I am very pleased to announce my first-ever retreat on the intersection of spirituality and creativity. If you live near the St. Louis area, think about joining me on Friday evening, October 11, and all day Saturday the 12th at Mercy Center to explore what happens at that very special place where God, prayer and our own creative activities meet. …
Tag: Creativity
We’re all hiding something inside, and we’re all making a mess of it from time to time. We’re multilayered people, all of us, onions (to shift the food metaphor) that need to be peeled away if we’re ever going to get at our centers. …
I am very close to beginning a new walk, as retirement from my position at the university looms large (target date: June 14). The question I hear most frequently, you might imagine, is “what are you going to do?” It will likely come as no surprise to those who know me if I say, “I have a plan.” …
I recently came across this line of poetry from the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda: “Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood.” And, of course, that’s right. Take, for example, the pick-up games of some variation of baseball (fuzz ball, Indian ball, Wiffle® ball, cork ball, kickball, step ball) of my childhood in North St. Louis in the early ‘70s. …
Like many, I was impatient and restless as a young person. My favorite prayer was something along the lines of, “That was fun. What’s next?” What I learned as I grew older was the importance of savoring the gift of the present and the little. …
On the Road: An unexpected find on the way to somewhere else --a visit to the historic home and studio of Indiana Hoosier impressionist painter Theodore Clement Steele, the first major artist to set up a studio in Brown County, Indiana. The surrounding landscape and Steele’s growing fame drew other artists to the area and helped establish the Art Colony of the Midwest. …
We live in unsettled, dangerous, destructive, confusing times, and it would be easy to allow our only response to be one of resignation, of saying to ourselves and to the rest of the world, “I give up. It’s just too big. It’s just too destructive. I have nothing to offer that will make a difference.” But such a response is lazy and not a response of faith. A response of faith allows us (perhaps propels us) to roll up our …
Pondering, at least it seems for me, is a most appropriate approach and primer to a life of prayer. When we can arise each morning and listen for the sound of our favorite bird and then connect it to the movement of God in our lives, we are certainly on to something mystical and yet very real. …
This weekend, Sue and I are in southern Wisconsin, and yesterday I walked through a broad swath of wildflower prairie adjacent to the place where we are staying. I stopped in amazement of what was before me: a noisy, ever-moving and always changing sea of grass, flowers, bees, birds and shifting light. When we stand in the midst of such natural glory, we stand at the center of creation, and we can begin to find our place in the world. …
BECAUSE OF A GLITCH WITH MY SERVER, I AM REPOSTING MY LAST BLOGPOST: If you read my blog regularly, you’ll certainly see a few repeating themes, among them the importance of living in awareness and gratitude of God and the critical nature of silent, contemplative prayer to do that. But there’s more, of course. As much as we need our times of silence, we need times of conversation and storytelling with friends new and old. …