I first fell in love with the mystics as an undergraduate when a friend gave me Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation. Merton introduced me to the essential place of mystery in any engagement with the Transcendent One.
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One of the most important questions you can ever address is, “Who am I?” You might think of identity as an adolescent issue. But, while adolescence might have been the last time you paid any serious attention to your identity, it has continued to evolve since then and where it has settled has crucial implications for both your psychological and spiritual wellbeing.
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Several years ago I had a conversation with a friend about wholeness, brokenness, and healing. Dr. Jackie Stinton is a psychologist and spiritual director who has thought a lot about these issues, and our interaction helped me clarify my own thoughts about them. Join us as we talk about these things, and make space for your own inner dialogue that arises in response to our conversation.
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Recently it has become fashionable to paint religion and spirituality with quite different brushes – religion often being represented as dark and oppressive while spirituality is viewed as either benign or potentially life-enhancing. As usual, reality is more complex.
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Christians are often ambivalent about their bodies. This is odd because of the central place of the incarnation in Christian theology. Why would God take on our humanity by becoming flesh if human flesh is such a bad thing?
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I wonder if you remember the story of the first astronauts who went into space to see the stars but were most deeply impacted by seeing the earth. It was, however, what they didn’t see that was even more surprising to them. No matter how hard they looked, they were unable to see national, ethnic, racial, socio-economic, or religious boundaries.…
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It may seem strange to write about trauma and awakening in the same sentence, since one of the first things our bodies do in response to trauma is shut down. But, trauma does not just shut us down. It also offers unique opportunities for awakening…
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I am often amazed by how alien the understanding of wisdom as the fruit of enlightenment is to Christians in the West. And it isn’t just the concept of enlightenment that seems foreign. Translating enlightenment into terms such as “an awakened heart” or “transformed consciousness” does little to change the confused looks.…
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One day a spiritual teacher asked his disciples why God made humans. One of them answered almost immediately, “That, teacher, is easy. So we can pray.” After a brief silence, the teacher asked another question: “Why, then did God make angels?” The same young man tried again, “Perhaps so that they also could pray.”…
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