Transforming Pain into Wisdom Pain gets our attention and focuses our minds. I have experienced physical pain which made it impossible to think about anything else. We may face emotional pain which absorbs our full attention. How can we solve problems, including our pain, when we cannot reason our way out? People tell us pain can make us a better person, that we can be stronger where we have been broken. Does that really work in a practical, everyday way?... Read more

Living in the Shadow of Fear It has been a challenging week to be fearless. A few years ago I decided to give up fear. I belong to a church which divides each year into liturgical seasons, including Lent. One year I decided I would give up fear for Lent that year. Giving up fear is not about never being afraid of anything. There are some things which are healthy for us to fear. For me, giving up fear has been more... Read more

Listening for the Sacred Are there sounds which are sacred to you? What does spiritual life sound like in your ears? How do you listen for the Sacred? We live in a world surrounded by sounds. For me, those sounds are more likely to be traffic or people talking than a gentle breeze. We rarely take time to get away from the sounds all around us and listen for the Sacred. When we want to escape the sounds of everyday life... Read more

The Benefit of the Doubt We can neither know nor remember everything. Events take place which very different significance depending on a person’s perspective. People have a long history of giving each other the benefit of the doubt. Someone is late and says there was an accident on the freeway. We cannot know where there really was an accident, and we give them the benefit of the doubt. Where there is doubt we give people room to maneuver. We recognize... Read more

Finding Our Places of Stillness Our minds are always full. Full of responsibilities, full of work, full of family, friends, and other people. We struggle to keep up with everything. There is what we need to know, what we want to know, and what we just know. We know words to songs we have not heard for years and names of people we have never met. There is only so much we can take. We try to put things in their places... Read more

What Color is Spiritual Life? I was born and raised in a world where spiritual life was black and white. Spiritual life was about what we believed and how we lived our lives. The things we were convinced were right to believe and to do were written down. The boundaries and standards were clear and we knew it was wrong to step over the line. We believed what we read and how we understood what we read. It was clear to us... Read more