Spirituality

Singing in Joshua Tree

Steve · November 9, 2026 · 2 Comments

We were racing against the sun. It was just about to set by the time we made our way back to the western entrance of Joshua Tree National Park from the northern exit about a half hour drive away. We were at the end of a long day of driving and hiking inside the austere and majestic national park in southern California’s high desert, but the golden disk of a sun descending behind the Little San Bernadino Mountains was calling our names. We were headed back in.

The park ranger at the gate suggested the Minerva Hoyt Trailhead (named for the woman who championed the establishment of the park with FDR) just a short drive away where we could watch the setting sun paint the sky, even after it disappeared behind the mountains. We parked with a few others in a lot just off the road and stood amazed as the sky fluidly shifted between yellows, reds, oranges and pure golds. It was like watching a paintbrush held by an unseen hand sweep watercolors across the darkening sky, dragging graying clouds along for the ride. We were transfixed.

The air got chilly quickly after the sun set and Sue made her way back to the car while I wandered into the desert scrub, following a disappearing trail between the namesake trees as best as I could. “Stay on the trail and don’t go too far,” Sue called out, “and watch for rattlesnakes!” That brought me up short for a moment and I slowed my pace and glanced down, my ears pricked for any tell-tale rattles. I don’t recall ever seeing or hearing one in the wild, despite years of occasional hiking in the desert Southwest, but I’d seen the documentaries and didn’t want my first time to be in the dark. I took a few more steps on the trail and stopped.

The light and color and shadow astounded me right into a deep silence of awe. I inched forward, aligning the looming darkened outlines of the Joshua Trees against a sky Van Gogh could have painted. My heart opened, my eyes closed in a moment of prayer, and finally I could keep silent no longer. The classic hymn “How Great Thou Art” — learned some 60 years ago in a North St. Louis Sunday School — began to rumble inside me. I felt like Joshua himself leading the Israelites through the desert. For by at least one legend, that’s how the Yucca Palm, so named by the native communities like the Cahuilla, got its “Christian name.” Nineteenth-century Mormon pioneers saw the strange-looking trees with their Seussian arms and recalled the story of Joshua, his arms extended in either praise or, just as likely, pointing the Israelites toward the Promised Land. With those crazy arms pointing every which way, it’s no wonder they wandered for 40 years.

I could not help but sing. A hundred feet or more from the parking lot, the wind blowing against me and the light fading to black, I raised my arms and my voice and sang what no one but me and God would ever hear:

Then sings my soul,
My Savior God, to Thee;
How great Thou art,
How great Thou art!

Trash to Treasure: The Spiritual Lessons of Sea Glass

Steve · October 27, 2026 · 2 Comments

Although it may boggle the mind in today’s more environmentally conscious world, for many decades of the 20^th century the good people of Fort Bragg, California, hurled their household refuse over the cliff and onto the nearby beach, just 16 miles north of Mendocino in beautiful northern California. They threw their garbage and their old cars and appliances. They scattered their newspapers and flung their soiled rags. And they pitched their discarded glass bottles. Lots of them. And those bottles? They are still there, sort of.

Although the city finally closed the dump and began cleaning it up in the 1960s, there is a sparkling, magical remnant left from that time. “Sea glass” was created by decade after decade of pounding waves that first broke and then wore down the discarded bottles into what today are small, smooth, glass-bottle-colored “stones.” They have become small bits of found treasure, salvaged by tourists and locals alike ever since.

Unwanted, discarded, thrown, broken, worn-down and…finally…found and treasured. Sounds like us.

So often we live and wallow in the castoffs of our past. Old wounds, bad relationships, long-held grudges, and serious addictions and sins have been left dumped on our minds and souls. They weigh us down and hold us back. Garbage, mucking up the works.

Hurled and broken, we often stay exactly where we have landed and nothing changes, for there is nothing there to move us. We become like that 1940s Ford pickup stashed behind your uncle’s broken-down barn on the side of a blue highway. We look like a truck but nothing works. We can’t move until something moves us.

I’ve come to know over the years that the all-loving and forgiving God that sits at the center of my life is no magician. God does not wave a wand, utter an abracadabra, and quickly take away all the pain and garbage. Neither is God like the tractor-towed mechanical device I saw on a recent vacation that sifts through the beach sand at the end of every day removing the litter, sea weed, broken glass, and debris so I can wake up to a pristine beach for my daily walk. Those machines, I learned while writing this essay, are called “sandbonis,” a play on words derived from the Zamboni machines that clean the ice between periods of a hockey game.

I have become convinced over my 66 years that God does, in fact, love us and knows us by name. I don’t believe for a moment that God has abandoned us just because there was not a divine sandboni that immediately sifted us out of the muck during those moments of our lives when we felt unwanted, abused, discarded, thrown, or broken. That would be a pretty small definition of a pretty big God, for God is not about keeping our lives safe, tidy and well groomed.

So where was God during all those difficult, soul-numbing moments of our lives? God was working on us, moving us little by little toward something new. For me, God was an ever-present force during the pain and fear of three years of chemotherapy some 15 years ago, a wave of grace more powerful than chemical bonds, occurring over and over and over, pounding and breaking me into smaller pieces so that I might recover and become some small fragment of the beauty of what I was born to be. Of what God needed me to be. It just took some time to round my sharp corners, erase the past abuses, and make me available to someone else who needed a bit of glass-colored joy.

Whether our wounds are physical, mental, spiritual or some paralyzing combination that keeps us feeling like forgotten treasure beneath the sands of time and the pounding waves, our faith in God give us hope that there is always the offer of grace and a shot at redemption, another chance at renewal and new life. But it will take some time, decades perhaps, for beauty rarely comes in one brief shining moment and it can’t happen just because we wish it so.

Rather, we are called to immerse ourselves in the cool and ever-moving waters of God and then let the movement and the years create something new, something bold and colorful and shiny. Something that God can pick up and say, “this is mine…this is beautiful.”

Finally, found and treasured. Just as we are made to be.

Let’s Go Around the Table (in Detail)

Steve · November 27, 2025 · Leave a Comment

To prevent any “spoilers,” I’ll just say I was doing an unnamed online word puzzle this morning. I quickly figured out it was asking me for words that you might normally hear while going around the Thanksgiving table and asking everyone to name those things for which they were most grateful. Let’s just say there were no surprises.

[If you haven’t done all your daily online word puzzles yet, you might want to stop reading now and come back later…]

These generic answers were all well and good as far as this annual exercise in gratitude goes, of course. The answers were all important “things” for which to be grateful. But, as I was taught a long time ago by one of my writing teachers, never use the word “thing” when you can be more specific. There’s more power and meaning in the details and in giving the “things” in our lives names.

So, as you go around the table today, I challenge you to outlaw the word “thing” and other generic words like family, life, home, friends, health, work, community, and food. Make them think harder and go deeper. Ask them for the details, for that’s where real meaning is. God, after all, is in the details of our lives. God is the giver of “life,” of course, but also the giver of specific moments, people, places and memories. Maybe ask these questions and require a “why” follow-up:

What was your favorite family moment this year?
When did you feel most alive?
Who are your three best friends right now?
What have you done this year to improve your health?
When did you feel most challenged by work or study?
When did you feel most a part of your community, neighborhood, church or school?
What’s the best meal you had this year? What’s your favorite food?

The stories we tell around the Thanksgiving table matter. They matter for the kids who are creating the memories they will carry forward to their own futures and families. They matter for the old folks who are searching for meaning and joy in their elder years. The things for which we are most grateful (and the details that describe them) speak most clearly of what we treasure.

And remember: “For wherever your treasure is, there will you find your heart.” (Matthew 6:21)

All Signs Point to the House of God

Steve · October 30, 2025 · 2 Comments

We just kept following the signs.

Sue Givens at Monet’s famous lily pond bridge.

One day near the end of September, Sue and I and our good friends, John and Karen, spent the morning walking through Claude Monet’s famous garden in Giverny, a small village in France’s Normandy region where the Epte flows into the Seine and where the impressionist master lived and worked from 1883 until his death in 1926. It’s the one with the water lilies and the green footbridge crossing the small pond, of course. No doubt you’ve seen the pictures.

While there, we followed the signs, first through the tunnel under the road to the water lily pond and then back through the tunnel to the rest of his gardens and home. It was an exquisite, unhurried morning in an unforgettable place. As we made our way back through the village’s main street, the aptly named Rue Claude Monet, we kept seeing flyers advertising “daily piano concerts” in the village church. We decided to follow the signs, which isn’t very hard to do in a town with one main road.

We arrived at the Church of Sainte-Radegonde, where Monet is buried and where the daily classical “improvisational” piano concert was advertised featuring someone named Hughes Reiner. Not knowing what to expect, we ducked into the dimly lit church and waited for our eyes to adjust before finding a seat among a handful of others. It quickly became evident to all of us that we had been dropped into the middle of something very special.

Reiner, it turned out, is a rather famous pianist, composer, opera singer, choirmaster, and conductor who lives locally but who has played all over France and Europe. Without much classical music knowledge, I don’t have many words for what we heard but it was certainly as exceptional as his resume was long. He was truly an extraordinary, intricate (and fast) pianist, and we sat mesmerized by his playing, with not a note of music in front of him.

As we were about to leave, I noticed an ornate, calligraphed sign near one of the side walls of the church. It was, of course, written in French, so I had no idea what it said. John snapped a photo and loaded it into an app that translated it in seconds. He passed me his phone and I read:

You have entered this house.
The house of God.
Whoever you are, He welcomes you.
With your joys, your sorrows.
Your successes, your failures.
Your hopes, your disappointments.
Be welcome.
Generations before you have loved this place,
have contributed to building it, to making it beautiful.
They prayed here.
Respect the peaceful silence.
If you are a believer, pray.
If you seek, reflect.
If you doubt, ask for light.
If you suffer, ask for strength.
If you are joyful, give thanks.
And may you remain here.
Whoever you are, He welcomes you.
Welcome Him. too.

The translation as I repeat it here may not be complete or perfect, but the moment was transcendent, a simple reward for following and reading the signs. It was a reminder that God gives us these signs on a daily basis, wherever we are, if only our eyes are open wide enough to see and read.

Wonder as the Foundation of Prayer

Steve · August 31, 2025 · 3 Comments

Earlier this summer, I read the book, “Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life,” by Dacher Keltner, an expert on human emotion and a professor of psychology at UC-Berkeley, where he serves as the director of the university’s Greater Good Science Center. In the book, Keltner sets out to define what we mean by “awe” and illustrates the experience of awe through dozens of individual stories gathered from around the world.

And, indeed, it’s the global experience of awe that makes this book worth reading. We are all moved, he writes, by experiences that make us draw in a sharp breath and let out the slow sound of “awe” or maybe “wow” or “woah.” In this sense, in what moves us, we all speak the same language, and there is something very important about understanding that.

For the purpose of the book and drawn from his own deep research, Keltner defines awe as: “The feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.” It is about “our relation to the vast mysteries of life.” These experiences, he writes, come from the “eight wonders of life,” which can be classified into a “taxonomy of awe.” They are, in order of their commonality around the world:

Moral Beauty – other people’s courage, kindness, strength and overcoming.
Collective Effervescence – those moments when, as part of a crowd (whether at church or a sports stadium) we feel we are part of a collective self or tribe – an experience of “we.”
Nature – not surprisingly, our experience in and of nature can often leave us speechless and with a sense of “something bigger” at work.
Music – and its ability to transport us to “new dimensions of symbolic meaning.”
Visual Design – art and architecture and its power to open our minds to new ways of perceiving the world and “locate ourselves” within the cultural systems that surround us.
Stories of Spirituality and Religion – and the way they transform, transcend, and give us hope for something more.
Stories of Life and Death – are common around the world and lead to awe at such moments as first and last breaths.
Moments of Epiphanies – times when we suddenly understand essential truths about life and experience “philosophical insights, scientific discoveries, metaphysical ideas, personal realizations, mathematical equations, and sudden disclosures that transform life in an instant.”

While you likely won’t find Keltner’s book on the “spirituality or religion” section of your local bookstore or online category, I found it to be a great tool for my regular prayer of reflection and examination of my day – my “examen,” as it known in Ignatian spirituality. Keltner’s “eight mysteries” opened my mind to looking for and finding God in an ever-wider array of my life experiences.

Shortly after finishing the book, I began to wonder: What if I paid a little closer attention every day to what astounds me and fills me with awe and wonder? What might I see and experience each day because I am looking for the awe? What if I expanded my time of reflection to look more broadly and consider those eight areas of mystery? What if this was the way I ended each day, with this examen of awe?

At this point in time, I am two months into a project to record one such moment of awe each day. What I am finding thus far is a much wider set of experiences, all of which cause me to either catch my breath, drop me to my knees, or stand in quiet reflection and gratitude.

Here are two examples:

July 13 – Today Sue and I walked a half-mile loop trail that lead to the Akaka Waterfall on the east side of the Big Island of Hawai’i near Hilo. As it finally came into view, this long, 400-foot ribbon of water took my breath away — a sudden and short intake of breath that amounts to “awe.” It plunged over the edge like an Olympic diver, cutting like a knife into the pool beneath it. Perfect in form, a quiet and perfectly straight line into the folding water. And so I prayed: “Cut me like a knife, O Lord, sever me from myself to allow you in. Pierce my heart and allow me to feel the height and depth of your love and compassion for me. Fill me, just as this water continually fills the bowl that rests beneath the falls like open hands.”

August 30 – This morning we went to a funeral for our friend’s 94-year-old father. We didn’t know him or were not even sure we had ever met him. We were there because we believe it’s important to “show up” for people in their times of grief and need. We believe in the beauty and sanctity of the “last rites” of the Catholic Church, that they are fitting ways to celebrate the end of earthly existence and be present as something new begins. I was awed by the flow of music, scripture, ritual, words of remembrance, all encouraging me to consider my own life and death. With the responsorial Psalm, drawn from the oft-used 23^rd Psalm, we sang: “Shepherd me, O God, beyond my wants, beyond my fears, from death into life.” And I think that this is what I want most when my time comes – for God to show up and shepherd me home, surrounded by the presence of those I knew and loved, and maybe a few others who show up to be there for my family, even if they have never met me. There’s awe in the way we humans (and the church) care for each other.

So here’s my challenge to you today: Pay attention to what catches your heart, your breath, your sense of being in the world, for God is in that moment.