Twelve-Step spirituality rediscovered the real transformative power that is the core of the Gospel. It is the spirituality of imperfection that Jesus taught, Paul clarified, Francis and Clare lived, and Thérèse of Lisieux brought to light for the modern world....
The most common one-liner in the Bible is, "Do not be afraid." Someone counted, and it occurs 365 times. from Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
God’s one and only job description is to turn death into life. That’s what God does with every new springtime, every new life, every new season, every new anything.
You cannot heal what you do not first acknowledge. from Breathing Underwater
Spiritual transformation always includes a usually disconcerting reorientation. Change happens, but transformation is always a process of letting go, living in the confusing, shadowy space for a while, and eventually being spit up on a new and unexpected shore. You...
We all become well-disguised mirror images of anything that we fight too long or too directly. That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the questions after a while. Most frontal attacks on evil just produce another kind of evil in yourself, along with a...
The most amazing fact about Jesus, unlike almost any other religious founder, is that he found God in disorder and imperfection — and told us that we must do the same or we would never be content on this earth. from The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See
Christianity is a lifestyle--a way of being in the world that is simple, non-violent, shared, and loving. However, we made it into an established "religion" (and all that goes with that) and avoided the lifestyle change itself. One could be warlike, greedy, racist,...
The absolute religious genius of Jesus is that he utterly refuses all debt codes, purity codes, religious quarantines, and the searching for sinners. He refuses the very starting point of historic religions. He refuses to divide the world into the pure and the impure,...
I believe that we can only safely read Scripture—which is a dangerous book in the wrong hands—if we are somehow sharing in the divine gaze of love. A life of prayer helps us develop a third eye that can read between the lines and find the golden thread which is moving...