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.

Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often given...

We do not handle suffering. Suffering handles us.

The Church, as Jesus seems to be defining it, is the gathering of accepted brokenness. It’s not the gathering of the saved.

You can unlock spiritual things only from within.

I hope we can inaugurate a new humility in our use of religious language, which for me is the very proof that it is authentic.

It is hard to hear God, but it is even harder not to hear God. The pain one brings upon oneself by living outside of evident reality is a greater and longer-lasting pain than the...

All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain.

THE MALE JOURNEY t some point in time, a man needs to embark on a risky -journey. It’s a necessary adventure that takes him into uncertainty, and it almost always involves some form of difficulty...

…religion either produces the very best people or the very worst.

Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.

Church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus. We invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question even when it is not entirely true...

Those who are not true leaders will just affirm people at their own immature level.

I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized...

Our religious institutions are not giving very many men access to credible encounters with the holy or even with their own wholeness. We largely give men mandates, signposts, scaffolding and appealing images that tend to...

Pain and suffering that are not transformed are usually projected onto others.

Men as a class appear to be “at risk,” maybe even at high risk.

…organized religion is no longer good news for most people, but bad news indeed. It set us up for the massive atheism, agnosticism, hedonism, and secularism we now see in almost all formerly Christian countries.

One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes...

Whatever good, true, or perfect things we can say about humanity or creation, we can say of God exponentially. God is the beauty of creation and humanity multiplied to the infinite power.