Where should we be casting our eyes? Upward, downward, or just on the road that we’re walking? Well, there are different kinds of spiritualities: spiritualities of the Ascent, Spiritualities of the Descent and Spiritualities of Maintenance, and each is important. Spiritualities of the Ascent are spiritualities that invite us to strive always for what’s higher,

We are all, I suspect, familiar with the famous expression from Julian of Norwich, now an axiom in our language. “In the end all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” To which Oscar Wilde is reported to have added: “And if it isn’t well, then

When the Romans designed crucifixion as their means of capital punishment, they had more in mind than simply putting someone to death. They wanted to accomplish something else too, namely, to make this death a spectacle to serve as the ultimate deterrent so that anyone seeing it would think twice about committing the offence for

Several years ago, in the question-and-answer period after a public lecture, a rather disgruntled young man asked me a question that carried with it a bit of attitude: “You seem to write a lot about sex,” he said, “do you have a particular problem with it?” My lecture had been on God’s mercy and had

Most of us have been raised to believe that we have a right to possess whatever comes to us honestly, either through our own work or through inheritance. No matter how large that wealth might be, it’s ours, as long as we didn’t cheat anyone along the way. By and large, this belief has been

We don’t know how to celebrate things as they’re meant to be celebrated. We want to, but mostly we don’t know how. Generally we celebrate badly. How do we normally celebrate? By overdoing things; by taking a lot of the things we ordinarily do – drinking, eating, talking, singing and humour – and bringing them

What’s to be learned through failure, through being humbled by our own faults? Generally that’s the only way we grow. In being humbled by our own inadequacies we learn those lessons in life that we are deaf to when we are strutting proudly and confidently. There are secrets, says John Updike, which are hidden from health.

A colleague of mine, a clinical therapist, shares the following story. A woman came to him in considerable distress. Her husband had recently died of a heart attack. His death had been sudden and at a most unfortunate time. They had been happily married for 30 years and, during all those years, had never had