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Prayer
A Figure In Black And Gray
What they all have in common is a weakness: an inability to say no to a deeply imprinted call — a call to poverty, chastity, and obedience, strange virtues that had to be flushed out from their hiding places, shown to us, and somehow made desirable. We’re men who, for the most part, had good jobs and degrees but were brought low by something many of us hadn’t really asked for, and to which we all eventually yielded. In the end concession and surrender may be our greatest accomplishments.
March 2010
Sunbeams
April 2009You cannot run away from a weakness; you must sometime fight it out or perish. And if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?
excerpted from
Every Eye Beholds You
To expect to have faith before embarking on the disciplines of the spiritual life is like putting the cart before the horse. In all the great traditions, prophets, sages, and mystics spend very little time telling their disciples what they ought to believe. Indeed, it is only since the Enlightenment that faith has been defined as intellectual submission to a creed.
April 2009The Whiskey Robe
On the screened-in porch of my in-laws’ house in central Massachusetts, I am reading a book. Sipping from the tumbler in my hand helps fight the unseasonable chill in the June air. The ice cubes are shrinking, diluting the alcohol, and clinking every time I raise the glass to my lips.
December 2007
Sunbeams
April 2007I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.
Possessed
There were strange hands on me. Some were small and cold; others seemed large and rough and smelled of sawdust and cinnamon. It was my third time at the new church, but I’d seen nothing like this before. The hands belonged to male church elders, who were encircling me in front of the entire congregation.
April 2007
Free Spirits
I have walked the few blocks down to the pond on campus tonight because I read in the paper that some Buddhists from the local sangha are going to free the souls of a lot of people who were bombed at Hiroshima.
April 2007
The Word That Is A Prayer
One thing you know when you say it: / all over the earth people are saying it with you; / a child blurting it out as the seizures take her, / a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital.
April 2007Praying
A hundred-dollar bill, lemon cookies and a Wink soda, J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey
April 2007
