Your identity is not equivalent to your biography. There is a place in you where you have never been wounded...where there's a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. The intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and...
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, "Wow! What a ride!" from The Proud...
The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention.
Christians, we have maintained, are those who through confrontation with death are given new freedom from the sting of death and so a new freedom for voluntary service to others. Surely if this claim has any truth in it, then it is not our own suffering but the...
Near the end of his [Jesus'] life, he struggles with a complete embrace of his mission. "If it is possible, let this cup pass from me," he says, hoping that perhaps suffering is not what God intends (Matthew 26:39). But somehow he realizes, through prayer and...
Prayer is…a very dangerous business. For all the benefits it offers of growing closer to God, it carries with it one great element of risk: the possibility of change. In prayer we open ourselves to the chance that God will do something with us that we had not...
The hymns are bigger than any mistakes; you fumble around with the hymnal and sing the wrong words—you’re on the wrong verse—but the hymn expands to make room for all these voices, even yours. We speak as a body; we have set the intent together, so rather than...
We must beware of the naive idea that our music can “please” God as it would please a cultivated human hearer. That is like thinking, under the old law, that He really needed the blood of bulls and goats… For all our offerings, whether of music or martyrdom, are like...