Suppose that throughout your childhood you were good with numbers. Other kids used to copy your homework. You figured store discounts faster than your parents. People came to you for help with such things. So you took accounting and eventually became a tax auditor for the IRS. What an embarrassing job, right? You feel you should be writing poetry or doing aviation mechanics or whatever. But then you realize that tax collecting can be a calling too.

I just read about John Le Carre, the great spy novelist. He had an absolutely miserable childhood. His mother deserted him when he was young. His father was a playboy and a drunk. He was shifted around to many different homes. He knew he was a writer when he was about nine, but he was dyslexic. So here was a person with an absolutely messed-up childhood and a symptom that prevented him from doing what he wanted to do most. Yet that very symptom was part of the calling. It forced him to go deeper.

Until the culture recognizes the legitimacy of growing down, each person in the culture struggles blindly to make sense of the darkness that the soul requires to deepen into life.

The word power has such a generally negative implication in our society. What are people talking about? Are they talking about muscles, or control?

To see the angel in the malady requires an eye for the invisible, a certain blinding of one eye and an opening of the other to elsewhere.

It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it.

Too many people have been analyzing their pasts, their childhoods, their memories, their parents, and realizing that it doesn't do anything-or that it doesn't do enough.