Category Archives: Accompaniment

Each Day, Fresh Eyes

Our sons love this sunflower (below) that has sprung up just outside the fence of a community garden near our home.

Each day, they ask to check up on this flower (both to and from school) so they can see if it has changed.

I bored quickly of this game, until I realized that, once again, they were teaching me how to love.

They are ready, every day, to see this flower with fresh eyes.  

Similarly, we simply cannot love (a partner, a child, a plant) if we do not approach them with the same openness and freedom.  We are able to love only that which we can constantly discover anew.

The Examen Book Turns One

The Examen Book is turning one!  It’s a wonder how fast these kids grow up.  And what a way to celebrate the year… … a Loyola press webinar roundtable this week on the Examen prayer with three formidable interlocutors – Becky Eldridge, Jim Manney, and Fr. Mark Thibodeaux, SJ.  Here is the recording.  If youContinue reading “The Examen Book Turns One”

A Different Way Home

While riding home on our bike after dropping his brother off at school, our younger son turned to me and asked: “Can we take a different way home?”

I am programmed to optimize for efficiency (“Must find quickest route possible!”), often to the detriment of my quality of life. Our son was opting for something else, a new adventure.

Productive routines and healthy habits are great, as far as they go. But routines also limit what we experience and see. It can be enlightening to take a different way home.

The adventure our son eventually chose was to go give his mama a hug at work. Not a bad choice considering our true home is in the heart of a God who is love.

Slack in the System

It can be tempting to maximize every system to its limit.

To squeeze as much productivity out of our minds and bodies selves as possible…

To be satisfied only with the best (whatever it might be)…

To overanalyze every moment to make sure it is producing maximum pleasure…

To take from the earth without regard for ecological limits…

At some point, this is going to break down and we will bear the cost.

And this maximization mindset actually makes us unhappy, pounding our interior lives dangerously thin.

Keeping the slack in life’s systems is a worthy and indispensable discipline.

The Infinite Game

Yesterday, for an hour or so, I tossed a plastic stingray, lobster, and octopus onto the floor of the community pool for our 6 year old to swim down and return triumphantly.  He loves this game, and so does his younger brother who also took turns throwing the “sinkies” while splashing around in his floaties.  Continue reading “The Infinite Game”

Religion DTR

In college, we used to jokingly talk about “the DTR”… where two people, with unspoken interest in a romantic relationship need to take time to “define the relationship.”

It’s a great turn of phrase and a useful tool.

It is worth it, too, to periodically have a DTR with one’s practice of religion.

That is, does my practice of religion:

Pad my ego and sense of superiority?

Narrow what I am willing to see?

Or does it represent a humbling preparation to enter a mystery of love, to engage a life more abundant than we could have imagined or engineered?

1984 or Brave New World

In school, we were introduced to two classic dystopian visions of the future: 1984 and Brave New World.

In 1984, the tyranny of a fearsome dictator reduces humans to submissive beings.

In Brave New World, humans are so preoccupied with pleasure and trivialities, they subdue themselves into submissive beings.

In your world, which one is coming true?