“Since childhood, [William]Blake had visions, which, unlike most people, stayed with him throughout life – if not grew in their intensity. He believed that this gift was innate within all, but that he[Blake] had merely retained it beyond childhood,” wrote the renown chemist, Philip Coppens about the visionary poet
Being in the world (of illusion) but not of it, is the fate and destiny, lot and opportunity of the mystic. Some mystics (unconscious of their state) try their best to fit into the matrix of canned “reality” and can live lifetimes of profound sorrow and confusion. Others, however—like the mystic artist and scientis
My early influences during my first years as a monk were Thomas Merton, Evelyn Underhill, and the most dear to me, Bede Griffiths. The first book that I had read from this English Benedictine who’d become a renunciate in India in the 1950′s was Return to the Center(1976). I was astounded at the pure love and [...]
Thomas Merton’s book Seven Story Mountain greatly influenced my decision to leave a successful career in music to become a Christian monk, launching my intense search for God through the contemplative life. However, during the first months of my own novitiate in a monastery in the northwoods of Minnesota in the 1970′
There are at least two kinds of souls on the path of authenticity. First, there are those that traipse up the mountain path and shed coat after coat and layer after layer of masks and shields. This feat is accomplished more by the world’s scars and wounds than by any choice. These are worthy of [...]
The life of a songbird is brief. Perhaps that is why each one must sing, sing as they pass swiftly through this world of wind, whistle and woe, circling through the heavens, lighting on trees, nesting, then moving once again in constant migration just above the earth. Their rest is only in death and of [...]
During my tenure as a Benedictine monk, I had traveled abroad for studies in Israel, Greece, and Egypt. My experiences there had spawned an album of mystical songs I recorded in 1982 called Time of the Harvest. Years later, after a pilgrimage to India in 1999, I was so profoundly moved by the spiritual emotions [...]
Although it is doubtful that Etta James ever penned a song herself, she didn’t have to. She gave every song its ultimate expression, whether it was the down and dirty “Tell Mama,” or “At Last,” the sublime song of praise to swimming in the ocean of life’s transforming loves. Anyone who’s
