Falling Upward

but very few Christians have been taught how to live both law and freedom at the same time. Our Western dualistic minds do not process paradoxes very well. Without a contemplative mind, we do not know how to hold creative tensions. We are better at rushing to judgment and demanding a complete resolution to things before we have learned what they ha

There is much evidence on several levels that there are at least two major tasks to human life. The first task is to build a strong “container” or identity; the second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold.

Although Jesus' first preached message is clearly “change!” (as in Mark 1:15 and Matthew 4:17), where

interpret that as a symbol of the message's coming from a divine source, an authority from without and beyond, unsolicited or unsought, and maybe even unwanted by Odysseus himself. Often

In other words, the container is not an end in itself, but exists for the sake of your deeper and fullest life, which you largely do not know about yourself!

The rebellions of two-year-olds and teenagers are in our hardwiring, and we have to have something hard and half good to rebel against. We need a worthy opponent against which we test our mettle. As Rilke put it, “When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.”

“God comes to you disguised as your life,” as my friend Paula D'Arcy so wisely says.

There is a deeper voice of God, which you must learn to hear and obey in the second half of life. It will sound an awful lot like the voices of risk, of trust, of surrender, of soul, of “common sense,” of destiny, of love, of an intimate stranger, of your deepest self, of soulful “Beatrice.” The

he told his listeners to “repent,” which literally means to “change your mind,”