The Problem of the Personal
O You, Finally, Beyond Names, At about the two-thirds juncture of my life I began addressing You primarily in the second grammatical person as “Lover.” I did this having reached a tipping point regarding...
Prayers in Winter Blog
How Large Is My “Yes”?
O Lover, One of the formative issues in my faith journey is captured by the title of J. B. Phillips’ Your God Is Too Small (1953) which I first read in college. Insofar as...
A Peek from a Pixel’s Perch
O Lover, Sequestered in the bifurcated gestalt of my protracted minority, in some respects an isolate harried by contingency and void, still holding both You and myself to be entities in some structure, I...
Regarding Non-dualistic Spirituality
O Lover, Over the past year I have been increasingly beset by questions regarding the implications of non-dualism for contemplative practice and awareness. I understand non-dualism as affirming that Reality in its very largest...
Beneficence
[Hall, Meredith, Beneficence. Boston: Godine, 2020.] O Lover, The setting for my reading highlight of this summer (but half spent) is largely restricted to a Maine farmstead across decades beginning in the early 1930s....
“Exploration into God”
[Ralph Vaughn Williams (1872-1958), Towards the Unknown Region (1907) & A Sea Symphony (1910); each is an orchestral/choral setting of text from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (“Darest Thou Now O Soul” & “Passage...
Enchantment Revisited
[“We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time” (T. S. Eliot,...
Enter Mentors
[Bourgeault, Cynthia, Thomas Keating: The Making of a Modern Christian Mystic. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2024. Bourgeault, OSB, is an Episcopalian priest, theologian, and practitioner of centering prayer; Keating, OCSO (d. 2018), was a Roman...
In the Tow of “Big Gravity”
O Lover, On this fair June day I am pondering the macro meaning of “gravity,” that force causing an object to be drawn toward the center of another object possessing mass. It is a...
“‘With [Moses] I Speak Mouth to Mouth’”
[“‘ . . .My servant Moses, / He is faithful in all my household; / With him I speak mouth to mouth, / Even openly, and not in dark sayings, / And he beholds...