“The reason to get married,” Christman writes,

is because you have met a person interesting enough that, death being inevitable, you’d prefer to experience it with them…

Marrying…was the best choice I’d ever make and that was part of the problem. A good marriage is a eucatastrophe: it ends a phase of your life well but decisively. Things are not the ... See more

When we make a pact with ourselves to show up for reality just as it is, reality rewards us by revealing its hidden holiness, its ordinary wonder, its fruitful shadows and radiant wounds. Not always, not everywhere, but more and more often and in the places we least expect.… This is what it means to be a mystic. To show up for what is, to be presen... See more

When you say yes to cultivating a mystical gaze, the ordinary world becomes more luminous, imbued with flashes of beauty and moments of meaning. The universe responds to your willingness to behold the holy by revealing almost everything as holy. A plate of rice and beans, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, your new baby, the latest political scoundr... See more

Living as a mystic means orienting the whole of yourself toward the sacred. It’s a matter of purposely looking through the lens of love.

Graphic designer and painter Paula Scher on how to make something great:

"Less is more and more is more. It's the middle that's not a good place."

My capacity to live a contemplative way of life was inscribed in my very being as a person created in the image and likeness of God.

It is arduous work to dig deep into one’s soul, bringing forth hidden or unconscious motives contrary to a spiritual life.

Even after a beautiful Mass, ritual, or retreat, we go right back to either/or, dualistic thinking. We go right back to being angry Republicans or Democrats, Protestants or Catholics, Black people or white people. It just never stops. But as we practice, contemplation becomes a way to touch upon reality, a way of penetrating illusion.