Good poetry is inherently spiritual. It is a clown car of interpretation. Once a door of perception is opened, endless and surprising “Ahas” tumble out. When you have a spiritual teacher who embodies a poem, their words become thunder and contemplation soaks you. The teacher who is having the greatest impact on me right now does this. And this teacher is uneducated and illiterate. This teacher is my 4-years old son. Two days ago my wife Laura had a meeting with his teacher. Laura learned that that morning our son had been spouting mildly inappropriate song lyrics to his classmates, …
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Spare Me Nothing
“I asked God to spare me nothing but life.” — Teddy Macker I first learned to practice from William Johnston’s book Christian Zen back when I was a shaggy haired 20 year old. It was a quake book, a book that shook my foundation, just as Brother Lawrence had done for me 5 years earlier. In Christian Zen the intersection of the disciplined approach of Zen and the pure gift of Christian contemplation spoke to me. As I deepened in my practice, I put Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence of God on the shelf for a few years, as …
James Finley on the Healing Path
“The beauty and illumination of Jim’s language, whether he is writing about trauma or God’s presence, open the heart. To read this book is to be changed forever.” — Bonnie Badenoch(Author of The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships) I was overly giddy, strangely nervous, but above all grateful to be in conversation with Jim about his breathtaking new book, The Healing Path: A Memoir and an Invitation. Each page is a thousand pages deep, that is how Jim walks about the world, drawing from the depths and teaching with winsome grace, poetics, and …