life on planet earth on Going Through the Motions

Holy God, we confess that we have been lukewarm about living our faith in Jesus each day. We put off to tomorrow what we know in our hearts you want to happen today. We go through the motions of relig...

As Europe plunged ever deeper into a second world war, the British poet W.H. Auden composed a poem (“September 1, 1939”) that peels back our human tendency to cover up all fear and uncertainty with se...

I pastored a church in the Chicago area for almost fifteen years. During the worship service one Sunday morning the ushers came forward to receive the offering, and one of the ushers was asked to pray...

When prayer consists of the same spoken sentences on every occasion, naturally we wonder at the value of the practice. If our prayers bore us, do they also bore God? Does God really need to hear me sa...

While primarily known today as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift also served as an Anglican priest in his home country of Ireland. While his writing gained significant traction througho...

Keeping time with the Spirit is less a regimental march—left, right, left, right! ad infinitum—and more like a subtle dance, a responsive feel for what comes next. Lionel Salter offers a parallel in h...

Never mistake motion for action.

The life of man becomes an unbroken chain of movements dictated by his anxious desire for assurances.

When we’re chasing our dreams, all the turbulence we face shouldn’t scare us into pulling back, though. The shaking, jerking, and rattling in our lives are telling us we’re getting close to the breakt...

Walter Brueggemann writes that the movement of the psalms is from orientation to disorientation and then to new orientation. The psalms give us a language for transformation in desert spaces: we move ...

Thomas Merton describes those who never experience the gift of a contemplative life. His explanation for why some people never experience this can be found in his book, New Seeds of Contemplation: [T...

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...

“I get up and pace the room, as if I can leave my guilt behind me. But it tracks me as I walk, an ugly shadow made by myself.”

My body continually takes me into place . It is at once agent and vehicle, articulator and witness of being-in-place.

It is life in slow motion, it’s heart in reverse, it’s hope-and-a-half: too much and too little at once. It’s a train that suddenly stops with no station around, and we can hear the cricket, and, lean...

Now my body seemed to walk itself, the road walking my body.

We fixed up the house and swapped it for another house and then another and then another. During the first ten years we were married, we moved six times. It was like being in the witness protection pr...

I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels so much like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that have become habitual…I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the ...

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Our bodies are apt to be our autobiographies.

The spiritual journey is a marathon of seasons. Sometimes you can hold your own. Sometimes your side aches, you're hot and you can't get your breath. Spiritual disciplines are intentional ways...

Our culture is afraid of grief, but not just because it is afraid of death. That is natural and normal, a proper reaction to the Last Enemy. Our culture is afraid because it seems to be afraid of the ...

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

When I fully enter time’s swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here.

Manipulation is moving together for my advantage. Motivation is moving together for mutual advantage.

The best way out is always through.

If identity is fluid, then to remain still is to die—or worse, to become irrelevant—and so we never cease our frantic movement in the direction we hope, and pray, is forward..

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

The Props assist the House Until the House is built And then the Props withdraw And adequate, erect, The House support itself And cease to recollect The Auger and the Carpenter— Just such a retrospect...

We often get into ruts, on treadmills, caught up in patterns and habits that aren't useful. We don't stop to ask, what can I learn from this week that will keep next week from essentially bein...