What does it mean to have a vocation? The term gets batted around both in religious and secular circles and everyone assumes its meaning is clear. Is it? What’s a vocation? Karl Jung defined it this way: “A vocation is an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from…
We tend to nurse a certain naiveté about what faith means in the face of death. The common notion among us as Christians is that if someone has a genuine faith she should be able to face death without fear or doubt. The implication then of course is that having fear and doubt when one…
It’s hard to be humble, not because we don’t have more than enough deficiencies to merit humility, but rather because there’s crafty mechanism inside of us that normally doesn’t let us go to the place of humility. Simply put, as we try to be self-effacing, humble and non-hypocritical, variably we take pride in that and…
A friend of mine shares this story. She grew up with five siblings and an alcoholic father. The effect of her father’s alcoholism was devastating on her family. Here’s how she tells the story: “By the time my father died his alcoholism had destroyed our family. None of us kids could talk to each other…
In a remarkable book, The Inner Voice of Love, written while he was in a deep emotional depression, Henri Nouwen shares these words: “The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to try to understand…
Some years ago I went on a weekend retreat given by a woman who made no secret about the fact that not being able to have children constituted a deep wound in her life. So she offered retreats on the pain of being unable to have children. Being a celibate and not having my own…
We quite naturally tend to think of the word ‘Christ’ as Jesus’ second name. We think of the name ‘Jesus Christ’ like we think of names like ‘Susan Parker’ or ‘Jack Smith’. But that’s an unhealthy confusion. Jesus didn’t have a second name. The word ‘Christ’ is a title which, while it includes the person…
It’s no secret that today we’re witnessing a massive decline in church attendance and, seemingly, a parallel loss of interest in religion. The former mindset, within which we worried, sometimes obsessively, about sin, church-going, and heaven and hell no longer holds sway for millions of people. As one parent, worried about the religious state of…
According to Isaac the Syrian, a famous 7th-Century bishop and theologian, a person who’s genuinely humble gives off a certain scent that other people will sense and that even animals will pick up so that wild animals, including snakes, will fall under its spell and never harm that person. Here’s his logic: a humble person,…
Jesus says that if we follow him the cross, pain, will find us. That message is chronically misunderstood. Maybe we would understand it better if Jesus had worded it this way: The more sensitive you become, the more pain will seep into your life. We catch the connection then. Sensitive person suffer more deeply, just…