I’m rereading Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, first published in 1963 (I read it probably in the late 1970s or early 1980s). Here is a conversation where the narrator asks Miss Faust, a secretary at the General Forge and Foundry Company, about a memorable conversation she might have had with Dr. Felix Hoenikker, the late Nobel-Prize winning physicist and creator of ice-nine.

“Do any conversations stick in your mind?”

“There was one where he bet I couldn’t tell him anything that was absolutely true. So I said to him, ‘God is love.’”

“And what did he say?”

“He said, ‘What is God? What is love?’” 1

Vonnegut’s narrator doesn’t have much to say about this. But I sure find it interesting. And probably because I’m sympathetic to both Miss Faust and Dr. Hoenikker’s perspectives. Like the secretary, I’m willing to say “God is love” is absolutely true. And like the physicist, I’m endlessly curious as to what words like God and love mean, after all.

None of us knows for sure.

From the perspective of contemplative or mystical spirituality, I think questions like “What is God?” or “What is love?” (and we can add to them a third, a question Pontius Pilate posed to Jesus of Nazareth: “What is truth?”) are beautiful doorways into the plenitude of the unnameable infinite.

Ultimately, God, truth, and love are simply three faces of mystery: words that open up into vast unknowing, unilluminable darkness, and certain uncertainty. They are not puzzles for us to crack open or enigmas for us to solve. These are wonders in the purely ineffable sense: invitations into an interior passage where the reality of language’s limitations is an entryway into freedom, not a punishment, not a claustration.

These mysteries never ask us to submit to a confinement of our will and our intellect, but rather always to embrace the infinite possibilities that only life in the Spirit can give us.

For if we could define words and concepts like God or truth or love, that would mean they are small enough for mortals to comprehend or control. The only way for God to be fully divine, for Love to be eternal compassion, for truth to be universal reality, is for these words to point not to a grounded finality, but to a boundless openness. What might seem fearful to those who requires dogmatic certainty is endlessly beautiful to all who accept mystical possibility.

The Buddhist writer Longchenpa compared nondual awareness to the sky.

“Mind, continual source of meanings, is like the sky:
The sky is Mind, genuine meaningfulness,
Without duality, complete and identical with itself —
Understand it thoroughly straight away.”1

Longchen Rabjam Drimé Özer (1308–1364) was a Tibetan Buddhist scholar and yogi. His name literally means, “The Vast Expanse.”

He was a prolific writer and is regarded as one of the most important teachers of his lineage, the Nyingma tradition. These words come from his treatise Now That I Come to Die, his final words of instruction offered to his disciples. The sky is Mind.

It’s an image that shows up again and again among practitioners of meditation. Ambient musician Ray Lynch titled his first CD The Sky of Mind, and an anthology of Buddhist writings from the Beat generation is called Big Sky Mind. But what makes this metaphor so useful?

English composer John Tavener (1944–2013) composed a luminous setting for a beautiful Russian Orthodox liturgical text, the “Akathist of Thanksgiving.”2 Originally composed in 1929 by Metropolitan Tryphon, this hymn had been translated into English by a British Abbess, Mother Thecla. The Akathist of Thanksgiving is filled with beautiful imagery celebrating the glories of the natural world — including these lines:

You led me into this life, as an enchanting paradise.
We saw the sky as a deep blue chalice
In whose azure rings out the song of birds.
We heard the peace-making noise of the forest,
And sweet-sounding music of waters;
We ate fragrant and sweet fruits and scented honey.
It is good in your home on earth, joyous to be your guests.

This striking way of seeing the sky brings together the Eucharistic heart of contemplative Christianity with the vast, spacious, serene view of Buddhist teachings on meditation. When we tend to our interior silence, we enter into a sacred awareness similar to how going outdoors places us in the sky — in the “deep blue chalice.”

One way meditation is like the sky: the “weather” can vary from day to day (or from hour to hour). Sometimes it is quite cloudy, or stormy, or foggy, or dark. At other times it can be luminous and glistening. We learn to love the sky however it may be — twilight or stormy skies can be beautiful in their own way, just as a bright sunlit “blue chalice” is glorious to behold. There’s no point in getting grumpy when the sky is overcast (although I know we all do it from time to time); it’s better to accept and embrace the unique beauty of the sky just as it happens to be at the present moment.

Doesn’t the silent attentiveness of contemplation work the same way? In other words, sometimes our minds and hearts are “sunny” or “cloudy” or “stormy” — sometimes brilliant, or dark as night, or mellow like the twilight. And while it might be human nature to desire the bright clear sky and chafe against all the other “weather conditions,” anyone seasoned in a practice like Centering Prayer learns that it is best to appreciate whatever is present, however spacious or turbulent the experience might be. When we rely on the sacred word and a sense of trust that it cultivates within us, we know that it might open us to a deeper and clearer silence at any time.

The experience of contemplative silence is an encounter with the interior sky. It can be simply a symbol for the quality of consciousness at any given moment, or it can also be a beautiful blue symbol of the chalice of divine presence. Personally, I’ll take both of these ways of receiving the spiritual metaphor of the sky. Like Longchenpa, I’ll seek to “understand it thoroughly straight away” so that my inner landscape might be more open, available, and conducive to the fruit of deep prayer.

What is prayer? I don’t know really. But if it’s anything, it must be a repository for the experience of today, a place for reckoning, with yourself, with the story of God that you tell or don’t tell, with the decisions you’re facing, with the guts of yourself. — Pádraig Ó Tuama 1

When I was a teenager, I knew a girl who used to say to people, “I love your guts”! Then she would explain that if you really hated someone, you’d say “I hate your guts,” so obviously to love someone’s viscera is, well, pretty special.

And now here comes Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama, who admits he has no idea what prayer is, but links whatever it is to our guts. Prayer is a place of reckoning — and that right there is a delicious pun, for here in the American South when someone says “I reckon” they basically mean they believe something to be true. But I imagine in Belfast “a place for reckoning” probably carries much more weight, something more along the lines of a setting where everything gets examined carefully, and what is real is seen and said for what it truly is.

So casual affirmation or in-your-guts responsibility — either way, prayer is a place where something happens. It’s deep, it’s in your heart, your intestines. It’s here and now, in the present moment, and it’s experiential: embodied, not merely thought about. But this embodied reality dances like Ginger Rogers with the story we tell (or fail to tell) about “God” — whatever that is. I’m reminded of the definition of God attributed to Barry Taylor, the AC/DC roadie who became an Episcopal priest: “God is the name of the blanket we throw over mystery to give it shape.”

So what is the story we tell (or don’t tell) about that blanket-enfolded Mystery? And how does it land in our heart, in our faith (or lack thereof), in our moment of deepest accountability or merely in the radical freedom of the present moment? Give your answer for that question to that Mystery and you have prayer.

I can imagine someone replying, “But — does prayer have to be so… heavy? I was just going to ask God to help me balance my budget.”

Okay, so not every prayer rocks the entire cosmos. Or maybe it does? Maybe that frantic plea for a parking spot when you’re ten minutes late for a meeting that could change your life, really does matter. And maybe in those desperate words, you’re reckoning with your guts far more deeply than you realize. Think about this for a bit, and perhaps contemplative silence could begin to make a lot more sense — and call us into its prayerful presence.

Alexandra Elene MacLean Denny (1947-1978), better known by her nickname Sandy, was a British singer and songwriter, known for her contribution to the music of bands like the Strawbs, Fairport Convention, and Fotheringay, but also for her four solo albums. To many people of my generation, she might be best known as a guest vocalist on Led Zeppelin’s song “The Battle of Evermore.” She died tragically young, at age 31, after sustaining injuries from falling down a flight of stairs.

At her very last concert, just weeks before her sudden death, she ended the evening by singing “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” a wistful ballad about losing friends as our days inevitably pass — a song that became her signature tune, as well as being covered by artists like Judy Collins and Nina Simone. It’s an achingly beautiful but profoundly sad song, acknowledging the inevitability of grief and loss. Still, the most beautiful moment in the song comes when Denny sings, with an almost angelic defiance, “I have no fear of time.”

Perhaps most people would share Sandy Denny’s courage. But often we dread what time brings to us: inevitable losses of those who die or go away, the limitations of old age, the infirmity of disease, the finality of death. We may not fear time, but we fear what it seems to bring our way.

Yet Denny makes this bold statement in the midst of a song about the necessary losses that come as a result of the passage of time. So she is not in denial when she speaks of having no fear of time. She is a realist, she knows that suffering comes to everyone sooner or later, and still, she faces the inevitable from a place of fearlessness.

Take it further: not only does she lack dread — she seems to actually trust time. For most of us, this could only be possible through the grace of contemplation. Which makes me wonder if we (all of us) relate to time in a manner similar to how we relate to God. So many people seem to carry a quiet awe for God that too easily prevents us from ever seeking divine intimacy. We try not to be offensive or rambunctious, we keep a respectful distance. As a Mennonite friend of mine once said, “We watch God the way the mouse watches the cat.” This might help us to maintain a polite religious observance, but does not ultimately nurture the soul.

By contrast, the First Letter of John reminds us that, spiritually speaking, love casts out fear. Perhaps for Sandy Denny, time is not only to be trusted, but even to be loved.

What could life be like if we accepted, affirmed, and even cherished the relentless passage of time? I’m not sure that any of us could answer that question, left to our own devices. But “with God all things are possible,” especially grace. Grace helps us to choose love and confidence over angst and self-protection. It’s not a magic bullet, of course, but it is a quality of a life well lived. May we all find the capacity to trust the flow of life’s passage, and to live in a manner consistent with the faith that the life-giving Spirit places in us.

Unfortunately, almost no video footage of Sandy Denny is available; but here is a brief clip of her with Fairport Convention in 1975 that gives you a taste of her heavenly voice.

Mystery Beyond All Naming,

Be with me in my faith and in my doubt.

Be present when I effortlessly trust in your loving grace, and when I question all concepts, all myths, all images associated with you.

Guide me to remain non-attached and serenely indifferent to the questions that swirl around you and through you.

Help me to remember that uncertainty is not the enemy of faith, nor its opposite. Illuminate my eyes so that I may realize what a gift a centered and contemplative doubt can be.

Show me those places where shame can be released, where anxiety can be assuaged, and where judgment can be gently surrendered into the infinite splendor of love.

Breathe with me, so that I may find love, truth, beauty, wonder, and goodness in every breath, and so that I may find limitless nurture in limitless silence.

And having received so many graces from you, inspire me to be a source of blessings and healing and compassionate care for others as well.

All this I ask in your unspeakable name and unknowable knowing.

Amen.

This prayer is inspired by Brian McLaren’s enormously helpful book Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do About It (St. Martin’s Press, 2021). Brian offers a roadmap for adult spirituality, going through four periods of simplicity, complexity, perplexity, and harmony; and he points out how a crisis of belief is often the psychological process that ushers us from one dimension of faith to the next. It is also inspired by an old Buddhist saying that there are three essential elements to Zen practice: great faith, great doubt, and great perseverance (or determination).1

Those who walk the contemplative path might feel tempted to shy away from perplexity or questioning; I know that when I am gripped by uncertainty, it generally feels like I have a problem that needs to be solved. But what if such a crisis of disbelief is not the enemy of spiritual growth, but rather its helper and initiator? If any one stage of faith is like children’s teeth, then isn’t doubt the equivalent to a tooth falling out? Perhaps it’s a bit unpleasant, but ultimately necessary and life-giving because it creates the space in our hearts for a more mature spirituality to take root. But unlike baby teeth that fall out only once in a lifetime, faith can yield to doubt over and over again throughout the lifespan, since we are (at least potentially) always available to grow spiritually.

We comfort our children when they lose their teeth by promising them a visit from the tooth fairy — a Tinkerbellian equivalent to Santa Claus who visits the child at night to remove the tooth from under their pillow, replacing it with a gift of money (when I was young the “payout” was generally 10-25¢ per tooth; I imagine nowadays most kids are expecting at least a dollar if not five!)

If a “faith fairy” could visit us at night to console us every time we’ve traded our belief for doubt, perhaps we would be more willing to go there, trusting that an inner crisis is not necessarily faith destroyed, but often is simply a cocooning of the heart — a caterpillar’s self-giving to make way for a new butterfly of deeper spiritual meaning and purpose.

July 14 is International Non-Binary People’s Day. Non-binary refers to a sense of gender as being neither exclusively male nor female — a word that describes an embodied experience, not just some sort of political or ideological viewpoint.

For those of us who are contemplative or journeyers along the mystical way (regardless of our gender identity), I think we can discern a fascinating point of convergence between non-binary gender and non-dual spirituality.

To have non-dual consciousness means to be someone whose way of seeing emphasizes what unites us rather than what divides us. Mystically speaking, this primarily means to see union with God as a more real and pervasive reality than the sense of being separate from God (even though it is normal to have that sense of separation). Non-dual spirituality does not pretend that dualities don’t exist: there are still real distinctions between good and evil, healthy and unhealthy, heaven and earth, and so forth. But a non-dual consciousness sees a unity that is deeper and more stable than even the most all-encompassing distinction. “Evil” people are still deeply loved by God. Democrats and Republicans share a common humanity that matters more than our adversarial politics (yes, I know that one’s hard).

Richard Rohr calls Jesus the first non-dual teacher in the West, and I think that’s an apt and mystically illuminating recognition.

Compare that with this fascinating, if startling, insight from activist Jacob Tobia (b. 1991): “You also know that Jesus was nonbinary… God is clearly too big, too wise, too omnipotent to have an easily discernible binary human gender. I mean, God made all the genders, so clearly God isn’t just one. God is genderless, or rather, genderful.”1

Feminist and queer theologians and spiritual teachers have been pointing out for years how limiting it is to reduce God to just the masculine gender. To say “God is our Father” is to negate the beautiful insights that come from calling God our Mother. Of course, even feminist theologians readily acknowledge that it would be just as narrow and limiting to view God as exclusively feminine.

If God is neither exclusively masculine nor exclusively feminine, doesn’t it make sense to describe God as non-binary?

Non-binary is a word that gender-nonconforming people have been using for some time now to describe the experience of sensing one’s gender identity as neither fully male nor fully female (regardless of what the person’s biological sex might be)2. But like non-dual, the weakness of the word is that it is fundamentally negative: it stops at saying what it is not, leaving no space to affirm what it positively is.

For Jacob Tobia, God is genderful: God’s gender encompasses all possibilities. It is therefore a non-dual gender, and perhaps human beings who are non-binary can find within their gender identity a path to a non-dual appreciation of the mystery of human gender — or even the mystery of divine love.

But just as genderful is a wonderful alternative to non-binary, we contemplatives need a positive word to balance non-dual. My votes goes to unitive, the word Evelyn Underhill uses to describe the experience of union with God (what traditionally has been described as theosis or deification, theological terms to point to the experience of divine union).

To be unitive is to be “Godful” and therefore to see all things through the eyes of divine love. May we all open our hearts to such a heavenly perspective.

Recently I led a day of reflection for an ecumenical group of lay ministers. Our theme was “Creating a Personal Rule of Life.” Inspired by the covenants that govern monastic and other religious communities, a personal rule of life is an individual statement anyone can create to express their aspirations for a disciplined and regular spiritual practice. It’s almost like a personal mission statement for the mystical life.

As I was preparing for this event, I recalled a book I read years ago, called Wishcraft. As the punny title implies, it’s about the “magic” of achieving one’s goals, although its advice is actually quite down to earth. One point the author of that book made was to assert that writing down your specific goals put you much closer to actually achieving them than if they were simply fond ideas in your head.

In fact, researchers at California’s Dominican University studied the correlation between writing goals and achieving them; their findings suggest that people who write down their goals on a regular basis are 42% more likely to achieve them than those who don’t. 1

Now, here’s the catch: the spiritual life is not about setting and achieving goals — or, at the very least, that’s not the central point.

We can get so caught up in creating a spiritual task list that it can actually be deeply counterproductive. If we turn the invitation to a deeper spirituality into a set of obligations and must-obey rules, we can actually set ourselves up for a subtle kind of resistance — if not outright rebellion.

Spiritual practices such as Centering Prayer, the Daily Office, lectio divina, and Ignatian/imaginative prayer are like any other discipline that we can undertake: sooner or later, the novelty wears off. What initially feels like an exciting commitment can eventually turn into a kind of pointless drudgery.

The real heart of a spiritual rule of life is not a list of action items to complete every day (or every year) — even if it is, indeed, helpful to have a clear sense of how we want to be disciplined in our spiritual life. But far more important than the to-do list is what I might call the to-love list: or maybe the to-love statement.

Spiritually speaking, a personal rule of life is a statement of love. We love God. We love our neighbors. We love ourselves. We love the earth and even those we find difficult to relate to. Any commitment we make to our regular practice only makes sense when it is an expression of our commitment to love.

The contemplative life prioritizes the grace of being over the necessity of doing (even though the doing may be very important indeed). So when it comes to creating a personal rule of life, choose the being of love first, and then the doing a disciplined spiritual life will sort itself out, sooner or later. If love leads, discipline will follow.

I first heard of the desert father Evagrius Ponticus when I read a book by church historian Roberta Bondi, where she wrote this electrifying sentence, “Evagrius Ponticus taught a highly disciplined kind of “imageless prayer” or “pure prayer” that was very similar to Zen meditation.” 1

When I read those words, I had been engaged for about a decade with the practice of silent, meditative prayer as taught to me through Shalem, a Christian contemplative ministry. But I was also very much interested in Buddhism in general, and Zen in particular, thanks to my engagement with counterculture writers like Alan Watts or Ram Dass. Intuitively, it seemed to me that contemplative prayer and zazen were similar practices: after all, silence is silence is silence.

What I lacked was any sense of historical perspective that could help me to see the underlying spiritual unity beneath and between these two religious practices. Evagrius Ponticus (346-399) provided me with a 4th-century bridge to that unity.

When I turned to the ancient writer himself, I was not disappointed. Many of his writings have been preserved as short, aphoristic sayings, similar to what one might expect from a desert elder. His most spiritually accessible writings have been preserved in two works, Praktikos — which could be translated into English as “The Practical Life (of Contemplation)” — and the Chapters on Prayer. These have been published in a combined volume by Cistercian Publications.

Like so much of the literature from the early Christian desert monks, some of it seems harsh or even dualistic — overly concerned with self-denial or moral purification. But that’s typical for the writing of his time.

Nevertheless, when he gets down to the business of offering advice on prayer, his words quickly become luminous.

Stand guard over your spirit, keeping it free of concepts at the time of prayer so that it may remain in its own deep calm. — Evagrius Ponticus, Chapters on Prayer 2

We do not “stand guard” over our spirit like a prison warden watching an inmate; we keep watch like a faithful sentinel tasked with protecting our heart while it settles into its “deep calm” held lovingly in the arms of God. Concepts — distracting or disturbing thoughts or images — may not necessarily be bad, but during the time of contemplation they need to be kept away from the tender vulnerability of the soul’s silent center. To stand guard like this is to set gentle boundaries as an act of love: love for the divine, of course, but also a most appropriate and healthy self-love.

Even within a single religious framework like Christianity, mysticism has an unnerving tendency to contradict itself and deconstruct itself in bewildering and playful ways. — The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism1

Anyone who has ever lived with a kitten knows that they are tiny furry agents of chaos. More than once I have heard my wife mutter under her breath “God made them cute so we wouldn’t kill them” as she dealt with whatever the latest kittenly swath of destruction might be. From broken glass or claw marks on the curtains, to the ungodly banshee wails that they could emit when rumbling with each other (how can something so very tiny emit such banshee-level sounds?), the one thing you can safely predict about kittens (well, and really cats in general), is simply how hopelessly unpredictable they are.

But they are cute! Adorable, funny, charming, affectionate, endearing. When one of those five-pound balls of claws and fur climbs into your lap and starts to purr, it is just about the sweetest thing anyone can experience (with due acknowledgment that those who are allergic to cat dander will naturally have a very different response).

I suppose it might be stretching most people’s imaginations to compare God to a kitten. But maybe it’s not quite so far a leap to assume that we human beings might be like kittens in the eye of God! Maybe we are not all cute and cuddly, but I rather think that chaos follows us mortals around the way a kitten will tag along behind whatever human it has bonded with.

I bring this up to comment on a sentence you’ll find in chapter two of The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism. I aver that mysticism can be internally self-contradictory and fosters the experience that we have come to call “deconstruction” — to enter the mystical life is to render ourselves vulnerable to a kind of spiritual (and/or religious) chaos.

The apostle Paul insisted that religious activities should be performed “decently and in order.”2 In other words, don’t put the kittens in charge. And I might add, don’t put the mystics in charge either.

It’s not that contemplatives are hostile to dignity and good order! But there’s a quality in the mystical life that places the liberating action of the Spirit above all other concerns. Sometimes our staid and stuffy ways of doing things need a kitten-quality shake-up. Such destabilizing moments can be upsetting — but if we listen carefully, they might result in some purring as well.

Join me for an online conversation on some of the ideas and themes in The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism! This free Zoom call takes place July 22, 2026 at 7 PM EST. Everyone is welcome, but pre-registration is required. Click here to register.

Why do people embrace meditation, mindfulness practice, zazen, or centering prayer?

Certainly there are many reasons. Some, no doubt, are seeking spiritual growth. Those who desire a closer relationship with God or the Spirit may seek out practices like these in order to foster that sense of divine intimacy.

And others might be looking for a more down-to-earth benefit. I, for one, first became interested in meditation when I was in college, and for a very simple reason: I wanted to be able to manage my anxiety better.

I can’t say that I experienced meditation as a cure-all, but it certainly helped. And even though from the beginning I had a vague sense that meditation offered a promise for spiritual growth or even enlightenment, what kept me coming back to the practice was an intuitive sense that it helped me to regulate my tendency to feel fear, anxiety, or even panic.

I know other people embrace meditation to help them sleep better, or to provide a spiritual context to their recovery journey (in 12-step parlance, meditation makes for a great “11th step” activity), or to manage pain more effectively. I imagine some people might even take on a meditation practice in order to alleviate depression or to improve their productivity, although I personally don’t know anyone whose motivations are specifically like this.

Nevertheless, I think it’s fair to say that many people might explore a meditation practice, or even begin such a practice, motivated by a desire to see what meditation can do for them. In other words, meditation is worth pursuing because it is a means to an end.

Now, I also know people, usually dedicated practitioners of a meditation method that they learned in a religious context (like zen within Buddhism or centering prayer within Christianity), who disapprove of such a benefit-based approach to spiritual practice. It’s a logic I certainly understand, and I have used it myself: “reducing centering prayer (or any other meditation method) to just a means to an end is to strip it of much of its value. Meditation is its own reward, and the benefits it offers us should be seen as bonus blessings, and not the main point behind the practice. Making meditation be about its benefits is basically making it a transactional tool for personal wellness, not a powerful means to spiritual liberation or enlightenment.”

I understand that some people might be troubled by what has been called “McMindfulness.” Just as a fast food chain might strip the nutrients away from the items on its menu, prioritizing convenience and profit over wholesome nourishment, so-called McMindfulness implies that the truly spiritual nurturing qualities of meditation have been stripped away in our culture in order to promote wellness methods that can be simply taught, commercialized, and monetized. You get the “benefits” but none of the challenges (like a call to humility, sacrifice, or ethical living) that have historically gone hand-in-hand with a serious spiritual practice.

As understandable as that critique might be, over time I have begun to question whether it’s really helpful to put down “McMindfulness.” It seems to me that when we do that, we are being judgy if not moralistic, which does little to make a more traditional meditation discipline appealing, at least to those who experience our negative judgment.

I do think that secular or “McMindful” practices are probably less conducive to deep interior growth than more traditional and rigorous contemplative methods. My own journey has borne this out. Over time, I became more drawn to meditation not just for what it could “do for me” but as an unconditional spiritual practice that I saw as a free gift I could offer to the Spirit. Paradoxically, by doing this my sense of how meditation benefited or transformed me grew deeper. It seems that letting go of a desire for personal benefit created the space for meditation to become more beneficial than ever before.

The analogy I like to use is that meditation is like diving into a swimming pool. Benefit-based meditation — whether for mental health wellness, or to support recovery, or whatever — is like swimming in the shallow end of a pool. It is an authentic “swimming” experience, but it can only take you so deep. To get to the deeper side of the water, where you are no longer able to stand on the floor of the pool, requires a willingness to trust the meditation practice for itself, and let go of the need or desire to get something from it.

Keeping to the shallow end of the pool is perfectly fine. It’s definitely an experience of swimming, and it seems to be truly safe and more accessible. I won’t criticize those who are swimming at the shallow end — but I do want them to know that there is a much richer and deeper experience that is available for when they are available to take the plunge. A deeper practice, promising no reward beyond itself, needs stronger boundaries to keep safe — but it offers a lifetime of spiritual growth and transformation to anyone willing to embrace such inner work carefully and respectfully.

In the contemplation of the earth, I know that I am surrounded by the love of God. — Howard Thurman1

Howard Thurman (1899-1981) was a theologian, mystic and visionary who mentored Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders in the Civil Rights Movement. His writing is lyrical, elegant, and imbued deeply with a compassionate contemplative way of seeing into the heart of things.

When I started my “Mystical Journey” Substack newsletter, my first post, on All Saints’ Day 2024, featured this quotation from Howard Thurman. At the time, I didn’t write a reflection on it — I simply let the quote speak for itself. Recently, I decided I needed to revisit this particular nugget of wisdom, and what better day to do this than Juneteenth?

It comes from Thurman’s luminous book of meditations, Meditations of the Heart, which were originally written for the benefit of his congregation at The Fellowship Church in San Francisco (one of the few fully integrated Christian communities in the USA at that time). The meditations are deceptively simple, accessible to everyone — but underneath a sheen of ordinary religious piety is a deep, beautiful, contemplative view. This particular line comes from a meditation called “Surrounded by the Love of God,” where Thurman considers the earth, the events of ordinary days, and the “edge of hope” as but three examples of ways he could know what it means to be immersed in the splendor of Divine Love.

Thurman wrote this meditation some 75 years ago. Today we struggle with political division, profound wealth inequality, and a planet that is suffering under the consequences of human consumption. The temptation to cynicism is great. It’s important to remember that for Howard Thurman, living under the shadow of Jim Crow was an equally great (if not greater) temptation to despair. And yet Thurman, like so many others, found even in the face of grave injustice repeated evidence of the ubiquity of God’s love — which of course also means, the ever-present reality of the call to justice and peacemaking.

May we all join Howard Thurman in refusing cynicism and despair, contemplating the sacred earth, and finding empowerment in Divine Love to work for the greater good of all.

Whether or not we identify as Christian, do we have a duty to be happy? Or a duty to be joyful and embody delight?

No doubt many would find this a strange, if not downright bizarre, question. Duty, for those who still believe in such things, is linked to self-sacrifice, to austerity, to a kind of self-denial in service of some greater good (whether it be the nation, or God, or even the world). A century ago, large segments of British and American society accepted values such as the nobility of sacrifice and the virtue of obedience. During World War I, many (not all) people would have accepted that these values are praiseworthy and important. For that matter, they would have regarded it as suspicious not to uphold such values.

Granted, there were dissenters, but generally speaking, concepts like duty would have been far more widely affirmed by society at large in the days of the Great War.

C. S. Lewis and Dorothy Day were near contemporaries (she was barely a year older than him); he briefly served during WWI, and both were in the late teens during the conflict. Despite their differences (gender, nationality, and politics), they were both destined to become world-renowned Christians, but not until several years after the War ended. Given these parallels, is it surprising that they both, independently, came up with a provocative insight into the duty of living an optimal life?

It is not easy always to be joyful, to keep in mind the duty of delight. — Dorothy Day1

It is a Christian duty, as you know, for everyone to be as happy as he can. — C. S. Lewis2

Let’s ignore Lewis’s archaic masculine language; he wrote these words in 1955 (Dorothy Day wrote hers before 1952). We’re back to our original question: is it fair to think of our relationship to joy, to happiness, to delight, in terms of duty? Do we owe our best life to God, however you may envision the Divine?

Both Jack Lewis and Dorothy Day would unhesitatingly say “Yes, of course.”

To my postmodern ears, duty sounds like the opposite of happiness, joy, and delight. To link those qualities with duty seems to risk poisoning the pleasures of life as given to us through grace. But I have to ask: is the problem here not with duty itself, but with my understanding of duty?

After all, duty is a reminder that none of us are truly, in the end, pure individuals. For better or worse, our lives are always lived in the context of some sort of community and relationships. If we let go of the cynical beliefs that make it fashionable to reject duty, perhaps we can be open to a much more radical idea. When we are innocently happy or joyful or full of delight, this not only brings us pleasure, but it’s something that strengthens all our relationships — including our relationship with the Divine.

This revelation does not make me a better person. I am only better if I love God better. And if it makes you love God better, the vision is more for you than for me. I am not saying this to those of you who are wise, for you already know it well. But as for those who are simple, like me, you may draw comfort and strength from this account. We are all one in love. — Julian of Norwich1

When I used to work for the Trappist monks here in Georgia, one elderly monk in particular used to tease me and put me down, practically every chance he got. It got to the point where I just assumed he didn’t like me very much. Then, one day, I was speaking with another layperson, and this particular monk came up in the conversation. “You know he thinks the world of you,” my friend said. “Really?” I replied, incredulously. “You couldn’t tell from the way he keeps poking at me.” “That’s monastic culture,” she replied with a laugh, going on to explain that the monks had a tendency to say things about each other that, on the surface, seemed teasing or even cruel, but were actually meant to keep each other humble.

I don’t know if this was really a characteristic of monastic life in general, or simply a quirk of this particular priest. But I do know that one of the potential pitfalls of monastic culture is ego inflation — the tendency to see oneself as especially blessed or favored by God, particularly after receiving any kind of mystical experience.

After all, if you had a deep experience of union with God, wouldn’t it be all too easy to jump to the conclusion that God, therefore, must be particularly fond of you — which in turn would seem to imply that you therefore must be… special?

Recognizing how ego inflation could easily accompany any meaningful experience of God, it is illuminating to see how the medieval visionary Julian of Norwich understood her own visionary experiences — most notably in relation to other people. Julian refused to entertain any idea that her visions (“This revelation”) made her a better, or holier, person. She got it that mystical experiences are not, in themselves, the point. “I am only better if I love God better,” she bluntly states, as she points out that anyone who reads about her visions, and consequently loves God better than she does, is ultimately more of a “visionary” (mystic) than Julian herself. Eventually, this train of thought takes Julian directly to nonduality — for her line of thinking concludes, “we are all one in love.” This oneness leaves no room for any suggestion that any one of us is better than anyone else.

Mysticism, including mystical experience, is never about figuring out who is closer to God, or “better” than anyone else. On the contrary, at its purest, mystical spirituality undermines pecking orders and social hierarchies. It really makes no difference whether you are a visionary or not. We are all one in love. Therefore, the mystical life has only one real purpose: to love.

The study called inspective is that by which we go beyond things seen and contemplate something of things divine and heavenly, beholding them with the mind alone, for they are beyond the range of bodily sight. — Origen of Alexandria1

I once saw a t-shirt with the slogan: “Meditation: Inquire Within.” It’s a clever play on words, but beyond the pun it points to what the ancient Christian mystic Origen of Alexandria called “inspective” contemplation. Inspective is an unusual word: in everyday English the suffix -ive (meaning a tendency or disposition to act in a certain way) is more likely to be used in a word like prospective, which means “the act of looking forward” — like a prospective customer refers to someone who in the future might make a purchase. The word inspect, in ordinary English, means to examine something carefully, and perhaps critically, as in an inspection at work when the boss wants to make sure everyone is doing their job properly. The heart of this word is -spect which means to see: think of spectacles, an old-fashioned word for eyeglasses (although nowadays, a singular “spectacle” singular is an extraordinary sight to see, like clowns making spectacles of themselves at the circus).

In contrast, here we have Origen, using inspect- not to mean some sort of external “inspection” but a more internal seeing. The unusual word inspective therefore means “the act of looking within” — using your imagination to, in Origen’s words, “see and contemplate something of things divine and heavenly.” It’s still a type of “inspection” but now an entirely interior examination, marked not by a careful evaluation of some external object, but perhaps an equally careful scrutiny aimed within. Clearly, this involves something other than our physical eyes!

To be inspective, therefore, is to be engaged with the imagination, calling upon the “inner eyes” of the mind to visualize divine and heavenly things. Origen is fairly coy when he makes this statement, and does not spell out what such exalted “things” might be. But I believe we can assume a visionary “spectacle” of angels, of the saints in paradise, and even of God in God’s three persons.

So we “inquire within” to encounter that which cannot be seen by our physical eyes. I know this is something that skeptics and atheists might scoff at (for example, “angels, just a figment of your imagination”). However, we who engage our mind’s eye from a posture of trust rather than cynicism may keep our minds open to the possibility that the wonders we imagine are spiritually “real,” even if they can never be measured or documented. How do we know that spiritual things are real? Simply by the difference in our lives, especially over time.

For years now, one of my favorite images for the mystery we call God is that of the ocean — probably because I grew up in Virginia, not far from the Atlantic. There, my imagination was inspired by the vast sense of spaciousness where the azure sky met the cerulean water.

Later, when I encountered the wisdom of the seventh-century mystic, Isaac of Syria, I learned that he compared the mercy of God to the vastness of the ocean (by comparison, all the sins of all humanity were nothing more than a handful of dirt, easily washed away by the expansiveness of the ocean!).

So it was a delight to find this nugget of wisdom in The Primacy of Love, a short book by Franciscan theologian and scientist Ilia Delio: “love is an irresistible ocean of attraction whose infinite goodness leads into the heart of God.”1 She goes on to say, “The world is not created ex nihilo, out of nothing, the world is created ex amore, out of the infinite love of God.”2

When I was growing up, most of the images of God that I encountered, whether at home, in church, or through society at large, tended to emphasize God as a patriarchal figure who judged our sins and maybe only begrudgingly gave us eternal life (thanks to the death of Jesus). I have long since abandoned that caricature of the divine mystery, but I know its effect lingers, not only in my life but in society at large.

Failure to trust in the God of infinite love might be a root cause of so much of our social division and individual angst. I’m not suggesting that if everyone agreed that “God is love” suddenly the world would be a perfect place: far from it! But I do believe that a more widespread willingness to meet God through an ocean-like abundance of love would certainly help.

“God is love” — it’s the only time in the Bible that biblical writers offered a succinct and direct definition of God. St. Isaac, Ilia Delio, and others expand on this: God is an ocean of love. May we who follow the mystics take the time to truly ponder what this means, and consider how we can calibrate our lives to this liberating truth.

Thinking matters.

I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood, where I learned at a young age that acting impulsively and thoughtlessly could cause real harm. This ranged from one of my worst childhood moments (breaking a window when mindlessly angry) to witnessing the tragedy of a high school friend going to jail after committing armed robbery.

Spirituality, like life, does not benefit from unthinking actions and choices. What is fundamentalism, after all, but a “thoughtless” (i.e., uncritical) way of reading scripture? A thoughtless religion can lead to shaming people, excluding people, and reinforcing human bigotry rather than working to heal and transform such prejudice.

I feel like I had to write the above two paragraphs to set the proper context for a recurring theme in mystical writing: that it is our heart, not our head, that brings us to divine union. As The Cloud of Unknowing succinctly puts it, “By love, God can be embraced and held, but not by thinking.”1 Cognitive ability — even that of great philosophers — only takes us so far on the spiritual journey.

As much as I love this principle, I think it carries the danger of subtly implying that we can check our minds at the church door. But since that leads to fundamentalism, it can hardly be what the mystics are trying to tell us. Which is why this quote from Richard Rohr is so helpful:

We don’t think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking.2

Rohr eloquently and simply reminds us that an intellectual faith never matters as much as a well-lived or embodied faith. The mind is a great servant but a terrible master; and nowhere is this more true than in the contemplative life. We think carefully and responsibly to protect ourselves from problems like superstition, fundamentalism, implicit bias, and unexamined privilege. We need critical thinking and careful reasoning to sort through the complexities of life. But mystics like Rohr remind us: careful thought must be formed by compassionate living (not the other way around).

When we give our heart to love, compassion, justice, and learning to care the way God cares, we create an inner foundation where a thoughtful mind serves us and protects us well. So let’s not check our minds at the door, rather, may we invite our hearts to be our primary inner guide.

One of the challenges of studying the spiritual tradition of Christianity (or indeed of any wisdom tradition) is recognizing that not all saints or mystics necessarily reach the same level of spiritual maturity. A person can exhibit profound insight and wisdom in one area of their life, and yet appear to be far less evolved in other ways. This is probably true of all of us, even of the greatest saints — and yet the differences can seem more dramatic in some than in others.

A good example of this is Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan friar who died in a Nazi death camp after volunteering to take the place of a stranger in Auschwitz. This sacrificial act not only made him a modern martyr — the “martyr of charity” as Pope Paul VI described him when he was beatified — but also became the defining moment of his too-short life. Pope John Paul II canonized him in 1982, making him one of the first modern Polish saints.

Unfortunately, the luminous witness of his supreme sacrifice is paired with a kind of theological writing that is far less inspiring. Like his contemporary (and fellow Polish saint and mystic) Maria Faustina Kowalska, his way of describing his spiritual worldview comes across as harsh and almost dualistic. Rather than celebrating the infinite love of God, he focuses on the problem of sin, the threat of Satan, and an almost naive rejection of modern science (he heaps particular scorn on the theory of evolution). Much of this is no doubt cultural: St. Maximilian died twenty years before the Second Vatican Council, so his language and theology are much more shaped by traditionalist Catholic theology, not to mention the harsh realities of Europe during Nazism. My honest assessment is that he could have easily been little more than a footnote in the history of 20th-century European theology — if not for the truly heroic way his life ended.

And perhaps it is fitting that the martyr of charity is known for this observation:

A person is great and becomes a witness and a teacher, capable of leaving an authentic message to the world, not so much on account of what one says or writes, but for what one is and what one achieves. What one says or writes deserves attention only insomuch as it is an expression of what one is or does.1

In other words, the flaws and limitations of St. Maximilian’s theological and spiritual writings are not nearly as important as the profound heroism and beauty of his final act of caring for another human being. That’s what we are meant to remember of him.

I do not mean to anger or offend the many people who find Kolbe’s life and witness meaningful and inspiring. Many mystics and saints cast a shadow, some longer than others. The point here is not to look for reasons to “cancel” or dismiss the mystics for their inevitable hypocrisy. Rather, may we find in the mistakes, limitations, and cultural blind spots of even our most revered spiritual heroes a reminder that we are all wounded and imperfect — all of us, without exception. This means that divine grace, or mystical transformation, is not reserved only for the especially holy, pious, or advanced — it’s meant for everyone, for all who wish to receive the felicity of divine love.

Francis of Assisi is easily the best-loved Christian saint outside of Biblical figures. Known for his simplicity, humility, joy, and love for animals, nature, and those who are poor, it’s pretty hard to find anything unlikeable about him. This makes it all the more gratifying that he is also generally regarded as one of the greatest Christian mystics, in addition to being a great saint.

What is the difference between a saint and a mystic? I’ve described it this way:

A saint is someone who is good and holy, while a mystic is someone who knows God, who embodies the presence of God, and whose life has been transfigured by this divine presence. Put even more briefly, saints embody goodness while mystics embody love.

Clearly, there’s some overlap here. Maybe it’s not even possible to be a mystic without also being at least something of a saint — and vice versa. After all, great mystical teachers from the second century through the twentieth have suggested that purification is an essential first step in the mystical life. In other words, let go of whatever separates you from divine love, in order to be one with that love. This purifying process — driven by grace, of course — not only makes us more available to be mystics, but also makes saints of us.

There’s too much to say about Saint Francis to easily encapsulate in a short devotional meditation like this one. So let’s just attend to his own words:

Where there is charity and wisdom there is neither fear nor ignorance.
Where there is patience and humility, there is neither anger nor disturbance.
Where there is poverty with joy, there is neither covetousness nor avarice.
Where there is inner peace and meditation, there is neither anxiousness nor dissipation…
Where there is mercy and discernment, there is neither excess nor hardness of heart.
— Francis of Assisi, Admonition 27

Whether we are talking about sanctification (the process of becoming a saint) or deification (the process of becoming a mystic), it seems that at the heart of such an interior transformation is a simple commitment to releasing qualities and values that corrode our hearts and our lives, and replacing them with values that foster compassion, felicity, kindness, and serenity. Don’t fight what is “less than” — simply follow the advice of Johnny Mercer, and “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive.” When we cultivate love, wisdom, patience, joy, and so forth, we embody the antidotes to those qualities that undermine our happiness. Not only that, but we make ourselves more available for the abundant life that both the saints and the mystics exemplify — and offer us.

Quotation sources:

• McColman, Carl. Christian Mystics: 108 Seers, Saints, and Sages, Kindle Edition, p. xvii.

• Francis and Clare. Francis and Clare: The Complete Works (edited by R. J. Payne; translated by R. J. Armstrong & I. C. Brady), Verbum Edition, p. 35.

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