of any religion.

If we seek spiritual heroism ourselves, the old ego is just back in control under a new name. There would not really be any change at all, but only disguise, just bogus self-improvement on our...

You know after any truly initiating experience that you are part of a much bigger whole. Life is not about you henceforward, but you are about life.

Faith for Jesus is the opposite of anxiety. If you are anxious, if you are trying to control everything, if you are worried about many things, you don’t have faith, according to Jesus. You do...

Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.

The ego hates losing – even to God.

Final authority in the spiritual world does not tend to come from any kind of agenda success but from some kind of suffering. Insecurity and impermanence are the best spiritual teachers.

You ironically have to have a very strong ego structure to let go of your ego. You need to struggle with the rules more than a bit before you throw them out. You only internalize...

Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.

Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment instead. It is such a willingness to live with bewilderment that characterizes the true wise man.

Men need men to keep their edges hot and clean, whereas women keep us warm and soft.

It is crucial that Jesus is led by the Spirit. There are two wildernesses, two darknesses in the spiritual journey. One you go into by your own stupidity, by your sin, blindness, ignorance and mistakes....

The cross solved our problem by first revealing our real problem, our universal pattern of scapegoating and sacrificing others. The cross exposes forever the scene of our crime.

Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events.

It is no surprise that the first and always unwelcome message of male initiation rites is LIFE – IS – HARD.

We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them, both immature responses.

The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling, or changing, or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo – even when it’s not working. It attaches to...

Ability to laugh at evil, to relativize symbols without dismissing them is usually a sign of a rather healthy person. Puritans and reformers can never laugh.

When I am not king, then THE Kingdom has its best chance of breaking through.

The soul needs meaning as much as the body needs food.

The big truth for men is that often we have to leave home in the first half of life before we can return home at a later stage and find our soul there.

Faith does not need to push the river because faith is able to trust that there is a river. The river is flowing. We are in it.

It’s true all the time everywhere or it’s not true! And that one truth is always Mystery.

Without law in some form, and, also, without butting up against that law, we cannot move forward easily or naturally. We have to have something hard and half-good to rebel against.

Our wounds are the only thing humbling enough to break our attachment to our false self.

Right words make all of us feel falsely important. Right action keeps all of us forever beginners.

If we know our original blessing, we can easily handle our original sin. If we rest in a previous dignity, we can bear insults effortlessly. If you really know your name is on some eternal...

The way to transmute the pain of life is to reveal the wounded side of things, evil, even, and then place the wound inside of sacred space. The Bible is about naming, facing, and then...

If we don’t learn to mythologize our lives, inevitably we will pathologize them.