Spiritual Direction

All kinds of cultural rhythms and routines are, in fact, rituals that function as pedagogies of desire precisely because they tacitly and covertly train us to love a certain version of the kingdom, teach us to long for some rendition of the good life. These aren’t just things we do; they do something to us.

The soul’s hunger for peace is a longing for a kind of rest from anxiety and frantic pursuits—it is to rest in God.

When you’re concentrated on reward and punishment you never get to healing.

love is both habit and hunger, then our tastes and cravings for what’s ultimate will be changed in the same way. Reflection is important—indeed, I hope this book can serve as a catalyst for your thinking about the liturgical formation (and deformation) of your loves. But reflection should propel us into new practices that will reform our hungers by

And if we pray the prayers we’ve been given, regardless of how we feel about them or God at the time, we sometimes find, to our surprise, that they teach us how to believe.

“Not many people can confront the truth about themselves. If they did they’d run a mile, would take an immediate and profound dislike to the person in whose skin they’d learned to sit quite tolerably all these years.”

Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts.