When I was a boy I had a sleepover with my cousin Mark, who lived on a farm about twenty miles from my town. I don’t remember how old I was but I will never forget the deep anxiety that settled over me when Mark and I hopped into our bunk beds and my aunt…

You can’t always get what you want But if you try sometime you might find You get what you need -The Rolling Stones If God really loved us he would give us what we ask for. That’s the assumption we bring to prayer. But what if God sometimes withholds something precisely because of his love?…

Consider the analogy of energy circuits: Most of us are relay stations; only a minority are transformers—people who actually change the electrical charge that passes through us. -Richard Rohr Unless you’re nothing like me, we all like to transmit our pain. Grumpy people want the whole house to know just how grumpy they really are….

I excel at self-diagnosis. When I developed continuous pain in my right knee, I decided that I needed that simple little arthroscopic surgery I once had on my other knee. They trimmed my meniscus and I was good to go. Accordingly, I made an appointment with an orthopedic doc. I’d get an MRI. Then I’d…

There’s an old Irish legend of “The Bell and the Blackbird” that I found in a poem by David Whyte. It’s the image of a monk standing out on the edges of the monastery grounds, hearing the chapel bell calling him to prayer and thinking, “That is the most beautiful sound in the world.” In…