“How happy are you?” Happiness studies are all the rage these days, and happiness books abound. The most popular courses at Ivy league colleges are devoted to happiness and what it takes to get it. The tricky thing is, happiness surveys are self-reporting. People respond to questions like: I am pleased with the way I […]
Adult Spirituality
The Power To Fall
I remember the day Pam got off the train, from her increasingly miserable daily commute into New York City, and said, “I am done with this.” We had two little girls and I wasn’t earning much in my first job out of seminary. She made more than I did. How were we going to survive? […]
The Return of Innocence: A Week With Two Children
Our grandchildren, ages eight and four, are with us for a week. All day every day. By about day four an adult reaches a saturation point and becomes, in some sense, a child too. After days and nights participating in play, story, physical and imaginative games, make-believe, general silliness, and the deep need for security […]
When Home Isn’t Where You Left It
I think of South Dakota, the place I left on my way to college, as Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone: “The little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve.” But, as I found on my visit last week, time has not unremembered my old home. It’s both the same as ever, and yet dramatically […]
The Bible and The Black Hole
There was an old saying, that people of faith should seek to understand their world with “the Bible in one hand, and the newspaper in the other.” For the last hundred years it’s been increasingly difficult to interpret the Bible, and now nobody trusts a newspaper. Maybe just as well. The idea that we could […]
What If I’ve Lost My Way?
Speaking of her early stage of faith, writer and retreat leader Paula D’Arcy shared a dream in which the kitchen table of her childhood disappeared. That table symbolized the beautiful security of her early years. It was the heart of her childhood home, where she learned her Baltimore Catechism, mastered every question, and came to […]
Are You Spiritually Bypassing?
Every once in a while, you hear a term that perfectly describes something you’ve experienced but didn’t have a name for. That’s how I felt when someone used the phrase “spiritual bypass,” coined by psychologist John Welwood in the 80s. He defined it as a “tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or […]
What Are You Running Away From?
On July 13, 1798, William Wordsworth returned to a specific place along the banks of the Wye River that flows through England and Wales. He sits above the murmuring waters, leaning against a dark sycamore tree. Years have passed and now he sees again the orchard trees, the steep and lofty cliffs, the wreaths of […]