Although we may cling to this life and fear its end, beyond death there is mind; and where there is mind, there is uninterrupted display: spacious, radiant, and continually manifesting. — Dzogchen Ponlop1

These words from the Tibetan Buddhist abbot and writer Dzogchen Ponlop (b. 1965) will, no doubt, strike different readers in different ways. To a materialist, these words are absurd. What mind? Perhaps radical materialism is, ultimately, nothing more than a failure of the imagination. If you cannot imagine something beyond the finality of death, is that so very different from a despairing prisoner who no longer can imagine life outside their locked cell?

But even if we are able to conceive of the “mind beyond death” as the abbot describes it, the next question that might arise is, whose mind? Is it my own little, individual mind that greets me in its spacious, radiant, manifesting suchness? Or is it some sort of universal mind, big mind, the mind of the universe, the mind of the All? Is death, as a fall into the “mind beyond,” not unlike the experience of love here on earth, which seems to be a falling into bliss and meaning and a sense of connection?

To theists, the low-hanging fruit here is irresistible; of course the mind beyond death is the mind of God! Even if the word “God” makes you twitch, there are nine billion names to choose from.2 Perhaps the mind of the Goddess, or Atman, or Spirit… what name do you wish to give to that which has no name or all names?

“Silence is God’s first language.” Words from Thomas Keating, with echoes of Rumi and John of the Cross. If this is so, we need no name for the spacious and radiant one. Death, it seems, is continually manifesting (over a million human beings will die this week3). So it makes sense to me that the mind of silence will continually manifest as well.

Perhaps there is really just one fundamental question of life: are we safe? Even if you believe there is no mind after death, how do you answer this question? And for those of us who do say “yes” to mind continually manifesting, we cannot be anything other than safe — for we are in that space that is spacious, radiant, and heart-openingly, beautifully silent.

Note: The following meditation was posted back in April 2025, but I’m sharing it again now in memory of the amazing nature mystic (and gifted writer) Annie Dillard, who passed away on September 15, 2026. Rest in peace, Tinker Creek pilgrim — thank you for your luminous words.

One day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance… Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. — Annie Dillard

In her classic book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard offers a powerful insight into nature mysticism by describing her visionary encounter with a “tree with the lights in it” — which makes me think of the famous lines by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries,
And daub their natural faces unaware…

Both Dillard and Browning remind us that the mystical encounter is for more available to us than we might we realize, but for some inexplicable reason we often miss it. Maybe we’re just too preoccupied with the cares of this world, like Browning’s blackberry pickers; or maybe we keep seeking the vision, like Dillard, only to find it is maddeningly elusive. Wanting the vision of the burning bush or the flame-lit tree is no guarantee that the epiphany will be granted.

What to do, then? We keep watch. We pay attention. And we need to persevere, trusting that the vision of heaven might be granted at any time.

Julian of Norwich said there are two types of prayer: the prayer of seeking God, and the prayer of beholding. We seek the burning bush, the tree with the lights, the mystical vision. We seek the epiphany on the street corner or the angel with the long dart of gold. And sometimes, probably when we least expect, our seeking opens up into beholding. Julian points out that, as sweet as beholding is and as arid as seeking seems, both types of prayer nourish us and please the Spirit. Part of learning to always seek the face of God is learning to understanding that even the seeking of the Divine Face is, itself, a fulfillment.

The contemplative life should not lead us just to suppress the imagination in order to get more pure messages from God. We must allow both for a contemplative prayer in which the imagination has little or no part and for a creative, imaginative, genuinely poetic side in our life. Our imagination must be able to click and find correspondences, symbols and meanings. It should point up new meanings. It should create nuclei of meaning around which everything can collect significantly.

— Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action1

Contemplative practices like Centering Prayer stress the beauty and grace of cultivating what Cynthia Bourgeault calls “objectless awareness” — in other words, a keen awareness that refrains from focusing on any one thing. As part of this process, we rely on a sacred word, phrase, image or even simply the rhythm of the breath, in order to release any internal thought, feeling, or daydream that clamors for our attention. Rather than zeroing in on this or that idea or notion, we release them all lightly, returning ever-so-gently to the sacred word which symbolizes our silent consent to the Spirit working deep within us.

Centering Prayer is a meaningful and spiritually rewarding exercise, and I commend it to anyone who feels called to deepen their spiritual practice through such attentive observance of silence. But it seems wise to remember that wordless meditation is not the only path up the mountain. No matter how beneficial silent prayer is, it is not meant to replace every other means for nurturing inner growth. And the renowned Trappist monk Thomas Merton understood this (even though he would never have called contemplation “Centering Prayer,” since that term was not used until after his death).

Merton sees spiritual methods like Centering Prayer, where “the imagination has little or no part” as needing a complementary practice, in which “a creative, imaginative, genuinely poetic side in our life” has free rein to pray.

While it might be logical and easy to assume that Merton is endorsing Ignatian spirituality here — a type of meditation that uses the imaginal faculty to foster a prayerful encounter with Christ or the saints — I believe Merton sees more possibilities for the imagination than just as a tool to facilitate prayer. He is not just telling us it’s okay to pray using the imagination; he is saying that spirituality needs opportunities where our imaginal potential can be truly creative. As Merton notes, “The imagination should be allowed a certain freedom to browse around, find its own spontaneous material and work with that material.”

What happens when we just let our inner creativity play, without giving it excessive guidelines or boundaries that it must observe? Sometimes, this might lead to aimless meandering, or an experience where all our wondering (and inner wandering) seems to yield little. But Merton knew that a slew of bad or half-baked ideas is the price we pay for the occasional insight that shines and glimmers with inexplicable genius. When we get out of the imagination’s way, it just might choose to dance with the Spirit. At that graced moment, suddenly everything becomes possible.

As I reflect on these words of Merton’s, I am reminded of a concept valuable to me as a writer: reverie. It’s that place where being lost in one’s own thoughts shades off into a pleasant daydream. It’s not practical and there’s no (immediate) profit in it. It also seems to be the opposite of Centering Prayer, where the game is to let all thoughts flow by — not to get lost in them. But when I am writing, I have learned that reverie is an important tool for my creative process. Journalist Burton Rascoe noted that a writer is working even when just staring out the window. What’s true for the writer is true for the contemplative — and the mystic — as well. May we all learn to pair our practice of intentional non-attachment to the reverie that puts us in touch with that creative place deep within us, where the Spirit dwells.

You’ve got what it takes to slow down.

You’ve got what it takes to listen to your heart.

You’ve got what it takes to truly be aware of the present moment.

You’ve got what it takes to find God in all things and in all people.

You’ve got what it takes to breathe slowly and gently and deeply.

You’ve got what it takes to notice the silence between every thought.

You’ve got what it takes to live in gratitude, giving thanks even for the difficult things.

You’ve got what it takes to love your neighbor as yourself — one love, one being.

You’ve got what it takes to open yourself generously to kindness and hospitality.

You’ve got what it takes to ask for what you need and to be receptive with others.

You’ve got what it takes to acknowledge the mystery at the heart of all things.

You’ve got what it takes to cultivate a life shaped by awe and wonder.

You’ve got what it takes to pray without ceasing, to take delight and find joy in the divine, to live in ever-blossoming empathy.

You’ve got what it takes to foster within you all the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and equanimity.

You’ve got what it takes to embody the Beatitudes: to enjoy the happiness that emerges from both the splendor and the challenge of a mystically grounded life.

You’ve got what it takes to see the burning bush, to be caught up into the third heaven, to fall in love with everyone, and to see the gate of heaven everywhere.

You’ve got what it takes to wake up, to notice what is alive and luminous in you and around you, the divine presence revealed here and there and in all things.

You’ve got what it takes to embrace the unknowing, to fearlessly enter the obscure night, to be vulnerable and broken and incomplete, to tell the truth, and to live into the possibilities.

You’ve got what it takes to recover your wholeness: to cleanse yourself, and also to allow the Spirit to bring you healing and renewal and newness of life.

You’ve got what it takes to become fire, to glow with your inner light, to shimmer as you partake of the divine nature, to radiantly shine like the sun.

You’ve got what it takes to embody the darkness, to celebrate rest and leisure as you honor the rhythm of being, mindful of how no breath is complete without the inhale and the exhale.

You’ve got what it takes to recognize what has been mysteriously hidden in you all along: that you are one with God, fully human, fully divine, fully realized, fully becoming, fully you, fully ecstatic, fully ineffable, fully beyond the limits of reason or words — fully divinized, here, now; in this very place, in this very moment.

As the fir-tree lifts up itself with a far different need from the need of the palm-tree, so does each [person] stand before God, and lift up a different humanity to the common Father. And for each God has a different response. —George MacDonald1

George MacDonald (1824-1905) is perhaps best known today as the 19th century fantasy writer who was such a profound inspiration to J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. His children’s books, including The Princess and the Goblin and At the Back of the North Wind, continue to be published in beautiful keepsake editions. John Philip Newell praised MacDonald as an important voice in the modern-day survival of Celtic spirituality, and I would add that he is perhaps one of the most under-rated of mystics from the last 200 years.

The beauty and idiosyncratic splendor of his mystical vision is on full display in his anthology called Unspoken Sermons — “unspoken” because they were written but never preached from a pulpit.2 And among those unspoken sermons, “The New Name” offers a particularly lovely vision of the dynamic nature of divine love.

This sermon reflects on a puzzling verse in the New Testament (Revelation 2:17) that suggests God will give us each a white stone with a unique new name on it when we go to heaven. We each get a unique new name because we are all, each of us, unique expressions of God’s love. Because of this, our capacity to love God is likewise one-of-a-kind. We are all like musical instruments, each of us creating a different melody and sound that will never be expressed by anyone else, throughout all space and time. Our contribution to the beauty of life (both here on earth and eventually in heaven) is not only unique, but uniquely beautiful. If we had never existed, the symphony of heavenly music would be all the poorer for it.

MacDonald seems to be saying something exquisitely simple and beautiful to us:

You matter. Your gift to life, to God, to the universe is irreplaceable and infinitely beautiful. Your very existence is a blessing to everyone. Thank you for being you, and for the life you hold and the love you share.

For a number of years I taught a class on spiritual writing for a continuing education program here in Atlanta. I used several different textbooks over the years; my favorite by far was The Art of Spiritual Writing by Vinita Hampton Wright, who for many years was an editor with Loyola Press in Chicago. I loved this book because it offered wonderful insights into the craft of writing, from journaling to publishing; but also drew clear connections between writing and spiritual practice. This quotation, one of many gems in the book, brings home the author’s gentle, clear-headed wisdom:

Prayer is attentiveness to your life and openness to the day and humility in the face of criticism and resolve in the moments of self-doubt. — Vinita Hampton Wright1

It echoes the wisdom of the French mystic Simone Weil, who said that “absolutely unmixed attention” is prayer.2 Vinita Hampton Wright takes this bit of wisdom and grounds it in the everyday reality of life. Not only to be attentive to your life, but to experience “openness to the day,” so prayer has a present-moment quality to it that is as essential as the attention.

Hampton Wright is not merely offering us spiritual encouragement; she is also providing practical advice to the writer who is hoping to be published some day. For such a person, prayer is an expression of humility: the down-to-earth resilience that enables a person to receive criticism, not with defensiveness or self-abnegation, but as a simple reality of creative work. No matter how good your work may be, to share it with others is to be vulnerable to rejection or criticism. This leads to her final point: prayer is resolve in the moments of self-doubt.

I have a longstanding and intimate relationship with my own self-doubt, and I sometimes fool myself into thinking that I’m the only person who second-guesses myself. It’s reassuring that be reminded that such “moments of self-doubt” are actually quite common. Writers (and other creators) discover that their relationship with self-doubt is not about “if” it happens, but rather “when” it occurs. When it does, it’s helpful to remember that prayer can guide us through such choppy waters.

Prayer, then, is the great antidote. Prayer calls us to be ruthlessly present to the exact moment we find ourselves in, even the moments of doubt and angst. Prayer is a reminder to be humble in the recognition that not all moments are pleasant or joyful; and to be resilient even when the transitory circumstances of our lives call us to question whatever might be going on.

A mind at peace, stilled, available for conscious thinking at will is of major value for those of us who confront chaos, confusion, noise, and numbness as our pace of life quickens with the ever more of things. — Sr. Mary Margaret Funk, OSB1

After years of my own silent prayer practice, I have come to the conclusion that inner peace is not guaranteed to those who dive into the contemplative way. As more than one spiritual teacher has pointed out, entering into the silence within can bring a sense of chaos as quickly as it might bring us peace.

So many of us carry deep conflicts in our hearts. We have interpersonal conflicts with family, colleagues, and other community members. Meanwhile, we so often are deeply concerned about the fault lines in our society, the social, political, economic and religious divisions that seem to cause (or sustain) so much pain and suffering in our world. We may desperately want to experience peace within, but again and again we seem stymied by how the practice of contemplative prayer seems to bring us anything but peace.

Perhaps this is not a failing. Perhaps it is actually a sacred calling.

Kenneth Leech wrote beautifully about how contemplatives explore the waste of their own being.2 His point is that we live in a conflicted and chaotic world; so how can we expect our prayer to be somehow immune to that chaos? On the contrary, when we meet the inner chaos head-on, we may not experience peace but we do experience something even greater: truth, truth that comes to us from the very heart of God. We discover that a contemplative prayer practice is not designed to make us “feel good” so much as it is meant to equip us to meet whatever challenges life may throw at us, responding to chaos with curiosity, to conflict with compassion.

In the first of her five-volume “Matters” series of contemplative teachings, Benedictine sister Mary Margaret Funk points out that “a mind at peace” is “of major value” for this practice of meeting confusion with clarity. On the surface, it may seem that she and I experience contemplation quite differently. I say it is highly unlikely if not impossible to experience inner peace even through contemplation, whereas she affirms not only that it is possible to embody such peace, but that it is extremely valuable to us when we do.

I don’t think there’s a contradiction here. When we bring our minds and hearts into a sustained practice of contemplative prayer, we are given a greater peace, a greater stillness, than we might otherwise have enjoyed. Often, it is hard to truly experience or appreciate this “relative” peace. But Sr. Meg reminds us that even in the midst of the chaos and the noise, the still peaceful awareness is present within us. It may not be a source of pleasure — but it is a valuable resource for meeting life’s challenges with a contemplative heart.

The word deconstruction has practically become a code word for people who are examining their religious faith and finding a need to re-think what they believe — or, perhaps, to abandon their prior beliefs altogether. Deconstruction implies jettisoning what simply no longer seems credible in favor of a new spiritual outlook, even if that means an entirely new way of thinking about things such as God, faith, or church.

As a concept, deconstruction comes from the postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), who coined the term in the 1960s to explain his approach to reading texts critically. Postmodern philosophy recognizes that almost any declarative statement is built on a number of assumptions, tensions, perhaps even conflicts — which, when taken into consideration, can considerably change the way we interpret or understand the text we are reading. It’s much more nuanced than just reading something through the eyes of skepticism or doubt. The idea is that the tensions and conflicts are embedded in the text itself — often because the very language that we use is so dualistic. We can’t talk about light without understanding “not-light” or dark. Same goes for male and female, good and bad, faith and doubt.

We can see that Jesus himself liked to deconstruct.

These paradoxical statements reveal a moral understanding that goes far beyond the simple binary of good and bad that most of us were taught as children.

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 Mysticism, chapter 21

The mystics, too, were deconstructors. Again and again, they offer us statements that seem to be at odds with “common sense” or ordinary reason (and ordinary theology). Here are just a few examples:

There’s plenty more where these came from.

My point is quite simple: for anyone who feels a need to deconstruct their faith now, there might be some small consolation in knowing that the mystics have been “faith-deconstructors” for centuries. Mystical contemplation is not a path toward nihilism: it does not lead to a place of cynical anger and rejection of faith altogether; rather, it is profoundly creative, inviting us to create a new sense of appreciation for spiritual wisdom and faith in the mystery, even when all the old doctrines and propositions have become meaningless to us. Indeed, it may be that very experience of meaninglessness which invites us to cross the threshold of mystery — a threshold where darkness invites us into a hidden yet profoundly compassionate light, the light of heaven within.

The Korean Buddhist nun Daehaeng Kun Sunim was a renowned Dae Seon Sa or “Great Zen Master.” Following her death in 2012, a number of her dharma talks were published in the anthology Wake Up and Laugh. Her teaching, like that of most Zen elders, is simple, direct, practical, and insightful. This can be seen in a quote from her dharma talk “Unwavering Faith”:

Let go of the idea that some thought or mental state is hindering you, and let go of even the idea that you have to practice diligently; just maintain steady, unwavering faith in your fundamental mind. Because it is inherently endowed with everything, all you have to do is believe in it. — Zen Master Daehaeng1

It’s so easy to get caught up in the notion that a spiritual discipline is “necessary.” When we take on a commitment like daily Centering Prayer, if we miss a day or two, it’s not just a blip — it’s a crisis. We’ve failed! We blew our streak, we dropped the ball, we’ve stained our spirituality with the black mark of indiscipline. What’s so insidious here is how quickly our desire for spiritual freedom turns into an ironic means of deeper bondage. We can take up a practice for the purpose of inner liberation, only to find that the very practice itself has become a kind of trap: a prison that can inspire us to thoughts and feelings of self-judgment over any perceived imperfection or lapse in commitment.

Zen Master Daehaeng offers a simple antidote: just let go, and have faith. Have faith in your own mind, even if it is clouded with distractions and confusion and ignorance. “It is inherently endowed with everything,” she points out. In other words, we already have everything we need.

A contemplative exercise is not something to do to compensate for our failures, but about gently learning to pay attention to the gifts we already carry within us. Nothing is hindering us, nothing is lacking, nothing is getting in the way. Our imperfections are just what they are imperfect parts of the dance of life just like dirt is part of nature. When we simply hold faith in our minds and hearts, we consent to discovering the miracle of who we truly are: luminous, loved, and beautifully alive.

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.

From the AnamChara archive: This article was first published on November 1, 2024. I’m reposting it to share with new readers and longtime subscribers alike.