The Gospel was able to accept that life is tragic, but then graciously added that we can survive and will even grow from this tragedy.

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

These are your authentic soul friends, and we now sometimes call them spiritual directors or elders. Celtic Christianity called them

The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young.

The ego clearly prefers an economy of merit, where we can divide the world into winners and losers, to any economy of grace, where merit or worthiness loses all meaning.4

liminal space

Thus the most common one-liner in the Bible is “Do not be afraid”; in fact, someone counted and found that it occurs 365 times! If we do not move beyond our early motivations of personal security, reproduction, and survival (the fear-based preoccupations of the “lizard brain”), we will never proceed beyond the lower stages of human or spiritual

It seems that in the spiritual world, we do not really find something until we first lose it, ignore it, miss it, long for it, choose it, and personally find it again—but now on a new level. Three

“The children of this world are wiser in their ways than the children of light” (Luke 16:8).