Spiritual Direction

One way to invigorate and renew your language is to expose your self to poetry. In poetry your language will find cleansing illumination and sensuous renewal.

And the ‘close of the age’ for which they longed was not the end of the space-time order, but the end of the present evil age (haʿolam hazeh), and the introduction of the (still very much this-worldly) age to come (haʿolam habaʾ)—in other words, the end of Israel’s period of mourning and exile and the beginning of her freedom and vindication.

And not merely free to choose—since that’s what got me here in the first place—but free to choose the good. If freedom is going to be more than mere freedom from, if freedom is the power of freedom for, then I have to trade autonomy for a different kind of dependence.

I run in the grooves that everyone else is running in; the rutted paths worn by others become the easiest way to go.

“palms down, palms up.” Begin by placing your palms down as a symbolic indication of your desire to turn over any concerns you may have to God.

Merging involves moving deeper than ever into life, into the world, towards others. It is a state of flowering and an embracing of all facets of life.

Fashioned from the earth, we are souls in clay form. We need to remain in rhythm with our inner clay voice and longing. Yet this voice is no longer audible in the modern world. We are not even aware of our loss, consequently, the pain of our spiritual exile is more intense in being largely unintelligible.

The tragic sense of life is not unbelief, pessimism, fatalism, or cynicism. It is just ultimate and humiliating realism, which for some reason demands a lot of forgiveness of almost everything. Faith is simply to trust the real, and to trust that God is found within it—even before we change it. This is perhaps our major stumbling stone, the price w