“The psalmist doesn’t try to explain evil. He doesn’t try to minimize evil. He simply says he will not fear evil. …When somebody takes your hand in the dark, you’re not afraid of the dark anymore.” Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark As I write this (composed in 2017), I ride rapids of fear over a family situation. The threat of real evil and injustice that looms threateningly over many has telescoped in on someone I love, and it tests me.... Read more
I keep stumbling upon the necessity of social connection. In news stories on children’s mental health; stories about memory function and what preserves it; stories about recovery from addiction. The potent prescription in each case, based on the mounting research of social scientists, is connection and community. We seem to need it like air, food, water, if we are to thrive. And really, we increasingly aren’t so good at it—if statistics hold water. The reverberations of this message came to... Read more
At times my response to music is Pavlovian. Particular songs can evoke a reaction in me almost before the notes reach my brain, transporting me to times or emotional experiences instantaneously. And of all songs, certain 80s ballads are most potent in this way. Somehow those songs so fully take me back to love-sick adolescence that hearing them makes me want to stop everything I am doing and slow dance. Once again, I feel the song’s force on my fourteen-year-old... Read more
In a paradoxical saying, Jesus says, “…whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it .” Does this agree with your experience? Have you found that the hard practice of “losing your life in order to find it,” strengthening your ethical musculature by doing the difficult, right thing—even when it is costly—is how you’ve found your way? When it comes to ethics, we generally start with tiny acts of... Read more
The passage in this Sunday’s lectionary gospel intrigues (Mt 5:21-37). In it, Jesus tells his audience to get to the heart of the matter; the law is important, but not enough. Yet in Mt 5:21-37, what Jesus seems to set out as ‘the heart of the matter’ sounds impossible. How are we to never anger, never curse someone or call them an idiot, never look lustfully at someone, never have unreconciled conflict with others, never have marriages end, never make... Read more
I sit with Brother Martin Gonzales, over sixty years a monk and reflecting on the nearness of life’s end. We are at Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey on a summer day when the perfume of magnolias stretches across the way and birds sing, as he reiterates words he likes to share: “I don’t care what anyone says, but the spirit world is the real world. Just think about your life. I mean, at one point you weren’t. Just think... Read more
“One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.” -John Steinbeck If Steinbeck’s quote is true, we Oregonians have laser-clear pathways to pain. And sometimes I do—even for fleeting moments. Clarity, the edge and shadow of pain, always felt as longing. This week, in another Oregon downpour, I was reminded of John O’Donohue’s notions around the experience. The late Irish poet wrote beautifully of longing as that which “quickens your soul with wonder” and as “divine urgency.” In... Read more
{Chapel at Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey, Lafayette, Oregon} His younger voice fills the chapel, easy to make out among the voices of older monks. It is Christmastide and dark outside, with stormy wind battering the stand of bamboo outside the southside windows; but a massive tree covered in lights brightens the otherwise dimly lit space, creating a sort of magic. My heart is ebullient. I’m sure I’m not the only one to celebrate the return of relative youthfulness... Read more
Sometimes the lectionary readings for a Sunday coalesce around a theme, and this week it is the theme of ‘calling’ (Isa 49:1-7; Ps 40:1-12; Jn 1:29-42). As I’ve thought about calling or vocation this week, I’m struck by how it can be straightforward for some, and for others not. My close friend Martin Gonzales was in his 20s, home a few years from WWII and flailing when he visited a priest during a crisis. The priest looked him in the... Read more
{Excerpt from Jesus Loves Women: A Memoir of Body and Spirit, DreamSeeker Books, 2011} That spring I read Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation, then his book on contemplative prayer. The stirring I feel during lauds at the abbey piques my interest in contemplation and the monastic life, and Merton helps explain them. But Merton’s way of looking at prayer and the spiritual life are relevant to a non-monastic life as well. They hold my interest. Merton’s emphasis seems to... Read more
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