IF YOU ASK PEOPLE TO DESCRIBE GOD, THEIR ANSWERS will tell you what they truly value most, what for each of them is their “ultimate concern.” For most of us, our god-images and the values they represent will be the ones generally held in the communities to which we belong. For example, the most traditional …
The Mystery of a Creative Dream
IF YOU’VE BEEN READING MY POSTS, YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED a recurring theme beginning to appear with some frequency. That theme recently crystalized in my mind as a short, declarative sentence: Love is the answer. Until this morning, I “knew” the sentence was one that came to me some nine years ago as I woke …
Why “Powers” and “Principalities” Still Hold Sway
ALTHOUGH MOST OF THE TIME MOST OF US DON’T RECOGNIZE IT, organizations have souls. Our ancient ancestors felt the presence of spirits everywhere, animating everything. Plato abstracted that ancient intuition into a theory of ideal heavenly archetypes standing behind all material forms. By Roman times, St. Paul and other early Christian writers could talk about …
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Breathing a Wind That Blows Where It Will
THE ARC OF SPIRITUALITY IS BENDING TOWARD INCLUSIVITY. Some 3,200 years ago, Ramesses II, pharaoh of the New Kingdom in ancient Egypt, presented himself to his people and the world as the son of the high god Ra, and as a god himself. In the highest of ancient civilizations, spirituality was a strictly royal phenomenon. …
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Into the Cloud, Whereabouts Unknown
WHILE I AM NOT A MYSTIC, I HAVE SPENT MOST OF MY ADULT LIFE STUDYING (directly and indirectly) both religious experience in general and mysticism in particular. Right now, I’m re-reading, for at least the fourth time, The Cloud of Unknowing, a classic 14th century English manual of Christian contemplative prayer. This will be the …
Embracing Doubt on the Spiritual Path
CONTRARY TO WHAT MIGHT SEEM OBVIOUS, DOUBT ISN’T THE ENEMY OF FAITH. Certainty is. In fact, doubt and faith, properly understood, are complementary drivers in a dialectic of growth. Certainty, on the other hand, stalls growth and often weakens faith. The primary problem behind our common misunderstanding of doubt and faith is our tendency to …
On Being a Musician the Spirit Plays
“LOOSE BUT SPIRITED” HAS BEEN MY MOTTO, for decades, as an improvisational musician. It affirms the value of letting the spirit play — not because precision is a bad thing, but because getting music “tight” too often pushes out the spirit entirely. In improvisational music, the magic happens when the spirit plays the musicians. To …
Soul Spirit Wisdom 