Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

When we are stuck in our convictions and personas, we enter into the disease of having good ideas and being right. My Jesuit friend Tom used to say that he never noticed what he was feeling; only that he was right.

Awareness spritzes us awake. Being awake means that we have taken off the blinders.

To paraphrase Paul Tillich, the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.

The medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart said that if the soul could have known God without the world, God never would have created the world.

Hate weighed me down and muddled my thinking. It isolated me and caused my shoulders to hunch, the opposite of sticking together and lifting our hands and eyes to the sky. The hunch changes our posture, because our shoulders slump, and it changes our vision, as we scowl and paw the ground. So as a radical act we give up the hate and the hunch the b

If you do stick with writing, you will get better and better, and you can start to learn the important lessons: who you really are, and how all of us can live in the face of death, and how important it is to pay much better attention to life, moment by moment, which is why you are here.

I know that all teenagers believe they are intrinsically defective, so that was why I brought up sparrows and friends. I asked the class if any of their best friends had acne, glasses, or problems at home, and if that made them love the friends less. Of course not. I asked them to say, “I have value,” and both teenagers did so with mortification. T

expectations are resentments under construction.

T. S. Eliot wrote, “Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still.” We long for this, and yet we check our smartphones every ten minutes for news, texts, distraction.