stories on Wholeness

In this excerpt, musician and author Ginny Owens shares a childhood exercise that only makes specific what all of us as human beings struggle with, the desire for wholeness: I wish you could know my ...

Ralph Waldo Emerson describes a true friend as a person with whom I can think aloud. This absence of the need to put on a façade is an essential and foundational aspect of all genuine friendships. He ...

“Christianity promises to make man free,” Anglican priest William R. Inge writes; “it never promises to make them independent.” Freedom and independence are polar opposites. The former leads to wellne...

The educator Parker Palmer writes, “Wholeness doesn’t mean perfection: It means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.” When Palmer speaks of wholeness, he doesn’t mean a perfectly function...

Mending is an act that requires courage. To mend can be to repair a relationship, as described in the line above from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing . In this splendid play, Benedick and Be...

In a letter of Justin Martyr, written in the second century, there is a remarkable passage. He writes to a friend and explains to him how essential it is that this man, who had sinned, should come bac...

The practice of confession in the context of a liturgy or in a private ecclesiastical setting has declined drastically over the past fifty years, and in particular since the Protestant Reformation in ...

The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight is what the Hebrew prophets call shalom. We call it peace, but it means far more than mere peace of mind or a...

Shalom, “peace,” is one of the richest words in the Bible. You can no more define it by looking in the dictionary than you can define a person by his or her social security number. It gathers all aspe...

In their excellent book, Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the foundation of life as being spiritual in nature. This means we are constantly be “form...

The word perfect comes from the Latin perficere, per (complete) and ficere (do). Something considered perfect is that which is completely done; it exists in a state of completion, wholeness, perfectio...

In their excellent book Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the reality of what it means to “take up our cross” in our daily lives: Sometimes we suffer u...

In their excellent book Invitation to a Journey, M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the Biblical understanding of the process of spiritual formation over and against the “self-help” p...

Spiritual formation has become one of the major movements of the late twentieth century. Spiritualities of all varieties have emerged on the landscape of our culture—Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Zen, vari...

God uses the wilderness experiences in our lives to teach us his name. If we, like Moses, wish to see God’s glory, it will often be in the wilderness that we see it. The beauty of the desert experienc...

Richard J. Foster tells a story about his youth, working among the Inuit people of Kotzebue, Alaska. He found that the Inuit people he was living among “had a deep sense of the wholeness of life” with...

Modern knowledge involves breaking things down into component parts. As philosopher Michel Foucault argues in The Birth of the Clinic, nowhere is this more disturbingly clear than in modern medicine, ...

The word vocation is a rich one, having to address the wholeness of life, the range of relationships and responsibilities. Work, yes, but also families, and neighbors, and citizenship, locally and glo...

Spiritual growth is, in large measure, patterned on the nature of physical growth. We do not expect to put an infant into its crib at night and in the morning find a child, an adolescent or yet an adu...

A few years ago I had a little boy. Then, within a year, he became a man. He went through one of those adolescent growth spurts. He grew almost a foot in height, his voice dropped into a deep bass, he...

I once asked my New York Times readers whether they had found purpose in their lives. Thousands wrote back to describe their experiences. One in particular sticks out and illustrates Rohr’s concept of...

A lesson often learned the hard way in each of our spiritual journeys is mistaking goodwill for vocation. Sometimes we feel deeply about an experience we have, whether it be on a mission trip or even ...

Sometimes God takes our greatest failures and turns them into our greatest successes. Charles “Chuck” Colson had risen the ladder of national political success at breakneck speed. After a tour in the ...

Presence is experienced as a unitary whole. Think, for example, about the experience of sitting on the top of a hill, far from the polluting lights of a city, gazing at a dark, starry sky. Unless you ...

The spiritual discipline of honoring the body helps us find our way between the excesses of a culture that glorifies and objectifies the body and the excesses of Christian tradition that have often de...

The mystery of perfection as an aspect of beauty is its transcendence. It points to a glory beyond itself. I knew that when I held my children, I didn’t simply cradle flesh and blood. I held a living ...

The world is full of presence. Every moment of life is crammed full of potential encounters with people and things that are present to us even though we may not be present to them: the presence of a c...

In his prose and poetry, David Whyte shares what David Brooks refers to as “emotional joy” in his book, While not necessarily unique to the Christian, this type of joy has the ability to draw us towar...

Intimacy happens as we bring more and more of ourselves into God’s presence. To pray with soul and body means, says Jane Vennard, “praying with all of who we are: our physicality, our emotions, our in...

As we begin to awaken fully to the spiritual, social and sexual dimensions of ourselves in God’s presence, we find that they are inseparably intertwined and not to be compartmentalized. In fact, many ...