The Nakedness of Pure Trust

God is love.  And so, prayer, the pursuit of God, is also a pursuit of love. Relationships then are the school of prayer.

There's a Sufi tale about a young man who came to a Sufi master seeking the life of prayer. "Have you ever fallen in love with a woman?" the master asked.  "No, not yet.  I'm only 18," replied the seeker.  "Then go and do that first." (for this tale see the Speaking of Faith interview with Dr. Keshavarz)

I'd like to think I can go the other way: love God and I'll learn to love others.  Frankly, it seems safer, purer.  But it can be more self-deceptive; I can hide behind my piety.  So, the Sufi mystic's got something right.  Love another truly and you'll learn the path to God. Experience the free-fall, the frightening tumble into vulnerability before the other.  Nothing between you.

Become "naked and unafraid" (Genesis 3).  This is the way of prayer . . . fragile and humbling, difficult and painful.

Love, and you'll find yourself right in the middle of the way of prayer.

Seek the face of the other whose love threatens to undo you, whose love will ask you to pull down the masks and illusions, challenging the falsehoods and pretentions.  For ultimately the mind with all its games stands dumb before the mystery that is God, and only love can carry you across the final abyss.

Love is "where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust."  Thomas Merton, see:

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When We Realize Something’s Died

An ebook excerpt—

Late in the second decade of my ministry, I took a long look at myself and wondered at what had become of me.  The same thing comes to many of us who’ve been related to something or someone for going on twenty years.  We wake up one day, look around at ourselves and at the person or career to which we’re yoked, and realize that something’s died.

My trouble had been coming, I suppose, for quite awhile.  Such things usually don’t just show up one day, knocking at the door unannounced.  We get hints along the way.  A whisper that haunts us in the night.  A gnawing in the gut.  An ulcer, high blood pressure, depression.  We get hints, but most of us don’t have a clue what we’re to do with them.  And even if we did, few of us have the time or space or wisdom to do much about them.  And so, we keep on—hoping things will change without us having to rock the boat, praying for a miracle so we don’t have to act, denying resolutely that we’re already living, to some extent, in the midst of a crisis.  But then the knock comes, crisis stands at the door, and we’re faced with a choice.  We can bolt the door and stop our ears against the crisis, or we can let it in.  Neither feels like a good choice.  But I’m learning—largely through the witness of those women and men who’ve lived life best—that embracing crisis is the path of God.  Ignore crisis and we’ve chosen a sure way to end up sidetracked or derailed entirely, maybe even dead.  And if not dead, at least feeling like we might as well be.

I think I knew deep in my gut that were I to ignore the crisis standing at the door, I could avoid some pain in the short term, but I wouldn’t have the muscle to hold off the pain further down the road—and with the freight my crisis was carrying, I feared I’d get buried sooner not later.  It was my desperation then, more than any psychological or spiritual savvy, that got me to open that door.

Read more.

The Problem with the Churches

An active and robust spirituality is what many people I meet long for.  They’re hurried and harried, fragmented and frustrated, and few have anyone to show them the way.  Unfortunately, many are turned off and turned away from Christian churches.  Churches too often meet those who seek God as too dogmatic and moralistic, oftentimes too concerned with church life to be much help to those seeking God.  Many of those who remain in the churches long for more, but figure this is all there is—read the Bible, give money, go to church activities, sit and listen to the preacher.  This is not what Christianity ultimately is.  And no one needs to settle for a second-hand spirituality.

To those who’ve dismissed Christianity as irrelevant to their heart’s desire, and those whose Christian experience is dull and obligatory, I extend this invitation:  join me in seeking a deep and continual experience of intimacy with God, awaken with me to the sacred in every day life, and to walk continually in it . . . revel in your sacred identity.

The interior life is the Way.

Deep within you’ll find God, and you’ll find the person you really are beneath the masks and charades, the wounds and busyness people like you and I use to prop up our aching selves.

This is what you’ll read about in these pages, and this is what I hope you’ll experience as you put into practice the invitation offered here.

The Tale That Points the Way

Everything on this site revolves around a particular story.  It’s the tale of an outer pilgrimage that carried me into the great sand sea of the Egyptian desert and among the craggy peaks and windswept isles of western Scotland, into the streets and halls of Oxford, England and along the rugged coast of California’s Big Sur.  It’s a tale of life lived in an ordinary American city, where I’ve tried to live all that I learned on that great journey.  But it’s also the tale of an inner journey that leads through moments of exquisite happiness and pleasure, but also into periods excruciating pain and bewilderment, unspeakable sorrow and loss.  In all this I was forced, through turns wry and unsparing, to enter the very core of my being, where I found God dwelling in astonishing fullness.  A radiant center that nothing can take away, nothing can destroy.

You’ll find little snippets of that journey here on this blog as a way to help you discern the mischief God may be up to in your own life.

The whole tale is told in my ebook, Returning to the Center: Living Prayer in a Distracting World, available as a free download in the Resource section on this site.

God, Heart in Our Hearts

St. Paul (in the first century) wrote, “I pray that you may have the power to comprehend how high and wide, long and deep is the love of Christ, and that you may know this love that transcends all understanding so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”  St. Bernard of Clairvaux (twelfth century) said, God is “the stone in the stone, the tree in the tree.”

And so, God is the heart in our hearts, nearer then than our next breath!  And God is all around us if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.

My aim is to invite active people around the world to experience God in the midst of their daily lives —whether they are changing diapers, arguing a case before a jury, painting a wall, or walking in the woods.  My aim is to inspire those whose desire for God has been awakened for one reason or another to experience what saints and mystics have known of God throughout the ages—intimacy with the Great Holy Lover.  And by doing so, I want to inspire them to find their own way to live focused, happy, and compassionate lives in our turbulent world through contemplative practices.