The gift of darkness draws you to know God’s presence beyond what thought, imagination, or sensory feeling can comprehend.

The ego knows itself by comparison.

Life is not, nor ever has been, a straight line forward ... Life is characterized much more by exception and disorder than by total or perfect order.

The journey to happiness involves finding the courage to go down into ourselves and take responsibility for what's there: all of it.

If you're the head of the organization that has to pay salaries, bills and keep the money coming, you have to be concerned with pleasing the middle. I find it means you have to dumb down your message to something less radical than the gospel. It can't be the real gospel. It has to be "churchiness" that pleases everyone, so they come back next Sunday and keep putting money in the collection plate. I don't mean that in a cynical way. I just think it's what happens.

Who is telling us about the false self today? Who is even equipped tell us? Many clergy have not figured this out for themselves, since even ministry can be a career decision or an attraction to "religion" more than the result of an encounter with God or themselves. Formal religious status can maintain the false self rather effectively, especially if there are a lot of social payoffs like special respect, titles, salaries, a good self image, or nice costumes. It is no accident that the religious "Pharisees" became the symbolic bad guys in the Jesus story.

The Eucharist becomes a microcosmic moment of belief and power in which we say we believe in the real presence of God in Jesus, in this bread, and in this wine.