Spiritual Direction

Often our loneliness and isolation is due to a failure of spiritual imagination.

THE secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God. But whatever is in God is really identical with Him, for His infinite simplicity admits no division and no distinction. Therefore I cannot hope to find myself anywhere except in Him. Ultimately the only way that I can be myself is to become identified with Him in Whom is hidden the

The deepest things that you need are not elsewhere. They are here and now in that circle of your own soul.

One need not have journeyed too far into this silent land to realize that the so-called psychological self, our personality (not what Paul is talking about as hidden with Christ in God) is a cognitive construct pasted up out of thoughts and feelings. A rather elaborate job has been done of it, and it is singularly useful. But our deepest identity,

Is self-possession the way I find security? Or could even this experience be a door to a different way of being, where my dependence is not something I resent but something that I learn is the condition of creaturehood? While this might be an affront to my autonomy, perhaps it is my autonomy that is the source of my dis-ease, not its solution. What

Different Paths, Same Journey

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

In another place he speaks of both ourselves and God, carrying a “united witness” (Romans 8:16) to our divine identity—as “children of God,” “heirs,” and “coheirs with Christ” (8:17).2 When we stopped trusting this inner and united witness, we had no support in believing the central Gospel message itself—that we share in the same identity as Jesus