Reflections

Tools for Carrying the Burdens of a Hostile World. By Paula Pryce photo by Yassir Abbas   Part Two:  Intentional Suffering   Traffic in Boston is mythic. People racing, gesticulating, and jockeying in whatever way possible. Rules are optional, it seems, and civility? Well – I’ve often thought Boston traffic to be the perfect microcosm of the get-ahead society. Here are a few of the images seared into my mind: A father with a carload of toddlers drives onto the sidewalk to jump the queue and...

Every night at 8 p.m., after the war began, Pope Francis called Holy Family Church in Gaza. Every night until he drew his last breath, Francis faithfully picked up the phone and checked in.

I haven’t been able to get this picture out of my head....

Illuminated by a near-full moon, several women and I made our way along a forested lakeshore across from a Midwestern Benedictine monastery. We had crept out that night to extend our Wisdom School lessons in intentional living to the serious work of play. A half hour of twisting climbs and descents brought us to a rustic altar and wooden benches that the monks had built high on a rocky outcropping. There we stripped to skin, scrabbled down, and leapt into black silky folds of water...

By Barbara Cecil I write to fellow travelers, who, like me, are wending their way into the living heart of silence…to women and men of all ages from far and wide, who are drawn to an inner stability that is not subject to the tempest of these times…  to those opening their lives to a creative force awaiting expression just behind chaos and disturbance.  I offer a few stories (out of untold myriads that could be highlighted) about ways an abiding ocean of latent potential, born in silence,...

Over the centuries, people just like us – ordinary, wise, imperfect – have found themselves in similar trouble:  doubting ways of knowing that had once felt dependable and secure, and yet becoming reticent when the lay of the land changed.  Often without warning, people just like us find themselves on a threatening road, so incomprehensible that they cannot fathom its boundaries....