The outbreak of war in Israel/Palestine on October 7, 2023 prompted me to post these reflections based on a visit to the Holy Land in 2007. A look at the conditions then may help us understand the current tragedy. My most recent post on the war is here. May those who have suffered most find a way to future healing.In 2006 I attended a talk by...
Here in the North, leaves fall through lightAnd leave last dry scattered whispersAlong the earth. Lives fall like leaves,Out of season some,Torn by storms too soonFrom shuddering branches. I remember them. Lives fall like leaves In autumn.Some rain...
We stayed with our old friend Terry Sullivan Prevey. Some of you...
Shortly after I entered the Spiritual Life Institute’s Carmelite hermitage almost fifty years ago, a friend of mine complained that spirituality is too serious. Amen. Anything humorless is dubious. My mentor at the time insisted that if we take God seriously, then we can take everything else lightheartedly. I noticed that the...
The Parliament of the World’s Religions first convened in 1893 in Chicago as part of the World Columbian Exposition. They met in what is now the Art Institute of Chicago. One hundred forty years later, Tessa Bielecki and I attended Chicago’s Parliament of the World’s religions at Chicago’s McCormick Place. I was eager to learn about relations...
Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope. —Martin Luther King, Jr.The people I encountered at Chicago’s Parliament of the World’s Religions, speakers and attendees, were tips of icebergs. Returning home and learning more about them and their affiliations, I am amazed at the quiet flotilla of virtue and social transformation that they...
Tessa Bielecki and I recently visited the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona, Arizona. I visited once when I was attending nearby Prescott College in the early seventies. Back then, a gaunt, blackened sculpture of Christ crucified hung above the altar. It reminded some visitors of the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many tourists came to...
In February 1975, I joined the Spiritual Life Institute’s young Carmelite community in Sedona, Arizona. As a college student, I fell in love with the red-rock chaparral beauty near Oak Creek Canyon. I wanted to learn more about Catholic contemplative life, which I first encountered on my occasional retreats at the Institute’s Nada Hermitage....
It’s not a stretch to say Dave Denny is what Thomas Merton would have looked like today had he lived. Both avid writers, teachers, inter-spiritual pioneers, activists, and...
My brother has a friend who teases him about growing up in a Norman Rockwell painting. It isn’t far from the truth. I suspect few people grew up as far from death and loss as I did. My friend Tessa’s experience of June was not so carefree, and she speaks beautifully and poignantly about this in her recent post, "Rare...