Browse Topics

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.

A Priest Calls On Sunday Night

Renee

This was it — the cool, very weird thing I had been hoping for. I was about to go to a strip joint with a Pentecostal Christian mentally ill recovering alcoholic young lady. These are the moments I live for.

The Acts Of Father Mark

Father Mark replaced the chapel’s crucifix with a dead pigeon he had found on the highway. Many of his parish were outraged.

Four Stories

One day the cocoon hatched. But there was no butterfly. Instead, hundreds and hundreds of baby praying mantes spread across my dresser top and marched down the side.

Dignity And Other Staples

Eating In The Soup Kitchens Of Seattle

On my rounds of the soup kitchens, I learned more than fine distinctions among bad foods. I learned the patience engendered by interminable waiting. I learned the deferential glance, a useful grace that gets one past the guards unchallenged.

Room One

I am in Room One, the first on the left at the top of the wide marble steps, with the rest of the first-graders. The mothers are beginning to leave. A lot of kids are crying. It still has not occurred to me to be afraid.

What The Shadow Knows

An Interview With John Sanford

The Jungian definition of the shadow was put well by Edward C. Whitmont, a New York analyst, who said that the shadow is “everything that has been rejected during the development of the personality because it did not fit into the ego ideal.” If you were raised a Christian with the ego ideal of being loving, morally upright, kind, and generous, then you’d have to repress any qualities you found in yourself that were antithetical to the ideal: anger, selfishness, crazy sexual fantasies, and so on. All these qualities that you split off would become the secondary personality called the shadow. And if that secondary personality became sufficiently isolated, you would become what’s known as a multiple personality.

Idols

Bob Dylan, the Holy Blessed Virgin Mary, J. Pierpont Morgan

Curlews

We are immortal until the hour death first seizes our imagination. This goes for species as well as individuals. To die you must once consider death and think of it as beautiful. All spiritual advances are advances in aesthetics.