If you are somewhere in your forties there’s a good chance that you are experiencing a major life-shift. You might be engaging this shift in a spirit of fully conscious participation, but more likely you have noticed it creeping outside your windows at night and scratching at your screen door. Things that once motivated youContinue reading “Sinking into Being”
Author Archives: tractsofrevolution
The Seduction of Identity
The average person is obsessed with identity. We come through childhood with all the instructions and labels that have been put on us by our tribe, and we can spend our entire adulthood trying to justify and live up to them, reverse them and prove them wrong, or we simply allow these programs to push us alongContinue reading “The Seduction of Identity”
Naming Mystery, Talking about God
Religion didn’t just fall out of the sky fully assembled but evolved over many thousands of years. It emerged as a way of securing the everyday world of human concerns to the deeper mystery supporting all things. The experience of this mystery – what I call the present mystery of reality, or Real Presence –Continue reading “Naming Mystery, Talking about God”
Jesus Against Christianity
The biblical deity Yahweh has a deep history going back to the habiru, which is a generic term used in reference to a migratory population of nomadic tribes that swept down from the north into the Fertile Crescent roughly between 1800 and 1100 BCE. These northern invaders were resisted as outlaws by the settled cities andContinue reading “Jesus Against Christianity”
As If
God has a plan and is in control. Everything happens for a reason. You have an immortal soul, but … Don’t trust yourself. A better place awaits those who obey God. I do not mourn because his soul is very much alive. God has a plan for each person. Mine was to hide in thisContinue reading “As If”
God and Ground
There is a very interesting paradox at the heart of healthy religion. Our notions of God – just looking across the landscape of world religions, and then deeper into the private religion of individuals – are practically innumerable and infinitely diverse. God is represented as a personality, a force of some kind, a supreme intelligence, orContinue reading “God and Ground”
The Quadratics of Transformation
This is a blog about creative change. My posts on the whole have been exploring creative change along several distinct trajectories – personality and life experience, spirituality and religion, individual and community. Working the angles on transformational change has gradually clarified what I now take as the essential dynamics of what’s involved in the transformationContinue reading “The Quadratics of Transformation”
Philosophy of Tears
Any theory of what life ultimately means, if it means anything at all, must take into account the reality of loss. We can contemplate things at some high level of abstraction, safe in the refuge of logic and ideas, or we can grapple with what’s really going on in life as we live it. AndContinue reading “Philosophy of Tears”
What Death Leaves Behind
My father is trying to find his balance now, after 56 years of leaning into his best friend and life partner. It’s not easy. The reality of my mother’s recent passing – or I should rather say, the hole she left behind – catches him unexpectedly and pulls him into convulsing grief, yearning to have her back. It strikesContinue reading “What Death Leaves Behind”
The Spirituality of Dropping Out
In recent years there’s been a lot of talk about purpose and the importance of living a “purpose-driven” life. In Christian circles especially, the message has been that knowing god’s purpose for you and living with a mission-in-mind is what it’s all about. This has turned out to be a “best-selling” proposal, as apparently manyContinue reading “The Spirituality of Dropping Out”
