The Mundane Way

I am reading a moving book by Father Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest and founder of Homeboy Industries, which works to educate and employ gang members in Los Angeles. Boyle’s book, Tattoos on the Heart , is a beautiful testament to what the kingdom of God can look like in the twenty-first century. In the book, Boyle sprinkles his heartful stories with quotes from various Christian writers. Reading these quotes, all gathered in one place and in such a spiritually powerful context, I realized how much these same writers have done to rescue Christian faith for me, sometimes gently and sometimes forcefully retrieving it from the confines of the fundamentalist package in which I originally received it and giving it new life and meaning. Yesterday, as I read another of these quotes from Boyle’s book, a surge of gratitude welled up in my chest. I lifted my face and thanked God for these beloved teachers, without whom my relationship with the religion of my childhood, of my culture, would...

In her book Leaving Church , Barbara Brown Taylor writes that part of what Sabbath looks like for her is living as though all her work is done. I like this as a guiding principle for Sabbath observance. I would set next to it the principle of doing the opposite of what I normally do, as a way to bring balance and rest. Since I spend much of the week sitting and looking at a screen, Sabbath for me might include walking around outside for a while. Since I spend my work days doing mentally taxing work, Sabbath might include mentally restful activities: doing puzzles, playing board games, or reading something light and entertaining. Perhaps most pertinent for me, since I spend most of my waking hours trying to improve myself, Sabbath must include rest from that heavy labor and the willingness, for twenty-four hours at least, to call my self good. To know myself to be beloved as I am. True Sabbath requires an interior rest, the cessation of the inner striving to do and be more than I am...

As an intellectually oriented person and a book lover, I have tended to put too much faith in the written word. The excitement of new ideas, the pleasure of an eloquent turn of phrase and, frankly, the cheap but powerful satisfaction of thinking I know something that someone else doesn't have too often driven me to read books of great spiritual value without profiting much from them. I simply read too many books too quickly to digest the gist of any of them. Before I finished one, my mind had already begun to hunt for the next, always looking past the wisdom offered in the present toward some supposedly greater wisdom in the future. This kind of reading was more compulsive than intentional. It stimulated but did not transform. Over the years my unhealthy relationship with spiritual reading has changed. Thanks to my spiritual teacher, Eknath Easwaran , I am coming to believe that truth and wisdom are not to be found among the aromatic pages and black ink of a paperback but within ...