Breathing Under Water : Spirituality and the Twelve Steps

God loves and respects freedom—to the final and full and riskiest degree.

Josef Pieper, a German Catholic philosopher, said many years ago that “the natural habitat for truth is in interpersonal relationships,” whereas we have made truth an idea on paper. There are ways of living and relating that are honest and sustainable and fair, and there are utterly dishonest ways of living and relating to life. This is our real, d

It is work to learn how to pray, largely the work of emptying the mind and filling the heart.

Our inability to see our personal failures is paralleled by our inability to see our institutional and national sins too. It is the identical and same pattern of addiction and denial.

Truth is not just factual truth (the great mistake of fundamentalists), but a combination of both text and context, style and intent.

It is such divine synergy, people’s willingness to creatively work with the hand that life and sin and circumstance and God have dealt them that is our deepest life of prayer and devotion. This is “doing the will of God”!

sin and failure are, in fact, the setting and opportunity for the transformation and enlightenment of the offender—and then the future will take care of itself.

“I want to have power” > “I will take control” >“I will always be right” >“See, I am indeed powerful!”

addiction emerges out of a lack of inner experience of intimacy with oneself, with God, with life, and with the moment.

Evil proceeds from a lack of consciousness.