B. May

Anxiety

is the mask that truth wears when we refuse to stop and uncover its face: the disembodied state I feel when I pretend to put things right by worrying about them instead of conversing with them

In the end, everything will be all right. If it’s not all right, it’s not the end.

Trust the down, and God will take care of the up. This leaves humanity in solidarity with the life cycle, and also with one another, with no need to create success stories for ourselves or to create failure stories for others. Humanity in Jesus is free to be human and soulful instead of any false climbing into “Spirit.” This was supposed to change ... See more

Over and over, Jesus lays this path before us. There is nothing to be renounced or resisted. Everything can be embraced, but the catch is to cling to nothing. You let it go. You go through life like a knife goes through a done cake, picking up nothing, clinging to nothing, sticking to nothing. And grounded in that fundamental chastity of your being... See more

What do you learn to ignore and what do you learn to love? What needs to die in your life and what do you need to affirm unreservedly? These two questions are the heart of desert spirituality. The desert becomes a tomb, said the monks, a place for the demise of the ego. But there’s also an immense joy and release in that, in learning to die before ... See more

I’m nervous to say what happened next, because I know how it sounds. Eleven words came to me from … dare I say God? Maybe it was my own mind finding the emergency brake, but it didn’t seem like the words were my own, since what my own mind usually comes up with sound much closer to “Stop being such a crybaby” than the ones I heard that day on the h... See more

Sin simply refers to all aspects of life where the reality of grace is not manifest and evil flourishes. It’s what happens when we’ve got the wrong story about reality in our heads. If we do not recognize grace, we latch onto lies about who we are.

THE FINAL SECRET, I think, is this: that the words "You shall love the Lord your God" become in the end less a command than a promise.