Aidan of Lindisfarne Today is the feast day of Aidan of Lindisfarne, a Celtic missionary monk who journeyed from the island monastery of Iona to establish an island monastery in Northumbria. It is also the day I chose to be received as a lay oblate at a Benedictine hermitage near Big Sur, California. The road which led me to the hermitage was part of a wider highway which showed me contemplative life. A friend who saw how drawn I was... Read more
Transcending Everyday Life We may think people drawn to monastic life are trying to escape from the real world. People assume living in a monastic community is like going on a particularly long retreat. They believe becoming a monk requires cutting ourselves off from the rest of the world, transcending everyday life. In many ways it is the rest of us, with our distractions and entertainment, who try to escape everyday life. Spending time at a monastery can feel so... Read more
Centering Prayer Last year a friend of mine, another spiritual director, and I began an online centering prayer group which meets each week. We create space in the midst of all the confusion and noise online where we can find some stillness. Centering prayer is both a form of prayer and a way to practice becoming more open to the presence of the sacred. It is based in understanding God, the sacred, is always with us. When we seem to... Read more
Spiritual Life Can Be a Pain Many of us assume spiritual life is about the thoughts we think or the emotions we feel. We live as if spiritual life lives in our heads or in our hearts. It can be tempting for us to try to ignore how spiritual life is incarnate throughout the rest of our bodies. We forget how spiritual life can be a pain. Some of us are experiencing spiritual life as a sense of fatigue. The... Read more
Laughing at Ourselves Quite a few of the people I know assume spiritual life means we sit up straight and are still. They are used to spending spiritual time, in public and in private, quietly. The idea seems to be to blend in and do what everyone else is doing. The practice of spiritual, even sacred, laughing confuses them. It may be a challenge to think about spiritual life as sparking laughter. We are used to thinking about spiritual people... Read more
Making a Fresh Start Many of us think of spiritual life as an overwhelming path we struggle to continue following. We think of monks who seem to spend their entire lives reflecting and practicing. In fact, spiritual life is about making a fresh start again and again. One version of Benedict’s rule governing monastic communities begins Always we begin again. People who embrace monastic life make commitments for the rest of their lives. They live into their commitments by practicing... Read more
Where Are We Going? Some of us appreciate a clearly marked path. I am one of those people who tends to ask Where are we going? It is comforting to me to know not only where we are trying to go, but what our next steps on the path might be. It can be helpful to have a clear plan. I decided I was going to be a lawyer when I grew up by the time I was in third... Read more
Napping as a Spiritual Practice This is one of those weeks. We feel too tired to continue pushing. It has already been a long week full of challenges and conflicts to resolve. Long hours of listening and talking, working on the computer, searching for solutions. Too many late nights and early mornings, and stirring in a serious dose of frustration and fatigue. Some of us like to assume spiritual life is about getting things done and taking meaningful steps forward.... Read more
Our Souls Cry Out For Something More We may have survived a pandemic, protecting and preserving ourselves and whatever else we could. Some of us feel we have done more than we expected, more than we imagined we could. We have arrived at a place beyond where we thought we could get, and our souls cry out for something more. There are times when what we have lost overwhelms us. Many of us have set aside people and possessions and... Read more
Beneath the Surface We think listening to sacred stillness is like lying on the beach. Do we explore beneath the surface? With our eyes closed, we try to clear our minds of everything which distracts us. The immense empty stillness spreads out like the ocean stretches from the beach. If only we could let go of our concerns and assumptions, we could look out to the horizon. But when we stand on the beach looking out over the ocean, we only... Read more
Strategic Monk
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