thought exercise on Having it All-Together

I became interested in the subject of transition outer changes around 1970 when I was going through some difficult inner and outer changes. Although I gave up my teaching career because of those chang...

One Ash Wednesday a decade ago, when I was new to Anglicanism, I knelt at a rail as Fr. Thomas, my priest, smeared a black cross on each forehead. “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall ret...

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 ...

When Tara and I learned we were pregnant for the first time, we went right out and bought a crib. You might have done the same. The act of selecting, purchasing, and assembling a crib is deeply cathar...

When a person is confused and things refuse to fit together, she sometimes announces a need to get out of noise and turbulence, to get away from all the hassle and “get my head together.” When she suc...

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 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...

William F. Allen, who in 1883 “pulled off a miracle.” What he did was to get not just an entire coast to pull in sync, but an entire nation. In [New Jersey Governor Tom] Kean’s words, Until high noo...

I remember playing a game as a child in which we would bend one knee and grab our foot behind us and then try to race—limping, stumbling and falling over as we struggled across the grass toward a fini...

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of t...

I remember playing a game as a child in which we would bend one knee and grab our foot behind us and then try to race—limping, stumbling and falling over as we struggled across the grass toward a fini...

There is a lovely disarray that comes with attraction. When you find yourself deeply attracted to someone, you gradually begin to lose your grip on the frames that order your life. Indeed, much of you...

Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other? They are of one accord by being tuned, not to each other, but to another standard ...

In one of Aesop's familiar fables, an old man has several sons who are always fighting among themselves. He had often, but without success, exhorted them to live together in harmony. One day, he c...

In a sermon on Revelation 21:5-7, which includes the auspicious phrase, “Behold I make all things new”, Eugene Peterson connects and contrasts the experience the energy or mood of the New Year with ou...

When I was in Germany speaking at a church, a blind woman named Elizabeth served as my interpreter. You can imagine the two of us on stage—me with my wheelchair and Elizabeth with her white cane. Duri...

I had a memorable lunch a few years ago with my friends Mike and Claudia, who had recently returned from Malawi, a small country in southeastern Africa. We were sitting in a booth at one of those chai...

One of the most influential myths nourished by the culture of authenticity is that we will be “saved” or made complete when we meet the right-shaped soul, that perfectly complementary person who can f...

Lucy says to Charlie Brown: ‘You know what the whole trouble with you is, Charlie Brown?’ ‘No; and I don’t want to know! Leave me alone!’ ‘The whole trouble with you is you won’t listen to w...

It is characteristic of any great work of literature to have in its ending something that brings a sense of harmony to the whole. Like the finale of a symphony, or the confetti at the end of a nationa...

How good it is to center down! To sit quietly and see one’s self pass by! The streets of our minds seethe with endless traffic; Our spirits resound with clashing, with noisy silences, While some...

I went to the IRS office in Oakland. I waited. And I waited. Eventually I was escorted through a warren of cubicles to the one where I was to meet the agent who would assist me. Alone in the bowels of...

Awesome stuff never satisfies. Nothing in the entire physical, created world can give rest, peace, identity, meaning, purpose, or lasting contentment to your awe-craving heart. Looking to stuff to sat...

The Gospel doesn't reveal to us that life isn't messy. In fact, God, in the Incarnation, joins us in the mess. Consider this illustration to highlight how the Incarnation transforms our expe...

Some marches are not against anyone or anything. They are marches for something or someone. Jesus. Peace. Hope. Unity. In a town where I lived for many years, a few of us organized an annual Walk of t...

In 1879, the preservationist and explorer John Muir took his first trip to Alaska. As he explored the fjords and rocky landscapes of Alaska’s now famous Glacier Bay, a powerful feeling struck him all ...

Everything we do is about winning something or measuring one person against another or garnering goods in great quantity, not because we need them but in order that others can’t have them. We make lif...

If I asked you the same question I asked my patient Aaron—“What do you want?”—and you could for a moment put aside the predictable anxiety that comes with it, I’m confident that at some point in your ...

There is no question then of the doctrine of the Trinity being a kind of numerical puzzle designed to test faith or to baffle the human mind. The doctrine does not state the paradox that God is one be...

In his classic monologue, comedian George Carlin riffed on the mountain of stuff we compile. His assertion is that a “house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.” So when you get right down to ...