I see more clearly, now that I am aging. Not with my eyesight, but with my soul. I see the fine detail of what I missed in younger years. I see the place of faith and forgiveness in my story. I see the possibilities of life in ways I never imagined. I was not blind in...
At 40, Franz Kafka (1883-1924), who never married and had no children, was walking through a park one day in Berlin when he met a girl who was crying because she had lost her favourite doll. She and Kafka searched for the doll unsuccessfully. Kafka told her to meet...
A few years ago, Tom Friedman had a column on the op-ed page of the New York Times called "The Taxi Driver." He told of being driven by cab from Charles de Gaulle Airport to Paris. During the one-hour trip, he and the driver had done six things: the driver had driven...
So the line had stuck in my head. “Sex,” I was pretty sure, meant whether you were a boy or girl, and “sin” made Tante Jans very angry, but what the two together meant I could not imagine. And so, seated next to Father in the train compartment, I suddenly asked,...
There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. Being right is identification with a mental position — a perspective, an opinion, a judgement, a story. For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong, and so the ego loves to make...
There is no agony greater than bearing an untold story inside of you.
Now, every time I witness a strong person I want to know: What darkness did you conquer in your story? Mountains do not rise without earthquakes.
A man was shipwrecked on an island where no one else lived. He laboriously gathered some material from the island and built himself a crude house. One day he was away from the house when he saw smoke rising from that direction. He rounded a bend and, to his horror,...
The true purpose of all spiritual disciplines is to clear away whatever may block our awareness of that which is God in us... It will be in order to suggest certain simple aids to this end. One of these is the practice of silence, or quiet. As a child I was accustomed...
One thing healthy religion does is challenge us. I don’t mean the strident castigations of the street preacher or even the social justice rally-er. Great traditions excel at the soft challenge, the friendly nudge, issued predominantly through the mode of story....