A powerful distinction I’ve learned from the Jesuits that I use as a discernment tool in everyday life. 06.06.23 The Jesuits talk a lot — like a lot — about freedom. And what I’ve come to see is that they really mean it, and they also have a very sophisticated…

Our inability to be with silence (read: reality, uncertainty, the unknown, our lack of control, our fear and fragility) and Silence (read: the Absolute, that which is well beyond our human mental striving) is why we’re in this mess — but this also doesn’t have to be the end of…

Allowing our defensiveness to teach us — for the sake of our own freedom. 04.10.23 I spent much of 2015–2019 at war, spiritually speaking. It was probably many years before that, too—but I suppose I had no conscious recognition of it. We’re often engaged in decades-long struggles (with others, with…

Meditation on ‘finding God in all things’ 02.15.23 (Thank you to Rabah Aburub for help with Arabic translation) Residents digging through a collapsed building in a northwest Syrian town discovered a crying infant whose mother appears to have given birth to her while buried underneath the rubble from this week’s…

Meditation on seeing the real inside the disappearance, 08.08.22 Who you are in the fleetingness of time will eternally be subsisting in the love of God forever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and we sit in silence that we might realize this deathless beauty in the fleetingness…

An Ignatian meditation on the Cursed Fig Tree, 02.14.22 As they left Bethany the next day, he was hungry. Off in the distance he saw a fig tree in full leaf. He came up to it expecting to find something for breakfast, but found nothing but fig leaves. (It wasn’t…

What does it mean to wait for something we can’t even begin to imagine? 12.07.21 Advent is a church season, like its cousin Lent, that always stands in such stark contrast to the cultural expressions blasting on around it. Its deep-water quiet is an affront to the endless busyness, anxious…

What we can learn when we shift from “fixing” to “witnessing,” 12.02.21 When I was in my early 20s and clinically depressed (although I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time), I worked a predictably depressing job with a predictably depressing commute. …

for Elena, at 10, 07.06.21 She comes to me, wearing her cat pjs and her earnest asking face. Momma, can we go for one last canoe ride before bed, just you and me? Please? Sometimes the look behind the eyes is so urgent it stings: It’s not just the ride…