Browse Topics

Big Ideas

For a long time the whole idea of God is bewildering to a little girl, but in a dreamy and faraway fashion, you know him. Like the moon and the stars across the night’s long distance, you love and fear him.

The God Of My Childhood

Killing God; discovering orgasms; feeling connected by a giant, invisible web linking all things

Confessions Of A Catholic Girl

We were seven years old. The Church believed we had reached the age of reason. I believed that when the priest placed the first holy wafer on my tongue, if I didn’t swallow it, if I could keep it from melting in my mouth, then when I stepped outside the church I would rise into the sky.

Living Through A Spiritual Emergency

Should I start with the apparent beginning, with that frozen January night when I felt suddenly dizzy and lightheaded, when my lungs tightened and my heart spasmed, when the malaria-like tremors began?

Bodhisattva

She saw clearly that God was physical, that God excluded nothing from His being, that there was no sensation or perception but that God was the sensation, perception, and the very consideration of these things.

The Perils Of Self-Realization

A harmonious inner awakening is characterized by a sense of mental illumination that brings insight into the meaning and purpose of life; it dispels doubts, offers the solution to many problems, and gives an inner source of security.

The Path of God

I write that name with hesitation, the pause that accompanies reverence. One does not scribble the name of the Creator casually. One does not toss about the title of the Segmented Deity without a shuddering respect.

The Marvelous Adventure Of Cabeza De Vaca

In the days that followed, in my first desolate confrontation with slaughter, I saw a far-off light, heard a far-off strain of music. Such words serve as well as any: for what words can describe a happening in the shadows of the soul?

Sunbeams

You cannot have both civilization and truth.

Iris Murdoch

Born Too Young: Diary Of A Pilgrimage

(Part Two)

So Jeanne is either with someone and not writing, or writing to Barcelona Poste Restante, as I directed her. I think she has slept with someone by now and probably still is in love with me — that’s my guess. (“I’m lucky with women,” I tell myself.)