Mature prayer always breaks into gratitude.
Jesus is the very concrete truth revealing and standing in for the universal truth.
I believe in mystery and multiplicity. To religious believers this may sound almost pagan. But I don’t think so.
Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.
In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you. But they also have much less power to control you or hurt you.
The ego knows itself by comparison.
Jesus praised faith and trust – even more than love. It takes a foundational trust to fall, or to fail, and not to fall apart.
We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them, both immature responses.
The big truth for men is that often we have to leave home in the first half of life before we can return home at a later stage and find our soul there.
Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.
If you try to assert wisdom before people have themselves walked it, be prepared for much resistance, denial, push-back, and verbal debate.
If God continues to give me health and a sane mind and verbal ability, I want to teach.
Egoic consciousness is the one we all normally operate with, until we are told there is something else! Every culture teaches egoic consciousness in different ways. At that level it is all about me, my preferences, my choices, my needs, my desires and me and my group as the central reference point.
Ancients knew that you need guidance, patronage and protection as you move from one place or state to another, whenever you cross a bridge. You had better know what you are doing when you leave one group or place to join another.
We Catholics must admit that there is a constant temptation among us to avoid the lectionary and the Word of God for private and pious devotions that usually have little power to actually change us or call our ego assumptions into question.
Much of the work of midlife is to tell the difference between those who are dealing with their issues through you and those who are really dealing with you.
Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.
Every time you choose to love, you have also just chosen to die.
A paradox is a seeming contradiction, always demanding a change on the side of the observer. If we look at almost all things honestly we see everything has a character of paradox to it. Everything, including ourselves.
I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona.