Healing

"I lost faith in the songs and myself. The horse died."

Praying to Forgive

Brian McLaren identifies how prayers of petition help us to experience forgiveness:

Since being wounded or sinned against is a terribly common experience, I suspect we need to pay more attention to it. In fact, being wronged is directly linked in the Lord’s Prayer to the reality of doing wrong; we pray, “forgive us our sins as we... See more

The great Borges thought it best to look upon our broken inner state as one of life’s great opportunities—to prove ourselves deserving of the blood pulsing through our veins. “Everything that happens,” he wrote, “including humiliations, misfortunes, embarrassments, all is given like clay,” so that we may “make from the miserable circumstances of ou... See more

And if the scar is deep, so was the love. So be it. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are a testament that I can love deeply and live deeply and be cut, or even gouged, and that I can heal and continue to live and continue to love. And the scar tissue is stronger than the original flesh ever was. Scars are a testament to life.

Active nonviolence begins with the truth that all life is sacred, that we are all equal sisters and brothers, all children of the God of peace, already reconciled, all one, all already united, and so we could never hurt or kill another human being, much less remain silent while wars rage, people die in poverty, and nuclear weapons and environmental... See more

That’s not surprising, because forgiveness is probably the only human action that reveals three goodnesses simultaneously! When we forgive, we choose the goodness of others over their faults, we experience God’s goodness flowing through ourselves, and we also experience our own goodness in a way that surprises us. That is an awesome coming together... See more

To express a desire is always vulnerable. To let yourself yearn for something you do not have, and then go after it, risking disappointment, requires courage. Whenever someone tells me they really want a relationship, or kids, or they are desperate to feel more part of a community, I want to applaud the honesty. Saying what we really want, especial... See more

One way to notice that you are being taught the same lesson over and over is by writing. When you reflect often, you become aware of your patterns (if you are willing to notice them). You see that life keeps trying to teach you the same lesson and you are simply not absorbing it. It tries to teach you by showing you that the choice you’re repeatedl... See more

Loitering, as you know, means fucking off, or doing jack shit, or jacking off, and given that two of those three terms have sexual connotations, it’s no great imaginative leap to know that it is a repressed and repressive (sexual and otherwise) culture, at least, that invented and criminalized the concept. Someone reading this might very well keel ... See more