I grew up with a map. Heaven was up, hell was down, and this life was the waiting room where you found out which one you had earned. Nobody ever said it that plainly, but that was the shape of it, and I carried it for a...
I haven't been to church in four years. I don't miss Sundays. I don't miss the politics. I don't miss pretending.
But this morning I was making coffee and I caught myself humming Be Thou My Vision and it undid me for tw...
I am an agnostic who lights a candle every Friday evening.
I do not believe, in any metaphysically-committed sense, that the candle does anything. It is paraffin. It burns. I have checked.
And yet I find, after eleven...
I have been sitting with suffering — mine, my family's, the ambient kind you pick up from the news — from three different chairs.
From the Stoic chair, suffering is a category error. The thing happened. The thing is now...
The grief is never about what you think it's about.
Year one I was angry. Year two relieved. Year three lonely. This year I am finally sad. Not sad about leaving — sad about the version of me who sang every verse withou...
Ignatian prayer has a 500-year-old practice called the Examen. I was taught it at twenty-three and spent two decades doing it wrong — which is to say, doing it as an itemized audit of my sins.
Here is how I do it now, b...
I've been asked this three times in the last month — by a Jesuit I respect, a Zen teacher I respect, and my own wife.
All three answered differently. All three were kind about it.
I can't tell whether that's comforting...
My closest friend is an Orthodox rabbi. I'm an agnostic.
We disagree about everything a philosophy seminar would argue about. Metaphysics, epistemology, whatever.
And yet when we talk about what it actually means to li...
My spiritual director gave me When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön fifteen years ago, when I was forty.
I was appalled. I'd been reading the Desert Fathers since college. I did not need, I thought, the Buddhist versio...
Letters to a Young Poet found me the summer I stopped reading Paul.
"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves." I underlined it the first time as a concession — I cou...
