For today’s contemplative, looking only to the Desert Mothers and Fathers for examples of contemplation and mysticism is to dismiss half of what these things are. We must not fail to also look to yesterday and today’s Black and Brown contemplatives who have “turned the ‘inward journey’ into a communal experience.”
Category Archives: Creativity
A Prayer for White People (including myself)
May we participate in the revolution, a revolution that doesn’t need us but will define us.
Zoom Diaries: A Week’s Lesson in Finding Voice
Last week, I had the opportunity to be with a group of friends from all over the country. With each of us in a different state, we gathered at 9 in the morning until about 5 each night to discuss what it means to find our call, know our voice, and live into the creativityContinue reading “Zoom Diaries: A Week’s Lesson in Finding Voice”
Things are Different: Grieve, Slow Down, Pay Attention, Stay Tender.
Things are Different: Grieve Our lives will be forever changed. The grief and loss we now face will forever change us. They already have changed us. They will continue to change us. As long as I keep letting it in, grief is tenderizing me in ways my body had yet to feel. Loss is softeningContinue reading “Things are Different: Grieve, Slow Down, Pay Attention, Stay Tender.”
A Monkish Friendship: Fr. Charles Cummings, OCSO (1940-2020)
“The monastic night watch is good practice in the art of waiting, as we patiently look for the coming of dawn. Monks and nuns wait in the dark, longing for the light of dawn but unable to hasten its coming. No one can force the dawn or bring it about in any way. It dawnsContinue reading “A Monkish Friendship: Fr. Charles Cummings, OCSO (1940-2020)”
New Year, Same Past
There is the place in my life, paradoxically, where mystery is conceived and the best of myself is birthed. It never seems to be a place of great joy, but it is a place of great truth.
The Absurd Vocation
“One person plus one typewriter constitutes a movement.” –Pauli Murray Coming off a week-long class on activism, organizing and social movements in Durham, North Carolina (and my first full year of seminary at CTS), I climb back into the quiet walls of a Kentucky monastery: Gethsemani Abbey. Here, the silence seeps into my bones likeContinue reading “The Absurd Vocation”
New film teaser, DAY OF A STRANGER
Many of you know I’ve been working on my directorial debut film, Day of a Stranger: the first film about Thomas Merton’s final years in his own words. For this short film, Patrick Shen and I recently took a winter trip to the hermitage and The Thomas Merton Center for filming, and from that have piecedContinue reading “New film teaser, DAY OF A STRANGER”
Be The Hope, Now
Islamophobia is not just a problem for Muslims, it is a problem for all of us. It is not the “job” of the marginalized, persecuted, or attacked group to solve the problem. To ask the even more deeply grieving “what do you need,” or “what can I do,” puts even more agony upon them. ThisContinue reading “Be The Hope, Now”
Love’s Undercurrent
Love grows where there’s room for it.
