Contemplation is an alternative consciousness that refuses to identify with or feed what are only passing shows. It is the absolute opposite of addiction, consumerism or any egoic consciousness.

The ego hates losing – even to God.

When you do the first half of life well, you have a good sense of yourself. Most of our mainline Christian denominations, in my opinion, don't do the first or second halves very well. We don't really give people a good container, we give them a bunch of legalisms.

The message of "falling" - failure, death, crucifixion, whatever you want to say - is not really that. Some sort of falling is really found in all the world's religions, just in different languages.

Let’s state it clearly: One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway.

Nature religions, for example, speak of summer, fall, winter, and spring. They see the downward path as the necessary prelude to any kind of upward path again. Our vocabulary is different. We Christians speak of the death and resurrection of Jesus. But unfortunately, we've projected it all onto Jesus and it didn't become a life agenda for the rest of us.

We all remain who we are. But on the way to healing or liberation we have to do what the Romans called agere contra: we have to act against the grain of our natural compulsions. This requires clear decisions. Because it does not happen by itself, it is in a way "unnatural" or "supernatural" . . . (we) simply have to cut loose now and then, and in the process . . . make mistakes.