Earlier this year, after forty years in advertising, I walked away from my career and its accompanying six-figure salary. Sure, I was approaching retirement age, but I knew I still had some gas in the tank. I could have successfully continued in my job as a pharma advertising copywriter for another five years or so. But something inside me had changed. If you’ve glimpsed my recent book Wake Up Call: Daily Insights for the Spiritually Curious, this might come as... Read more
Do you remember the book The Shack? It was the story of a man’s journey from personal tragedy to spiritual rebirth, with a key component being his conversations with God, who appeared to him as a black woman. It sold more than 10 million copies after its release in 2007 and was later made into a movie—but it was not without its detractors. While the book was based loosely on Biblical scripture and was a huge hit with the Christian market, it also... Read more
What if the four Gospels of the Bible aren’t the most reliable source for the spoken words of Jesus? What if there was another source that consisted merely of the things Jesus said, with no attempt to weave a story around the sayings? Almost like someone had jotted them down in a notebook as he spoke? Well, such a document exists, and it’s called the Gospel of Thomas. In the book The Quantum Sayings: Decoding the Lost Gospel of Thomas,... Read more
If I were to ask you “would you rather feel empty or full?” what would you say? I know my first instinct would be to respond full. That may be because we’re a society that seems to yearn for fullness. We like our bellies to be full, our calendars to be full of activities, our homes and garages full of stuff. In The Eloquence of Silence: Surprising Wisdom in Tales of Emptiness, Thomas Moore makes the case that there’s a... Read more
What do you do if you’re a man of the cloth and are confronted by the reality of UFOs? I’m not talking about a now commonplace flying saucer sighting, but a middle-of-the-night visitation by a gray alien—an incident that’s then repeated over and over again, with a changing cast of extraterrestrial visitors. If you’re the Reverend Michael J.S. Carter, who currently serves as the minister of a Unitarian Universalist congregation in North Carolina, you try to make sense of the... Read more
Have you heard of “the shimmer”? It’s a term coined by the life philosopher and dharma artist Erick Godsey to describe our unhealthy attraction to our smartphones, or any screen that sucks us into the Internet. Godsey, whose ideas are rooted in mythology, didn’t exactly invent “the shimmer.” He borrowed it from the 2018 science fiction movie Annihilation. In that film, the shimmer is (as reported by Wikipedia) “a mysterious quarantined zone of mutating plants and animals caused by an... Read more
I was a good ten years into my spirituality explorations before I seriously tried meditation. I had wondered, “what’s the point?” I had believed that my mind was the vehicle that would garner me new spiritual insights—and wondered how thinking about “nothing” could result in something. But eventually, I got it. I began to see that my ever-thinking, always analyzing mind didn’t have all the answers. In fact, it was sometimes getting in the way. I discovered that the quietude... Read more
I read a lot of spirituality books and articles and sometimes stumble upon stories that don’t merit a full column—but have messages worth repeating. Each of these “tidbits” has an important insight (or insights) to offer, ideas that may have you thinking long after you read them. Here are four of my recent favorites, with some light editing. What Does the World Owe You? This short piece comes from Seth Godin’s Blog and is a trick question of sorts. The... Read more
Jesus was a man, yes, but he is also a spirit as alive today as he was two thousand years ago. He does not appear now as a man but as a state of consciousness, which does not make him any less real. ~Marianne Williamson In her new book The Mystic Jesus, Marianne Williamson sees Jesus as a living presence, as alive as you and me. Forget the dusty Jesus of the Bible. This Jesus is more a state of... Read more
This is one of the 112 stories that appears in Wake Up Call: Daily Insights for the Spiritual Curious. How do you walk through life? Are you sure-footed with a specific destination in mind? Or are you stuck in place, unsure of your direction or which way to head? Every now and then, you’ll hear about a friend or acquaintance who has “found their calling.” And when you hear those words spoken, it might cause you to wonder: Does everyone... Read more
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