The blog is here.
Featured guides and series.
How do we discern a decision?
Spiritual practice spotlight.
Exploring spiritual direction.
![[Sample Chapter] The Design of Everyday Desire: Discoverability](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e9c6fb4118efd39e06f7cd9/1642534547688-1PVGSHBZHIPZXPDQFP2K/unsplash-image-70l1tDAI6rM.jpg)
[Sample Chapter] The Design of Everyday Desire: Discoverability
Let’s start with a basic question: What’s the meaning of life?
Lectio divina: Spiritual practice spotlight.
Often, we tend to read the Bible with the intention to understand it like it an ordinary text—but we can also approach it with a desire to hear through it.
How do we discern a decision? 4: Discern the “spirits.”
The discernment of consolation and desolation is just one piece of a much larger picture, but it does in many ways represent the heart and soul of Ignatian discernment.
What is a “fit” in spiritual direction?
Often when one is first exploring spiritual direction, we talk about the importance of finding a “fit” with a spiritual director. What do we mean by this?
Dreamwork: Spiritual practice spotlight.
What do our dreams mean? Is God speaking through them? Dreamwork gives us an opportunity to take them seriously without taking it too far. And it’s a simple process.
How do we discern a decision? 3: Identify the occasion and method.
How we experience our time of discernment will help us determine which of three main methods are best for us to use.
Imaginative prayer: Spiritual practice spotlight.
Imaginative prayer is designed to teach our hearts and our bodies the lived theology of who God is and how God loves us by creating a concrete memory of a real experience.
How do we discern a decision? 2: Find your foundation.
Setting a solid base for our work of discernment starts with why our decision even matters and who it can help us become.
The Jesus Prayer: Spiritual practice spotlight.
St Paul instructs us to “pray without ceasing,” but is this really something we can do in our daily lives? One practice aims at this exactly.
How do we discern a decision? 1: Know what you’re choosing between.
Before we can begin to discern methodically, we have to know what we’re really discerning.
A life of commitments: On making vows.
This week, after a journey of something like five years, I’ve made my first vows with the Order of the Common Life. Why did I make them, and what did I promise?
Praying the statio: Spiritual practice spotlight.
Numerous practices and rhythms of prayer can help us to integrate prayer momently. One of the simplest and easiest is the statio prayer.
Meditatio psalmorum: Spiritual practice spotlight.
Meditatio psalmorum is one way that we can read the psalms not merely as Scripture but as living prayers for us today, now, in the place where we are.
4 styles of spiritual directors.
If you’ve never met a spiritual director, you might not know what to expect, which might make such a personal conversation hard to imagine.
When faith goes dark.
After I stepped down from pastoring in an evangelical church in California, burnt out and aimless, I used to sit every week in the back of an early Catholic mass and witness it. Sometimes my lips would move. Sometimes I would say, “And with your spirit.” But I didn’t sing and seldom prayed.
The problem with peace.
Under the right circumstances, we can have peace about the wrong thing for the wrong reasons.
Finding God in the night.
Many things will have taken a hard left turn—some will have seemed suddenly to drop off and vanish: hopes, discernment, progress. So much landscape has changed. How do we make sense of this?
6 reasons to see a spiritual director.
There are many reasons we may not think spiritual direction is “for us”—but I believe many of us are just missing the expressed invitation and the “why.”
Be still, and let God do some work.
While many of our churches are praying for the eradication of COVID-19, healing and physical protection from the virus, I would add a different prayer for us—that we would notice and nurture what God is wanting to do within us during these strange and troubled circumstances.