Questing is a spiritual practice that helps one clarify the mind and free oneself temporarily from the burdens of life to focus on their own spiritual journey. After about seven months of planning, June 7 finally arrived, and I was on my way to New York to hike the eighty-six-mile section of the Appalachian Trail in New York. The bags were packed, the body ready, the mind sharp. At least that is what I thought when I left on Friday,... Read more
What Shapes Our Humanity? What shapes our humanity? I was having a conversation the other day and this question came up. The idea I posited was that time was a human made illusion. To push this further then, I then suggested that at a basic level, we only need food, water, shelter and satisfy our primal urges to procreate. Everything else we believe we need and is human made constructs. The Beauty of Being Human I was reading about... Read more
Tales from the Holocaust How does a Jewish Ontology inform our Christian faith? This semester, I had my students look at Victor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning to explore the meaning of life using a Jewish Ontological lens. In Frankl’s book, he describes his journey of suffering and his endurance to survive. In his exploration and in his writings, he demonstrates to the reader how we have the power to make meaning no matter even in the worst situations. In Frankl’s... Read more
If you do not like who you are, you won’t like who you are becoming. People come to me all week to work out things that they do not like about themselves. Some of the biggest changes I see in people take months, sometimes years. Spiritual growth is a process that too takes years to attain. Stages of Spiritual/Religious Maturity As a pastor, I was and still am very interested in how people come into their faith and how... Read more
From “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander”: Thomas Merton, pages 153-154 In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of... Read more
An odd title indeed. It has been an odd week. This line was made to me by a client last week and we laughed together and then I asked them what they meant. Because of confidentiality I can’t go into their answer, but suffice it say we are all the same. This is the problem; I continue to find it curious that people are so broken that they come to me. In the past, we had systems such as church,... Read more
The writer Paul offers in 1 Corinthians 13 these thoughts, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways” (1 Corinthians 13:11). This essay is an addition to the discussion I had in a previous post around the spiritual practice of Wonder, you can find it here: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/loveopensdoors/2023/11/eyes-of-a-child-the-spiritual-practice-of-wonder/ What does it Mean to be Childlike... Read more
Mental Health Month May is mental health month. I have been a mental health therapist, pastor or social worker for almost three decades. As a pastor, I have observed a lot of well-meaning people trying and talk about mental health, but often fall short. Often, stigmatizing language couched in toxic theology and general ignorance create alienation for people with mental health concerns. The intended audience for this post on the Spiritual Practice of You is church leaders specifically but also... Read more
Rene Girard Rene Girard, born in 1923 and died in 2015 was a French polymath, historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science. He would write nearly thirty books which covered many academic domains. Girard was most known for his intellectual work on desire. In this essay, I want to comment on two well-known components of Girard’s work, desire, and his work on the Scapegoat mechanism. Mimetic Desire and the Imaginary Audience Girard was most known for his work on mimetic desire.... Read more
“Just as God is truly Father,” she writes, “so also is God truly our Mother.” – Julian of Norwich. This week, we collectively come together to celebrate our mothers. But the question is not just about who our mothers are, but also what are the qualities that woman possesses that are “mothering”? At a church I once served, I had a woman stand up in the middle of my sermon on motherhood and ask me, “pastor, what if some of... Read more
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