Articles on Listening
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Learning to See
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. John 1: 5 This year I’ve had to replace my Advent wreath candles one by one as they spent themselves illuminating the darkness. Lit not only for dinner or in the evening, they have burned for long stretches of time at all…
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Inside the Ramparts: A Journey Inwards
We speed past green, rolling hills, pastures full of cows and sheep, and the red roofs of brick towns on the way to the Spanish city of Avila. The three hours on the train pass as quickly as the scenery due to my 85-year-old grandma and my excited conversation about the upcoming pilgrimage: our expectations,…
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The Healing Path
The next time I went to see Thomas Merton for spiritual direction, I asked his permission to spend some time each day alone in the loft of the sheep barn. With Merton’s permission, I began my daily ritual of going to the loft of the sheep barn to pray and be alone with God. One…
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Iona: A Touchstone to a Longer Horizon
The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh loved to tell a parable about a man and his horse. The horse is galloping quickly and everyone who sees the man fly by assumes that he is on a mission, going somewhere important. At some point a man standing along the road shouts at him, “Where are you…
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A Sense of Belonging
Several years ago, during a difficult time in my life, I found comfort in reading books that introduced me to a new way of experiencing God that was different from the AME church I attended as a child, and was different from the Baptist, Methodist and non-denominational churches I found myself cycling through as an…