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 […]
Belief
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 […]
Why Is Prayer Such A Struggle?
How I pray is breathe.” -Thomas Merton I grew up with the slogan, “Prayer changes things,” which I believed. I was just wrong about what got changed. I thought it could change my lot, save my soul, rescue people I cared about. I hoped I could change God’s mind. Not surprisingly, that kind of prayer […]
Is God Omnipotent?
Most of us were taught that, along with being omniscient and omnipresent, God is omnipotent. But it’s hard to love a God Almighty. Omnipotent isn’t in the Bible. It’s a term coined by thinkers influenced by Greek philosophy, who saw God as infinitely above us, the pinnacle of perfection. He—and the omnipotent deity definitely has […]
The Power of the Act
Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “The act teaches you the meaning of the act.” This is pure wisdom, but we have mostly counseled its reverse. We have tried to teach people the meaning first to see if we might coax them into the act. If we taught people to believe that God calls us to love […]
Letting Beliefs Go
This morning I read this: A broad group of scholars is beginning to demonstrate that religious belief and factual belief are indeed different kinds of mental creatures. First of all, they have noticed that the very language people use changes when they talk about religious beings, and the changes mean that they think about their […]
The God I Don’t Believe In
Last week I heard Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, the writer and scholar of the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, interviewed on the radio. He told a story that I haven’t forgotten. Rabbi Kushner was invited to a dinner for a class of young people preparing for their bar or bat mitzvah. Classes completed, they had come […]
You Don’t Have to Be Good
The things people tell a minister after church. . . . Yesterday a woman I did not know spoke to me after church—she was there for a baptism. I heard about the church of her childhood, where “salvation” was attained by refraining from smoking and drinking and dancing and cursing. It was a rigid theology […]