This profound phrase, often attributed to the 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich, echoed by contemplatives like Anthony de Mello and Father Greg Boyle, draws us back to the foundaitonal truth of healthy spirituality:

that God looks upon us not with judgment, but with deep delight.

To sit with this idea is to allow ourselves to be seen through the lens of Divine tenderness. Not as a project to be fixed, nor a disappointment to be endured. But as someone utterly and unshakably beloved. When we pause to imagine God gazing at us with joy, not after we’ve healed, achieved, or proven ourselves, but right now, as we are…it begins to dismantle the shame, anxiety, and drivenness we so often carry. We stop striving to earn love we already have. We soften toward ourselves. We learn to live from acceptance rather than for it.

The implications of this go damn well beyond emotional comfort; they’re deeply practical. If I believe God delights in me, I’m more likely to offer that same grace to others. I become less reactive, less self-critical, more grounded. My relationships shift. My pace slows. I begin to live less out of fear and more from love. I find courage not through perfection, but through presence.

So today, I offer you a simple exercise:

close your eyes for just a moment and picture God’s face turned toward you. Not frowning, not evaluating, but smiling. Behold God beholding you with affection. Let that image settle into your heart. Return to the image. We are allowed to live with gentleness, compassion, and deep-rooted peace belovedness offers us.

Perhaps the more you practice this imagery, maybe, in time, you’ll begin to behold yourself the same way The Divine always has.

So today I invite you to behold God beholding you…and smiling.
—-

ALSO: If you want to lean into this message of belovedness more, my new book, Born Beloved is now available for pre-order! You can get it here.

Quick note: My new book, Born Beloved is now available for pre-order

I was sitting with a friend today who was sharing his current journey of healing. We had spent a few days on retreat together, and he was experiencing what it felt like, after years of carrying trauma, to finally know something of peace and presence. He described it with the wonder of a child.

He talked about watching the clouds for the first time, truly noticing them. He talked about smelling flowers and realizing he had been surrounded by beauty his entire life, but had never been present enough to receive it. He described what it felt like to be grounded in his own body, awake to the moment in front of him, less distracted by the past and less consumed by the chaos of his mind. He was finally learning what it meant to simply be here.

Then came the familiar post-retreat question: How do you stay present when you are no longer on retreat? How do you experience this peace when there is money to make, children to care for, responsibilities waiting, and a life that keeps asking you to move?

We know presence matters. We know what it feels like when we find it. We experience it in monasteries, labyrinths, retreats, and moments of silence. But shouldn’t the peace we encounter in those sacred places begin to transform the way we live in every place? Shouldn’t contemplation teach us not how to escape our lives, but how to become more present within them?

The question, then, is simple: How do we learn to find presence not just on retreat, but in the middle of our real lives?

A Modern Monk

As he was asking this question, my mind went where it often does: to the Rule of St. Benedict, where much of the wisdom I rely on comes from. Even though I have studied the Rule extensively, I still find myself wondering how this ancient wisdom speaks to the modern world. Does a sixth-century monk really have something to say to a culture built around speed, productivity, distraction, and constant movement? Again and again, despite my doubts, the answer is yes. Benedict’s wisdom speaks directly to the question my friend was beginning to ponder as it so consistently speaks to our modern curiosities.

Perhaps the reason Benedict’s wisdom continues to endure is that he was never really addressing technology, culture, or any particular historical moment. He was addressing something much deeper: the human condition. The deepest desires of the human soul transcend time, and in the way he was writing to the soul, rather than the world he found himself in, it stands to reason that wisdom can transcend to our current lived experince.

St. Benedict’s story is wildly misunderstood. We imagine him as someone who escaped the world, withdrew from society, and entered a monastery in order to find God. We often assume monks and nuns have found presence because they have removed themselves from the responsibilities and distractions of everyday life. But if that were true, their wisdom would have little to offer us. It would only apply to those who had escaped the very things we are trying to navigate.

The Cave Was Not the End of the Story

It is not unusual for me to hear people say in my office, “If I could just live in a monastery,” or “If I had a spiritual job like you, Tyler, maybe I could finally find God or be more present in my life.” I think we often misunderstand monks, nuns, and what actually deepens their spiritual life. This is certainly true for St. Benedict.

sure, Benedict’s story did begin by leaving the world. As a young man, disillusioned by the excess and corruption of Rome, he withdrew into the wilderness in search of God. He settled in a cave at Subiaco, where he spent years in prayer, silence, and solitude. We often picture Benedict there, alone with God, far removed from the noise and demands of ordinary life. But the cave was not the end of the story.

People eventually found Benedict in his solitude. They sought his wisdom, guidance, and the peace they sensed within him. Benedict left the cave and began gathering people around him.

The Rule of St. Benedict was born from this experience. Not written by a man trying to escape the world, but a dude who had discovered that holiness was a communal pursuit.. The Rule became a guide for how to live in and among the world: how to pray and work, share space with difficult people, how to practice hospitality, patience, forgiveness, and care. Benedict had discovered that solitude could teach us how to listen for God, but community would teach us how to live our what we had heard. The Rule was Benedicts attempt to help ordinary people like us, become present to God. Not by leaving the world, but by learning how to live faithfully within it.

There is a difference between escaping the world and being transformed within it. Solitude can reveal who we are, but community reveals who we are becoming. We often imagine that if we could just get away from the noise, the responsibilities, the difficult conversations, or the complicated people, we would finally become present. But Benedict discovered something different: presence is not found by removing ourselves from life. It is found by fully entering into it. This is why Benedict eventually wrote his Rule, not as an instruction manual for people trying to escape humanity, but as a guide for people learning how to become more fully human within it.

The Monastery as a Way of Life

After studying Benedict and his writings for the last seven years is that, while the Rule was written for monks, its wisdom speaks far more universal. Monastic living becomes a metaphor for how all of us are invited to engage our lives. The monastery is not simply a place. It is a posture, a decision to stop waiting for another life and begin paying attention to the one we already have.

Benedict understood that peace is not found by finally reaching a life free from interruptions, responsibilities, or difficult people. Peace is found by learning to meet those very things with presence. Our monastery may not be a stone building on a hillside. It may be our home, our workplace, our marriage, our friendships, or the responsibilities that fill our days. The place where we learn presence is not somewhere else. It is the life we are already living.

Ronald Rolheiser explores this beautifully in his book The Domestic Monastery, where the home itself becomes a monastery, ordinary responsibilities become spiritual formation, and the people around us become our teachers. This is why I think so many of us miss the deeper invitation of Benedictine spirituality. We imagine monks found God because they escaped ordinary life, when Benedict was actually teaching them how to find God within it. The monastery was simply the place where this truth could be practiced.

Ora et Labora

At the heart of Benedictine spirituality is the phrase ora et labora, prayer and work. Benedict did not separate the sacred from the ordinary. He understood that God was not found only in worship, silence, or contemplation, but woven into the whole rhythm of our lives. In Chapter 31 of the Rule, Benedict instructs the cellarer to regard all the utensils and goods of the monastery as sacred vessels of the altar. For Benedict, even the tools of ordinary work were worthy of reverence because there was no sharp line between the sacred and the ordinary. All of life belonged to God.

This is Benedict’s invitation to us: to learn to see differently. Our work, our relationships, our homes, our responsibilities, and even the interruptions we wish would go away can become places of encounter. Preparing a meal, answering an email, caring for a child, welcoming a guest, or sitting with someone we love can all become opportunities to practice presence. The invitation is not to escape life in order to find God, but to become present enough to discover that God is already there.

I think this is Benedict’s answer to my friend’s question. The path to presence is not found by living permanently on retreat, it’s found by learning to pray and work, to love and serve, and to become awake to the sacredness hidden within the ordinary moments of our lives. The clouds drifting overhead, the flowers beside the path, the children asking for our attention, the work waiting on our desk, the conversation unfolding in front of us. These are not distractions from spiritual life. They are the spiritual life. Perhaps presence is not something we achieve by escaping the world. Perhaps it is what happens when we finally stop resisting the life we have been given and discover that God has been waiting for us there all along.

We don’t need to be monks. We need not live in the monastery. For our life is the very sacred place where God dwells.
—-
{ you can pre-order my new book here }

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On paper, there was nothing particularly impressive about it. The programming was simple, the budget was modest, and there was very little in the way of polished systems or carefully engineered pathways for transformation. And yet, something alive was happening there. Much of the work was carried by volunteers, many of whom had first come into the community in a place of need and slowly found themselves becoming part of the very fabric that once held them.

People found sobriety there. Others rebuilt their lives after prison. Others again found something like a second beginning after years of disorientation, addiction, or collapse. Hundreds of people have named that place as the site of some kind of turning, though not always in ways that can be neatly measured or explained.

The question inevitably comes from all sorts of places. What was the secret? What was actually happening there that allowed for so much healing?

The longer I lived inside that environment, I developed an answer. Unequivocally the answer is not found in programs or sermons. Transformation does not happen through instruction. It happens through relationships, through proximity, through life shared over time.

But even that perspective needs refinement, because not all forms of community seem to produce the same depth of change. Not every communal group produces significant environments of transformation. There is a particular quality of specific communal life that seems to make real transformation possible, and it has very little to do with efficiency, design, or perfection.

****

Over the years, I have been part of and observed many communities that are great at producing noticeable short-term behavior change. Some of them are quite effective in that regard and they tend to tout this change proudly. But not all change is the same. More specifically, what motivates all change is not the same. When we begin to consider the motivation or the foundation beneath the change, we see that not all change is the same.

Shame can produce change. Pressure can produce change. Fear can produce change. Forces like these can reshape behavior quickly and dramatically. While we love to tell the stories of rapid change, when produced with these types of fuel, they tend to produce adaptation rather than transformation.

In these spaces people begin to adjust what they say, how they act, and how they present themselves. They learn what is expected, what is acceptable, and what is rewarded. Slowly, the outer life becomes more aligned with the community’s norms while the inner life remains largely untouched. Something shifts on the surface, but the deeper layers of the self stay the same.

While this is the common pattern I see in most healing communities, this is not what I came to recognize in this small church. Which begs the question…what was so different?

****

I recently stepped away from pastoring this community as my wife and I move toward new dreams. In that transition, I continue to return to the meditation that made that place what it was. There is something that stepping away can clarify what proximity can hide. And in that clarity, I have felt a desire to put language around what I witnessed and came to know as true within this environment,, not as a final explanation, but as a remembering.

If I were to say it simply, it’s that growth happens in gardens. Unless we treat our communities like gardens, we won’t see transformation, only adaptation.

It was, in many ways, a kind of soil rather than a system.

Compassionate Community

Most communities, especially spiritual ones, imagine themselves as spaces of compassion. But I am not convinced that what we intend by compassion is always what people actually experience when they arrive in those spaces.

What I witnessed in this community was something different. There was a kind of welcome that did not wait for people to become acceptable before they were received. People were not first evaluated and then included. They were included, and from within that inclusion, evolution began. Belonging came before becoming.

When belonging is withheld until people change, they tend to change in order to survive. But when belonging is given freely, without precondition, something else becomes possible. They relax. The need to perform softens. The constant internal vigilance begins to loosen. And in that loosening, something deeper than behavior starts to surface.

What made the difference in the various life transformations was not speed, charisma, or impactful programming, it was safety. A sense that they did not have to become someone else in order to remain included.

When people feel unsafe, they do not grow. Danger produces a mindset of survival, and survival needs to be managed. Someone who is too busy managing their survival does not have much capacity left for transformation. People learn the language. They learn the posture. They learn what it means to appear “formed.” But inwardly, the deeper wounds often remain untouched.

Real transformation, if it is to happen at all, requires something more fundamental than instruction or correction. It requires a space where belonging is not something earned through performance, but something given through compassion.

****

Compassion, in this sense, is not simply a feeling or an ethic. It is something closer to an environment. It is the soil in which life takes root, the atmosphere in which something fragile can begin to grow without being immediately shaped or corrected.

In Hebrew, the word most often translated as compassion is rachamim, which comes from rechem, meaning womb. And within that linguistic root, there is a badass invitation to rethink what compassion actually is. It is not only tenderness or mercy as we typically imagine it. It is something generative. Something that holds life in its earliest and most vulnerable stages and allows it to become what it already is.

Like a womb, gardens additionally become incredible metaphors for the nature of what a compassionate environment can actually do or be. Both are environments where life is held, nourished, protected, and given the conditions it needs to become itself. Neither demands that life prove what it is before making room for it to grow. Perhaps that is what compassion really is: creating an environment where life can be held long enough, and safely enough, to become what it already carries within itself.

Eden itself reads like a kind of healing garden, a space where life is not driven by anxiety or striving, but unfolds within presence and care. A place where humanity is not first defined by performance, but by relationship and belonging within a living environment. Much like a womb.

In that sense, compassion becomes something like Eden restored. It is the return of a space where life can grow without coercion, where the ground itself is hospitable to becoming.

And so when we speak of compassionate space, we are speaking of something far more than a place where people are kind. We are speaking of the kind of space where life is safe enough to emerge, and where what is broken is not immediately corrected, but gently held until it can begin again.

This is also why Scripture so often describes God as compassionate. Again and again, the story of God with humanity is not one of immediate rejection or punishment, but of return, patience, and ongoing invitation. It is as if God is continually tending the soil again, returning the garden to a place where life can grow.

So often we think of returning to God like returning to a person. And while there is something beautiful about that image, I can’t help but wonder if, in the ways God calls God’s own self compassionate, returning to God is also something like returning back to God’s womb. A place where we can stop bracing ourselves, where we can be held without being judged, and where life can begin to grow again.

A rabbi once told me that whenever we encounter compassion in Scripture, we might understand it as God re-wombing people. Perhaps it is also God re-gardening people. God returning them to Eden. God restoring the conditions where life can be born again.

****

When compassion is understood as a space or environment rather than an action it impacts the spaces we If we are going to imagine our communities as wombs and gardens, then we have to ask what actually makes a womb a womb and a garden a garden. It is not simply that they are welcoming places. A womb does not merely welcome a child; it provides an environment where life can develop without having to manage its own survival. A garden does not simply make room for a seed; it provides soil, water, nourishment, protection, time, and space for roots to grow.

Gardens are slow. Wombs are hidden. Gardens trust what cannot yet be seen, and wombs protect what is not yet ready to be revealed. Neither is particularly concerned with appearance or productivity. They are places where something can be unfinished without being considered a failure, where becoming happens quietly before it can be witnessed. They remind us that some of the most important things happening in a life are happening beneath the surface.

Perhaps our communities need to be built around these same conditions. We need to create spaces where people are safe enough to stop performing, where they are nourished rather than merely instructed, and where there is enough time for what is happening beneath the surface to take root. We need spaces that do not rush people into a predetermined shape, but trust that something living is already within them that needs room to emerge.

And perhaps this is where our understanding of leadership has to change. Our task is not to make people grow. It is to cultivate the conditions in which growth can happen. We cannot manufacture transformation in another person any more than we can pull a seed open to make it grow. We can only tend the soil, protect the space, provide what is needed, and trust the life that is already there.

That is a very different vision of community. It is not simply a place where everyone is welcomed. It is a place that is actually capable of holding life, nourishing life, protecting life, and giving life the time and freedom it needs to become.

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As we continue to listen to this voice, we deepen our anxiety. We begin to measure ourselves against imagined timelines, against other people’s progress, against the quiet but constant noise of urgency that hums beneath modern existence. There is always somewhere we think we should already be. Something we think we should have already become. And slowly, without noticing, life becomes less something we are living and more something we are trying to qualify for.

We start treating our days as evidence. Evidence that we are enough, or not enough. Evidence that we are moving fast enough, healing fast enough, becoming fast enough. Even our spiritual lives can become subtly infected by this pressure, as if grace itself had deadlines. And beneath it all is a restless question that rarely gets spoken out loud: Am I behind?

But the Divine is not hurried. The Eternal does not pace the room tapping a foot, waiting for you to catch up. What we call delay is often simply formation. What we name as being “behind” is frequently the hidden work of becoming. And what feels like absence is sometimes the most intimate kind of presence. It is simply not a presence that announces itself loudly enough to satisfy our anxious need for proof.

The truest movements of God are almost always imperceptible at first. They do not arrive like headlines. They arrive like silence deepening. Like attention softening. Like the strange and subtle realization that you are being changed even when nothing around you appears to change at all. Something in you is shifting at a depth that cannot yet be translated into outcomes or language, but it is no less real for its hiddenness.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote, “Above all, trust in the slow work of God.” It is from one of my all time favorite poems. This is not a passive resignation, but a sacred consent to the rhythm of grace. It is the refusal to force mystery into machinery, or to turn becoming into production. Divine time does not move in straight lines or quarterly goals. It moves like roots underground, like yeast in dough, like love learning how to breathe inside a human life. The soul ripens in secrecy. God is never anxious about your unfolding.

And yet we are often tormented by the feeling that we are falling behind invisible benchmarks. We scroll through other lives and mistake their visible chapters for the whole story. We compare our interior uncertainty to someone else’s curated clarity. We forget that what is most essential in a human life is almost never visible while it is happening. Life is not primarily built in display; it is formed in depth. And depth takes time.

Much of what we call “progress” is simply distraction dressed in achievement. There is a kind of busyness that does not move us forward at all, but only keeps us from meeting ourselves in silence. And so we run, not always toward something, but away from the still point where truth would begin to speak.

But there is another way of being human. A quieter way. A slower way that does not reject responsibility or purpose, but refuses to confuse urgency with meaning. In this way, even waiting becomes sacred. Even uncertainty becomes fertile ground. Even what feels like stagnation becomes a place where roots begin to go deeper than outcomes can measure.

You are not late. You are not failing. You are not being bypassed by grace.

You are in process in a way that is deeper than productivity can track and more real than accomplishment can prove. There is a hidden intelligence to your life that is not dependent on your clarity. Something in you is being formed not for performance, but for presence. Not for speed, but for depth. Not for visibility, but for union.

Your belovedness precedes your progress and outlasts your confusion. This is the quiet center of all spiritual awakening. You were known before you were efficient, held before you were certain, loved before you were articulate about any of it. Nothing you achieve will make you more real than you already are in this moment, and nothing you fail to achieve will undo the reality of that love.

So rest there, not as escape, but as return. Let the false clocks fall silent. Let the imagined timelines loosen their grip. Let the inner compulsion to “arrive” somewhere dissolve into the simple fact that you are already here.

The God who called you into being is still patiently shaping you, and nothing essential is missing. Not in you. Not in your life. Not in the hidden work unfolding beneath what you can currently see.

And perhaps, if you listen closely enough, you may begin to notice that what you once named delay was actually an invitation all along.

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Spiritual direction is one of those realities.

This is important for me to explore because spiritual direction changed my life. More accurately it saved my life and my spirituality. So much so that almost seven years ago, I sold my successful coffee company in order to spend the next two years studying at a Benedictine monastery in order to become a Spiritual Director.

People often ask what spiritual direction is, expecting an answer that fits neatly alongside therapy, coaching, mentoring, or pastoral care. While it shares something with each of these, it is ultimately unlike any of them.

Spiritual direction swims in different waters.

This can be difficult to explain because spiritual direction is less something that is accomplished than something that is practiced. It is less about finding answers than cultivating attention. Less about being given a map than learning how to notice the path beneath your feet. The spiritual director does not stand above another person as an expert with hidden knowledge. Instead, they become a compassionate companion, listening alongside another until what has always been true begins, little by little, to come into view.

Perhaps, then, spiritual direction is best understood not through definition but through imagination. Like the deepest truths of spiritual life, it is often the language of image, story, and metaphor that brings us closest to its mystery.

Below are a few images I’ve used over the years, embodying the sacred and cosmic beauty that is the practice of spiritual direction.

The Cafe

I owned a coffee company for many years. Having spent thousands of hours behind the bar, you begin to notice the way in which the same room can be many different worlds.

Every morning people scream through the front door carrying laptops, briefcases, and the invisible weight of a busy life. They order almost instinctively, rarely looking up from the glowing screens in their hands. One hand reaching for a paper cup while the other answering another email. Within moments they are gone again, swept back into the hurried current of the day, having passed through the café without ever inhabiting it.

Others arrive at a different pace. They choose a chair instead of the exit. They wrap both hands around the warmth of a ceramic mug as though remembering that they have one body and not merely one mind. They notice the barista greeting a regular customer by name before the order is even spoken. They smile at the elderly couple who quietly meet there every Tuesday morning, lingering over conversation after what appears to be decades together. They catch the afternoon light as it slowly stretches across the wooden floor, illuminating the dust suspended in the air like tiny prayers no one else has noticed.

An observation emerges. The coffee shop has not changed. The same coffee is brewed. The same music plays softly overhead. The same people move through the same doors. And yet, those who enter often leave having inhabited two completely different worlds.

I have often thought that spiritual direction feels something like tending a well-loved café.

People arrive carrying all sorts of things. Anxiety. Joy. Exhaustion. Grief. Questions they cannot name. Some enter hurried and distracted, and that is perfectly alright. Never would I ask the businesswoman rushing between meetings to pretend she is somewhere else. I would never insist she slow down before she is ready, or ask her to savor a pour-over when all she has time for is coffee in a paper cup. Hospitality begins by receiving people as they are, not as we wish they would become. The same is said for spiritual direction.

So instead, I simply keep the space.

Then, every so often, something shifts. The conversation slows and a long silence no longer feels awkward. A passing comment suddenly carries unexpected depth. A tear appears before either of us fully understands why. A story that has been told a hundred times is heard differently the hundred-and-first.

Nothing extraordinary has happened. The coffee is still warm. The room is still the same. The person’s life has not suddenly become easier. But they have become present enough to notice a myriad of different things in their same atmosphere. Beautiful things that have always been true and always waiting for them.

The work of a spiritual director is not to point these things out as though I possess some secret knowledge. It is simply to know the café well enough to remain there with another person until their own eyes begin to notice all that it offers.

Like any good host, I cannot make someone linger. I cannot force wonder or manufacture awakening. I can only create a space where hurried hearts remember that they are allowed to rest, where listening becomes more important than speaking, and where the ordinary slowly reveals itself as holy.

The architect

Imagine a woman who purchases an old warehouse tucked between newer buildings in the heart of a city. Most people cannot understand why she would bother. The roof leaks when it rains. The windows have long since been boarded shut. Layers of paint conceal the original brick. The floors groan beneath each step, and the rooms are dark enough that they seem to have forgotten what sunlight feels like. Friends encourage her to start over. It would be easier, they insist, to demolish the building and construct something new in its place.

Instead, she invites an old architect to walk through it with her.

He says very little. He pauses often. His hand lingers across the weathered brick as though greeting an old friend. He tilts his head toward the heavy timber beams hidden above a lowered ceiling that someone installed decades ago.

The building bears the scars of time, but its bones remain remarkably sound. They have carried the entire weight of the structure through every storm, every season, every ill-conceived renovation. The architect smiles as he sees what this building was always intended to be.

So they begin their work.

Not by adding, but by uncovering.

The work is slower than anyone expected. False walls are removed. Old windows are uncovered after years of being sealed away, and sunlight returns to places that had grown accustomed to darkness. Layers of paint are carefully stripped back until the warmth and character of the original brick begin to emerge once again. Little by little, the building does not become something else; it becomes more deeply itself. What seemed broken was often merely hidden. What seemed beyond repair had, at its deepest level, never stopped bearing the weight.

When the restoration is complete, visitors stand in quiet amazement. They speak of the transformation as though an entirely new place has appeared in the middle of the city.

The architect only smiles.

“We built very little,” he says. “ Everything beautiful was already here. We simply removed what kept it from being seen.”

It seems to me, the human soul is something like that old warehouse.

Most of us spend years constructing walls we never intended to keep. We build aditions and paint walls out of fear and shame. Chasing trends of the modern world instead of evolving with intention.

Over time we forget that there were ever additions at all and we begin to identify with what we’ve added to our building rather than what the building was intended to be.

Yet beneath every false wall and every boarded window, something older, deeper, and more trustworthy has never ceased holding us. Beneath all that has been added, there remains the architecture of God. The image of the Divine woven into us from the beginning, carrying us even when we have forgotten it is there.

The work of a spiritual director is not helping someone construct a better life, nor is it repairing a foundation that has failed. It is accompanying another person as they slowly uncover what has always been true: that beneath the layers of fear, performance, and self-protection, the deepest part of them has never stopped belonging to God. The foundation has held. The beams have remained strong. The beloved life was never lost.

It was simply waiting, patiently, for enough light to find its way back through the windows.

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The Fly Fishing Guide

I remember the first time a friend took me fly fishing on his boat. Before we ever cast a line, he told me that fishing begins with learning how to see water.

To the untrained eye, a river looks like one endless current, rushing over rocks and around fallen trees with relentless energy. Everywhere seems equally alive, equally promising. But a seasoned river guide sees something altogether different. They notice the subtle seam where fast water meets slow. They point to places where the surface barely moves.

What they know is that beneath the stillest waters, the river is often deep and full of life.

“Cast there, if you’d like,” the guide said, pointing toward water I would have dismissed as too ordinary, too quiet, too uninteresting.

The one thing a fishing guide really knows is that fish rarely linger in rushing water. The current demands are too much of them. If you are going to find a fish, it will most often be in the slower places, where the water is calm. And so the guide patiently helps you learn to find them.

The guide does not hand you a fish. Nor do they fish for you. They certainly cannot promise what the river will offer that day. Instead, they invite you into the boat and, over time, help you notice what you could not yet see. They point toward the quiet water you would have overlooked. They encourage you to cast again after disappointment. They remind you that patience is not wasted time but part of the practice itself.

It seems to me this is the quiet work of spiritual direction. It is not teaching someone how to control God, nor offering techniques that guarantee a spiritual experience. It is accompanying another person until they begin to notice the still places within the river of their own life, those quiet moments where grace is so often waiting. And while there is never a promise that the fish will rise, those who learn to return, patiently and faithfully, to the calm waters discover that they encounter mystery there far more often than they ever imagined.

---

If you find yourself longing for a quieter place to listen, notice, and pay attention to the movements of God in your own life, spiritual direction may be a place to begin. I offer spiritual direction for those who desire a companion on the journey—a sacred space to slow down, reflect, and discover the grace that has been present all along.

If this feels like an invitation for this season of your life, you are welcome to reach out here, and we can chat.

Before we achieve anything...
Before we prove ourselves...
Before we earn our place...

We are beloved.

That conviction has shaped nearly everything I’ve shared here on Substack. It has guided my work as a spiritual director, my years in the monastery, and the way I’ve tried to make sense of both my own life and the lives of those I meet.

One of the great tragedies of modern life is how much energy we spend trying to prove that we belong, to God, to one another, and even to ourselves...without realizing we already do.

Today, I’m incredibly grateful to finally share where that journey has been leading.

This fall, my first book, Born Beloved: When Nothing to Prove Becomes Everything, will be published by Orbis Books.

Even writing that sentence feels surreal.

This project has been five years in the making. It’s the book I wish someone had placed in my hands when my life fell apart. It’s also the book I’ve wished I could hand to so many of my clients as they began their own journey toward healing and wholeness.

I wrote it because I believe so many of us are exhausted, not simply from doing too much, but from carrying the impossible burden of trying to become enough.

What I’ve discovered, and what I hope this book helps others discover, is that when we stand in our belovedness, we have:

Nothing to gain.
Nothing to lose.
Nothing to fear.
Nothing to prove.

To awaken to our belovedness is one of the most liberating experiences a person can have. Helping people embody that reality has become the deepest calling of my life.

A Beautiful Book Tour

As exciting as publishing a book is, what excites me even more is what comes after.

I’ve never imagined Born Beloved sitting quietly on bookstore shelves or being read in isolation. Belovedness is something we embody together. It comes alive around dinner tables, in churches, retreats, coffee shops, small groups, and honest conversations between people learning how to receive love.

That’s why I’m planning a book tour with more than ten stops across the country, visiting communities wherever doors open.

But I also want this message to reach people who would never, or simply can’t, spend money on a book.

One of my goals is to place more than 100 copies of Born Beloved directly into the hands of people who need this reminder most. Some copies will go to pastors, chaplains, counselors, prison ministries, campus ministries, and community leaders. Others I’ll simply give away along the journey to anyone who could use the reminder that they were born beloved...and still are.

Sometimes the right book arrives at exactly the right moment.

I’d love for this one to become that gift for someone else.

Kickstarter

To make the tour and giveaways possible I’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign.

The funds will help cover travel expenses, community gatherings, free books, and the resources needed to carry this message farther than I could on my own.

If my writing or work has encouraged you over the years, supporting this campaign is one of the most meaningful ways you can help that encouragement reach someone else.

You’re helping create conversations.

You’re helping build communities.

You’re helping awaken people to the truth that they have always been beloved.

The Invitation.

My goal is to raise $7,000, which will make this tour possible, allow me to visit communities that might not otherwise be able to host speakers or retreats, and provide more than one hundred books to give away along the way.

One of the fun parts of the Kickstarter is that it’s filled with meaningful rewards. Depending on your level of support, you can receive exclusive stickers, original artwork, merchandise, signed books, and even invite me to lead a retreat or event in your own community.

Whether you choose to support financially, share the campaign with a friend, or simply continue reading along here, thank you.

Thank you for believing that love is deeper than fear, that grace is stronger than shame, and that the truest thing about us is not what we’ve accomplished, but what God has declared from the very beginning.

We were born beloved.

SUPPORT THE KICKSTARTER HERE

With gratitude,

Tyler

The Benedictine expression of my spirituality comes as a surprise to some folks. Maybe you knew me once as an entrepreneur. Others as a life coach or a spiritual director. At minimum, the tattoos and occasional cuss words don’t always align with an ancient monastic spiritual expression. All that to say, I get a lot of questions.

I woke up and felt the impulse today to share, with a touch more clarity, what it means for me to live as a Benedictine in the modern world. Like what does it actually mean and how does it practically impact my life?

More than seven years ago, I found myself sitting in a room with a group of elderly Benedictine sisters who held me through one of the darkest seasons of my life. After a full breakdown in my life, I impulsively sold my coffee company and committed to spending the next two years at this monastery to heal.

They did not rush to solve my problems or explain away my suffering. They remained present, listened, and welcomed me before they ever tried to change me. Their hospitality, steadiness, and joy was a hospital to my weary soul.

As I spent more time with the sisters, my gratitude transformed into curiosity. I wanted to know what kind of life produced people who carried so much peace without pretending life was easy. What made their wisdom feel less of an intellectual superiority and more of a deep-rooted presence. That search led me deeper into their Benedictine tradition and way of life where I discovered a significantly different form of spirituality from my younger years.

Over time, admiration became practice, and practice eventually became commitment. I entered formation as a Benedictine oblate and eventually made my vow to seek God according to St. Benedict’s wisdom with the Sisters of Benet Hill Monastery. To be an Oblate is to remain fully engaged in the ordinary responsibilities of family, work, and life in the world, while maintaining this monastic perspective in all I do. To be an oblate is not about leaving my life for a monastery, but instead learning how to bring the monastery home.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me. Benedictine spirituality has never been an escape from the world but a way of loving the world more faithfully. It’s not a detour from loving Christ, but a way to love Christ more faithfully.

We first see this in how Benedict, who once escaped Rome to go pray in a cave, but eventually left and cultivated a monastic movement, built around community rather than isolation. This monastic life as the tradition teaches, is a life that becomes purified, not in extraordinary extremism or isolation, but in ordinary moments and community. Thighs like:

Sharing meals, welcoming strangers, reading Scripture slowly, answering emails with attention, doing honest work, tending relationships, and returning again and again to the quiet presence of God hidden within everyday life.

Now, there is far more to the Benedictine tradition than I could ever hope to capture in a single essay, and certainly far more than I have yet begun to embody. I remain, in every sense, a student of Benedict’s way. But there are a handful of themes that have become faithful companions along my journey. Ideas that have reshaped my spirituality and how I view living life fully alive.

The following are a handful of the core perspectives, birthed from the Benedictine way, that have radically shaped how I live and exist in the world.

Listening with the Ear of the Heart

The Rule of Saint Benedict begins with an invitation: “Listen carefully, my child, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.“

I grew up in a spirituality and we seem to live in an age that prizes certainty more than attentiveness. We accumulate information with astonishing speed, broadcast our opinions to strangers, and often mistake having an answer for possessing wisdom. For many, a life of faith has become an exercise in mastering ideas rather than allowing ourselves to be mastered by love. We become experts in theology while remaining novices in listening.

Benedict begins somewhere altogether different.

He does not begin with belief, discipline, morality, doctrine, or accomplishment. He begins with attention. Before we are invited to speak, teach, defend, or even understand, we are invited to listen.

Benedict does not simply tell us to listen with our ears, but with “the ear of the heart.” He assumes there is a deeper capacity within us. A way of perceiving reality that lies beneath analysis and argument. The heart, in the spiritual imagination, is not merely the seat of emotion. It is the center of the whole person, where desire, imagination, memory, love, and will are gathered together before God and with God. To listen with the heart is to become fully available. It is to cultivate an inner stillness capable of recognizing the quiet movements of grace.

This invitation carries with it a profoundly different vision of what it means to be human. Much of my early spiritual formation was shaped by the idea that something at the center of us was fundamentally wrong, that our hearts were naturally inclined toward sin, that we entered the world already separated from goodness, and that the spiritual life was largely about overcoming or correcting what was broken within us.

Benedictine wisdom offered me another way of seeing. It did not deny human brokenness, suffering, or the places where we need transformation, but it began somewhere deeper: with the conviction that beneath all of it is the image of God. That there is a goodness placed within us that God has never abandoned. Listening, then, is not the act of searching for a God who is far away. It is the practice of awakening to the God who has always been present within us.

The more I have lived within this tradition, the more I have come to believe that the spiritual life is not primarily about learning to speak to God or memorize words or defending theologies about God. It is about becoming the sort of person who can recognize that God has been speaking all along, deep within our chest.

Everything else in Benedictine spirituality grows from this posture of attentive listening. Hospitality is simply listening made visible. Prayer is listening made habitual. Scripture becomes listening made receptive. Even work becomes listening embodied in the ordinary tasks of everyday life. Once I began to see this thread running through the tradition, everything else in my sacred life began to evolve.

Hospitality: Making Room for God

If listening is the posture of Benedictine spirituality, hospitality is one of its first expressions. Hospitality has been calling to me for my entire life. As early as I can remember my parents hosted people in need in our home. This translated into a hospitality focused coffee company that grew to global fame for its guest experience. Long before Benedict entered my life, hospitality simmered inside of me. It was, of course,the hospitality of the sisters that firm made me feel safe and has thus translated into echoes of hope and healing in my life.

Saint Benedict instructs his communities to receive every guest as though they were receiving Christ himself. At first glance, this appears to be practical advice for monasteries that regularly welcomed travelers. But the longer I have sat with these words, the more I have realized that Benedict is speaking about far more than opening a door. He is describing an orientation toward reality itself.

Hospitality begins long before another person arrives at our table.

It begins with learning to welcome ourselves.

One of the tragedies of modern life is how many of us live as strangers to our own souls. We wage constant wars against ourselves. We criticize our bodies, deny our grief, hide our fears, and treat our limitations as enemies to overcome. We imagine that holiness requires becoming someone different than the person God already knows completely.

The Benedictine tradition has gently challenged that instinct in me. It has reminded me that God has never withheld love until I became more productive, more disciplined, more successful, or more spiritually impressive. Divine hospitality always precedes human transformation. Like in a good monastery, God welcomes us before changing us, and perhaps it is precisely that welcome that makes change possible.

Learning to extend that same hospitality toward myself has been one of the hardest and most liberating practices of my life. It has meant receiving my humanity instead of resisting it. It has meant sitting with sadness without immediately trying to solve it, acknowledging weakness without shame, and trusting that even my unfinished life is a place where grace can dwell.

This same hospitality also reshapes the way we welcome God. The longer I have lived within the contemplative tradition, the more I have come to notice a God who is always at the door, gently knocking, just as the Scriptures describe. God does not force the door open. Love never coerces. Divine love waits with remarkable patience, honoring our freedom while continually inviting us into deeper communion. Prayer, then, is not primarily begging God to intervene in our lives, but opening the door to the One who has been faithfully waiting all along. It is less about persuading God to come near and more about becoming receptive to the Presence that has never left us. The more hospitable I become toward God, the more aware I become of God’s presence woven throughout my ordinary life.

This movement of hospitality never remains in one direction. We are first welcomed by God, and from that welcome we slowly learn to welcome God in return. As we become more deeply rooted in that relationship, we begin extending the same grace toward ourselves. We no longer treat our own humanity as something to conquer or escape, but as holy ground where God has already chosen to dwell. Hospitality becomes the rhythm of spiritual life. A continual flow of receiving and offering, of being welcomed and learning to welcome.

Eventually, that hospitality cannot help but spill over into the world around us. Hospitality is not simply setting another place at the dinner table, as beautiful as that may be. It inevitably becomes a matter of justice. If Benedict invites us to receive every guest as though we were receiving Christ, then it seems only natural that we begin to see every person we encounter as an image bearer of God. The stranger at our doorstep and the stranger across the street, across the aisle, or across the world are all worthy of the same sacred regard.

This has profoundly reshaped the way I engage the social and political life of my community. Before asking what position someone holds or what party they belong to, I am invited to ask a more fundamental question: Can I recognize the image of God in this person? Can I remain rooted in love even when I profoundly disagree? Benedictine hospitality does not ask me to abandon conviction, but it does require that every conviction be carried with humility, compassion, and an unwavering commitment to the dignity of every human being.

The invitation extends even further still. Hospitality becomes a lens through which I examine every aspect of my life. Does the way I spend my money create room for others to flourish? Does the way I use my influence make space for voices that are often overlooked? Do my politics, my relationships, my work, and my daily choices reflect the expansive welcome of God, or are they primarily arranged around my own comfort and self-interest? These questions rarely produce simple answers, but they continually call me back to the heart of the Benedictine vision: to live in such a way that others encounter, however imperfectly, the hospitality of God through the hospitality of my own life.

Ora et Labora: Pray & Work

One of the great gifts of the Benedictine tradition is the phrase ora et labora: Pray and Work. It takes two of the most ordinary realities of human life and weaves them into a single breath. What feels like two separate tasks for most folks, becomes one integrated way of living in Benedictine life. Prayer is no longer something we squeeze in before getting on with the “real” work of the day, nor is work simply an interruption to our spiritual lives. Together, they become the inhale and exhale of a life lived in the presence of God.

Saint Benedict writes in the Rule, “Before you begin any good work, pray most earnestly that it may be brought to perfection.” There is humility in this invitation. Meaningful work begins not simply done with our own effort, but with God’s grace. Before our hands begin moving, our hearts are invited to remember who sustains them. Our work becomes less of a solo achievement and more of a co-creation with God.

Yet Benedict is equally clear that prayer alone is not the whole of the spiritual life.

Sometimes we imagine the monastery as a place where the monks spend their days in endless contemplation, as though holiness means escaping ordinary responsibilities. But that was never Benedict’s vision. Monks worked. They tended gardens, prepared meals, welcomed guests, copied manuscripts, cared for one another, and carried out the ordinary tasks of human life. Their work was not a distraction from prayer. It was one of the primary places where prayer became embodied.

Holiness, then, has never depended upon escaping the ordinary. The monk and the parent, the nun and the entrepreneur, the teacher and the leader all receive the same invitation: seek God, then faithfully attend to the work in front of you.

This is what Father Ronald Rolheiser points toward when he speaks of the “domestic monastery.” Most of us are not called to leave the world for a cloister, but we are invited to discover that the wisdom of the monastery was always meant to shape the lives we are already living. The rhythm is the same. We wake and offer ourselves to God. We enter into the work before us. We are interrupted throughout the day. We return our attention to God. Then we begin again.

The monastery simply makes this rhythm visible.

The monks and sisters rise to prayer, then return to their daily tasks. Throughout the day, the bells ring, calling them back to awareness. The bells interrupt their work and they go to the monastery for prayer. This is no different than my life.

As an oblate, I have begun to see the interruptions of my own life in much the same way. My own monastery bells. The crying child. The red light. The unexpected phone call. The difficult email. The neighbor who needs a few minutes of conversation. The meeting that runs long. The plans that unravel.

These moments that once felt like distractions can become invitations. They call me back to the present. They invite me to breathe, to remember, and to listen with the ear of the heart before returning to the work before me.

Ora et labora reminds me that prayer and work are not competing realities to be carefully balanced. They are the movements of a single life. We breathe in through contemplation, becoming aware of God’s presence. We breathe out through faithful work, offering that presence back to the world through our hands, our words, and our ordinary responsibilities. If we only inhale, we suffocate. If we only exhale, we collapse. Life requires both.

The monastery and St. Benedict teaches me that we are not so different from the monks after all. When we carry home the rhythm of the monastery, we see life as the same breath. Co-creation with God that infuses countless calls to prayer throughout the day.

This is the invitation of Benedictine spirituality. Not that we admire the monastery from a distance, but that we discover its wisdom quietly unfolding within the lives we are already living as we pray and work.

Reading to Listen

As a young Protestant boy, I was taught to approach Scripture primarily as something to understand. Memorization, theological precision, careful interpretation, and sound doctrine were presented as the foundations of a healthy spiritual life. That still matters. Loving God surely includes loving God with our minds, and I remain deeply grateful for the scholars, teachers, and theologians who have helped me encounter the richness and depth of Scripture.

But there came moments in my life when knowledge alone could not carry me.

When my mother died, grief was too deep for explanations. The theological framework I had learned felt insufficient. People trying to tell me the theology of suffering while in the middle of it was wildly unkind to a grieving soul. I also think of seasons of discernment when I longed for clarity and direction, I needed more than information about God. I needed an encounter with God.

The Benedictine tradition began to teach me another way of approaching Scripture. Again I feel drawn to the prologue where we are invited to “listen with the heart of our heart”. Benedict is also quoted in the rule inviting us not to a cerebral reading, but a “prayerful reading” of scriptrue.

It makes me think of the Proverb “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.” The invitation is not to abandon the mind, but to open the whole self, especially the heart, the imagination, and the soul to the presence of God. My own understanding pales in comparison to the trust of God on a heart level rather than a brain level.

The tradition carries this forward through the practice of lectio divina, which simply means “divine reading.” It is a prayerful way of encountering Scripture that honors Benedict’s invasion to a “prayerful reading”

At its simplest, lectio divina is not complicated.

We read a small passage slowly. We notice a word, phrase, or image that catches our attention. We sit with it. We allow it to move from our mind into our heart. We ask not only, “What does this passage mean?” but also, “What is God inviting me to notice? What is this revealing in me? Where is God meeting me here?”

This is to say if 5 people are reading the same scripture together, they very well may hear different things. Why? Because they are different people with different needs and a different relationship with the Divine. No more racing through chapters to complete a reading plan. No more studying until my brain melts. Rather than dissecting the text, I began allowing the text to examine me. Rather than mastering Scripture, I slowly discovered that Scripture was patiently reshaping my own heart.

This kind of reading requires a different pace. It asks us to resist our culture’s obsession with consumption, speed, and productivity. We often measure spiritual maturity by how much we have read, how much we know, or how many verses we can quote. Benedict invites us into another question altogether.

Have we listened?

The purpose of sacred reading is not simply to collect more knowledge about God, but to become more available to the presence of God. Scripture becomes most alive not when I finally understand every difficult passage, but when I become quiet enough to hear the invitation hidden within it. The Bible becomes less like a textbook to master and more like sitting beside a trusted friend whose few carefully spoken words reveal more than hours of explanation ever could.

This is why Benedict begins his Rule with listening rather than speaking. Prayer, hospitality, work, and Scripture all become schools of attention. Each one patiently trains the heart to recognize the quiet voice of God woven through the fabric of ordinary life.

The way of St. Benedict shows us that spiritual maturity is not measured by how much we know about God, but by how deeply we have learned to listen for God’s presence in every unfolding moment.

The Invitation to Become

A core vow both monks and oblates take is the vow of conversatio morum, translated as “conversion of life.” It is a commitment to continual transformation and a lifelong willingness to keep becoming.

In my work as a spiritual director, it seems more and more that one of the great limitations of modern spirituality is that we imagine the spiritual life as a single moment of arrival or a place we must strive to arrive to. We say the sinners prayer, We make a decision, get baptised, We receive salvation and we are good. We are told the journey is complete.

But the ancient wisdom of the Benedictine tradition offers a different vision.

Salvation is not simply something that happens to us once. It is something that continues to happen within us. It is not merely being rescued from something; it is being transformed into someone new. It is not only the question, “Am I saved?” but the deeper question, “Who am I becoming?”

The Benedictine way assumes that God is not finished with us because love is never finished with us.

Conversion is not the process of becoming lovable, rather it is the process of waking up to the belovedness that was there all along.

The spiritual journey is not about escaping our humanity or overcoming the parts of ourselves that God somehow regrets. It is about allowing God’s love to heal, transform, and bring to fullness the person we were created to become. We release what no longer serves love. We surrender our ego, our need for control, our unhealthy patterns, and the false stories we have carried about ourselves. Not because we are worthless, but because we are deeply loved.

Saint Benedict writes that “the love of Christ must come before all else.” Everything begins there. Transformation is not the result of striving harder to prove ourselves to God. It is the natural response of a heart that has begun to trust that it is already held.

Joan Chittister writes about conversion as the willingness to allow life itself to keep changing us. The events we experience, the people we encounter, the disappointments we endure, and the joys we receive all become invitations to deeper awareness. The question is no longer simply, “What happened to me?” but “What is this moment inviting me to become?”

This is perhaps one of the greatest gifts of the monastic tradition. It refuses the illusion that we can arrive spiritually. There is no final version of ourselves that we finally achieve. There is only the ongoing journey of becoming more fully alive in God.

Benedict understood that this transformation happens slowly. It happens through ordinary faithfulness. Through prayer and work. Through hospitality and humility. Through the daily choice to return again and again to love.

The questions of conversion remain before us:

Who am I becoming?

What in me still needs healing?

Where is God inviting me into deeper love?

The monastery has taught me that the goal of the spiritual life is not perfection, but wholeness. Not becoming someone entirely different, but becoming more fully who we were created to be. The journey is not about earning our way into God’s affection, but about awakening to the truth that we have been held by it from the beginning.

And perhaps this is what Benedict has been inviting us into from the very beginning:

Listen. Receive. Become.

I’m not sure my spirituality would have survived at all if it wasn’t for him and especially the cornerstone practice he brought to the Christian West.

Keating is most known for helping bring a meditation and prayer practice called Centering Prayer into wider awareness. The practice itself is disarmingly simple. You sit in silence, choose a sacred word, and rest your attention there. When your mind wanders, and it will, you gently return to the sacred word without judgement.

What’s essential to understand is that the practice doesn’t just allow for distraction, it assumes it. You’re not asked to eliminate your thoughts or achieve some kind of pristine inner stillness. Instead, you are invited to notice when you’ve drifted and to return. To be clear, there is a pre-set assumption that your mind will wander.

That assumption alone was a gateway to deep spiritual transformation in my life.

—

For years, the goal of the spiritual life was simple: don’t mess up. Don’t get distracted. Don’t fall off. Devotion without lapse. Perfection wasn’t just an ideal, it was the measuring stick. Every wandering thought during prayer, every overreaction, every return to an old pattern felt like evidence that I wasn’t where I should be.

Thus the only feasible response to a lapse in life was to try harder, to become more disciplined, to pay closer attention to everything that was going wrong. The belief was that if I could simply eliminate the setbacks and distractions, I would finally arrive at the spiritual height I longed to attain.

But that kind of spirituality has a center, and that center isn’t God or Their love. The center is perfection. Perfection: The great idol of the American west. And perfection, it turns out, is a terrible god. It doesn’t lead you into love. It leads you into exhaustion, and eventually into shame.

One of the first things I learned while studying spiritual formation in a Benedictine monastery was that spiritual practices aren’t ends in themselves. They are training grounds. They are private rehearsals for how we live in the world. Prayer is not just about what happens in prayer; it’s about what prayer forms in you, so that you go out into the world in a prayer formed way.

Meditation and Centering Prayer, in this sense, are not about becoming good at the practice. They are about becoming more awake to your life and how you live. I don’t know about you, but my life in this modern world is filled with distraction. My life includes often losing my center, reacting poorly to things, missing the moment.

What has been so liberating for me, is that in the same way Centering Prayer is not about avoiding distraction or falling away so too is the spiritual life. The idea that we will one day reach a place where we no longer need to return to life, or meditation is not only unrealistic…it misses the point entirely.

The point of meditation is not to avoid distraction, it’s to return kindly. The same is said for our lived expeince.

—

What so often truly derails us in life is not the distractions we experience or the times we missed the mark. What really takes us to the dark places is how we respond to our missteps. Not only do we miss the mark from time to time, but we get frustrated and fiercely judge ourselves for the reality that we fell astray. Not only now, did you miss the mark in something, but you are tangled in judgement about being distracted.

The mistake itself is rarely what takes us out. It’s the way we hold the mistake, the story we tell about it, the way we turn it into evidence against ourselves. Whether in meditation or life, the result is the same. Falling off the wagon is expected, and it might hurt a bit. But our response holds more power than we’ve ever been taught.

This is where the practice of Center Prayer can be so powerful. It trains you not to obsess over the distraction, but to release it and return to your center with kindness. To gently return without turning your distraction into a cosmic critique.

For so much of my life, spirituality wasn’t about returning to love. It was an ongoing fixation on where I had fallen short. But what if the mistake was never the primary problem? What if the deeper issue was the posture we take toward ourselves in the wake of it?

—
Now when we miss the mark in life, there will be consequences. Oftentimes these are out of our control. And yet, the way we respond to our falling out of center has a tendency to unnecessarily comb out our consequences well beyond what is necessary or helpful. One response leads into shame and fragmentation from Divine love. The other becomes a doorway back into presence.

That shift may sound small, but it changes everything in the spiritual life. Over the last seven or so years, I’ve worked to reaffirm my pursuits to simply being obsessed with avoidance and instead have invited my shortcomings to be part of my overall evolution and process.

There’s a story from Thomas Keating that captures this better than anything I could say. A nun once came to him discouraged about her attempts at centering prayer. She had been trying to sit in silence, but her mind kept wandering. Over and over again, she would get pulled away. She counted how many times it happened and brought that number to him, expecting correction for here many sinful distractions.

Instead, Keating had tears falling from his eyes. “A hundred times?” he said. “ A hundred times you returned to God.”

What she experienced as failure, he saw as faithfulness. What she thought disqualified her was, in his eyes, the very substance of spiritual life.

—

This sacred reframing doesn’t stay contained to prayer, it reaches into everything. If spirituality is about never drifting, most of us are out before we even begin. But if spirituality is about returning, then every moment of awareness becomes a path back home to love. . Every time you catch yourself mid-reaction, every time you realize you’ve checked out, every time you notice you’ve lost your way you are being given a chance to come back.

And that brings us to what may matter most: not just that we return, but how we return.

The repentance culture many of us grew up within taught us to come back to God in a harsh and scary way. We’ve internalized voices that correct, criticize, and push. So when we notice we’ve drifted, we really return, violently we snap back. We tighten. We quietly promise to do better next time. Our awareness carries an edge and pressure to it.

But that type of return forms us and disciples in fear. To be formed in fear, by fear, is not the way of God. Thankfully, there is another way. Centering Prayer teaches us this way.

Once you’ve noticed you’ve drifted, instead of turning that moment into a critique, you let it be simple. You begin again. No lecture, no internal frustration. Just a quiet return back to the life you long to live. You practice in life what you’ve practiced in Centering Prayer.

This begins to shape you. Not because you’ve eliminated distraction, but because you’ve changed your posture toward it. You stop treating your humanity like an obstacle and begin to see it as the place where the relationship actually unfolds.

Perhaps spiritual maturity isn’t about reaching a point where you no longer wander. Maybe it’s about becoming someone who knows how to come back without violence, shame, or the constant pressure to fix yourself.

Because the way you return is the way you are formed. And how you are formed is who you become.

If your returns are harsh, you will become harsh. If they are patient, you will become patient. And if, over time, you learn to return with kindness, you will find that kindness has worked its way into you at a level deeper than effort. It becomes the atmosphere of your life.

—

Eventually, Centering Prayer stops being something you practice for twenty minutes in the morning, and it becomes a way you move through the world. You drift and you return. You forget, and you remember. You close and you open again. Not perfectly, but consistently enough that a deeper stability takes root. Not the stability of never falling, but the stability of knowing how to come back.

Underneath this prayer and life practice, the invitation is then not to be graded on how perfectly you stay present or can refrain from distraction. You are being invited into a relationship that can withstand your wandering. A relationship that seems to meet you most clearly not when you’re getting it right, but when you’re returning.

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I’m Tyler Hill, a Benedictine oblate of Benet Hill Monastery. This means I’ve made a lifelong commitment to integrating the contemplative and monastic wisdom of St. Benedict into everyday life. After many years of running a coffee company I founded, I sold it and spent two intense years at the monastery, and have now been studying there for seven years. My writing and creative work live at the intersection of mysticism, spiritual formation, and my experience leading and working in the 21st century.

Like Benedict, I believe everything is drenched in the sacred, and that there is a voice beneath all things continually speaking belovedness to and through us. This means my punk ethos, my parenting, and my entrepreneurial work are not at war with a deeply contemplative life. I hope that we learn to hear the divine voice of love in all of life.

At the heart of my work is this simple conviction: before we strive, improve, perform, or become, we are already fully known and fully loved. Beloved. From that place, we begin to live more freely, more honestly, and more fully into the unique shape of who we are becoming.

My first book, Born Beloved, arrives at the end of September. It explores this same core truth in depth. That beneath every layer of striving or self-doubt is a more original identity: belovedness. It’s both a theological and human invitation to come home to that reality and learn to live from it in everyday life. I can’t wait for you to read it.

This Substack page aims to be a reflection of a grand integration. Here you will find:

Essays — Explorations of the sacred hidden in pop culture, daily life, and the unexpected places divinity shows up, alongside personal reflections on healing, creativity, mysticism, breathwork, and becoming.

St. Benedict — Reflections on the Rule of St. Benedict, reimagined for modern contemplatives seeking rhythm, presence, and the holy in the everyday.

Transmissions — An (almost) monthly offering of what’s moving through me: music, books, films, beauty, and small altars of the divine in unexpected places.

Beloved & Becoming is where:

Mystic meets modern. Punk meets prayer.

This is where the ordinary catches fire with the divine.

And where you’re invited, just as you are, to belong, become, and burn a little brighter.

I’m so glad you are here.

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I’ve been studying the Rule of St. Benedict for over seven years now, and I’m approaching my one-year anniversary as an Oblate at Benet Hill Monastery. People often ask why I would commit myself to something so ancient, so rooted in another time. What draws me to this particular expression of spirituality in the modern world?

While there are myriad reasons why I consider myself Benedictine and follow this particular way, there is undoubtedly one thing that has stuck out over the last few years more than others.

For over fifteen hundred years, the Benedictine way has endured. Empires have risen and fallen. Cultures have shifted. Wars, plagues, political collapse, economic upheaval and downfall. Yet, in the midst of all that can happen over the course of fifteen hundred years, this particular community has endured. They still exist and thrive. That alone keeps me paying attention.

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A World That Feels Too Hard To Hold

The modern world can feel exhausting in a way that is hard for any of us to fully explain. Socially, politically, emotionally, and spiritually. Every second that ticks we are presented with another reason to panic. Another fracture, another reminder of how unstable things are. You can’t help but wonder what kind of life can boldly hold off of this without completely turning cynical, numb, or chronically afraid.

The Benedictine community I’ve spent the last seven years with is not naive. People sometimes assume monks or nuns have checked out of the world, that they’ve escaped into silence while the rest of us deal with reality. That has not been my experience at all.

These sisters are deeply aware of the suffering in the world. They care about the poor, the environment, and marginalized people. They read the news and pay attention. They carry grief and live with an awareness of the uncertainty our world brings.

But there is a difference between them and the rest of the world,

By and large, it seems that people who are aware of the spinning nature of society tend to respond in two ways: either they shut down and numb out just to survive, or they become so consumed by fear and outrage that it spills into everything around them. You can feel it when it enters a room.

In the West especially it feels like the tide of fear, both on the right or left of the political spectrum swells with an unstable panic every time something of significance happens. It’s definitely not reserved for one side or another, and while the reactions are different, they carry the same effect. A slow drift out of love and into panic and reaction.

And while the sisters are not unaware of the world around them, they are not consumed by it.

I’ve been around them long enough to know it’s not just a show. I’ve seen the ups and downs the community can bring. I’ve heard them share their fears and frustrations. I’ve seen them have disagreements and express sadness and fear. They are just as human as the rest of us. But there is a stability among the community that is hard to find out in the world and, of course.

And to me this is what makes their peace so trustworthy.

It is not built on ignorance or avoidance. It is a peace that exists alongside the chaos of the world. A steadiness that can look directly at reality without collapsing under its weight. There is a softness to them, a kind of grounded peace that feels lived in rather than imagined. Not the peace of denial, but the peace that comes from building a life strong enough to hold reality.

That is what first drew me to them. Whatever that is, I want it. I’ve wanted it. And I still need it. I need their stability amidst the chaos of existence.

What Actually Holds Them Together

Whatever they do works. And of course I’ve been drawn to wonder what actually makes their steady peace possible. It’s worth noting that whatever their method is, it’s a tested example of how to live and not let the world bring you down.

It’s not just a, “We made it through eight years of this president,” or “We survived another economic downturn.” They have remained rooted, coming back to peace, and not fully broken for fifteen hundred years. Every war, every president, every conflict, all economic chaos, they have remained stable. Something here is different. Something here is true.

In short, what I’ve come to believe, and what I’ve committed myself to following the Benedictine way, is exactly that… community.

Benedictine community is formed by a small volume called The Rule of St. Benedict. Many assume that the rule is a spiritual text or a theological volume, outlining St. Benedict’s theology and what to believe. But this is not the case.

Significantly less of a spiritual text, The Rule is a blueprint for how to live together. It’s a guidebook for the community. Sure, it has some theological persuasions, but largely this text is centered around how one can live among another and stay committed and peaceful for a long period of time.

This is profoundly transformative in ways I believe if we truly allowed ourselves to embrace, we would see peace enter into our presence once again.

Community Teaches Us How To Live

I think Saint Benedict knew that authentic communal experience would be the best teacher, far outweighing a rigorous prayer practice or unified theology. This is why his book is written the way it is: a guide for living among one another rather than an outline of shared beliefs and perspectives.

What community actually offers is chaos. Rubbed shoulders, different views, annoyances, and difficulties. But when one is committed to a community in this way, you are not afforded the lazy luxury of simply getting angry and spouting off on the internet about why you are right. You are forced to lean in, work through it, and find peace anyway.

Could it be that after living in community this way for fifteen hundred years, the Benedictine rhythm has formed these people to live the same way in the world? Not to be tossed to and fro by the whims of the world, but to have learned, through their communal way of life, to default to the peace that God actually offers?

I believe this is precisely the case.

It’s the very lack of authentic community that has led much of humanity away from the ability to live well when the world isn’t. We’ve skipped the university of communal living, and we are suffering the consequences.

What’s the difference, though? And how does this impact our modern world? Aren’t there communities all over the place? Furthermore, we can’t all be monks and nuns, let alone Catholic or Benedictine—so how does this actually matter for us in the modern world?

What Builds An Authentic Community?

Most communities are held together by radically shared beliefs or more accurately, shared opposition. Who is in or out? Who is right or wrong? We like to say it’s centered around love or God or scripture, but an honest search of the soul or the communal core often reveals otherwise.

Community shaped this way can make you feel passionately part of a tribe, something bigger than yourself for a short time, but it rarely produces the fruit of the Spirit. It most definitely does not produce beauty in the world. Look outside, the evidence is everywhere of how many modern communities are insular and are (in the name of their community) throwing stones at others.

The problem with building community around an ideology, person, or political agenda is that these things change. Your perspective changes, the needs of the world change, people change. And as these shift, the community fractures. Once centered on something unstable, it eventually breaks.

The Benedictine community shows us a different way. Saint Benedict offers a more holistic and enduring vision of life in the midst of chaos, one that can hold the ups and downs of life.

It begins with a commitment to community itself. Not to theology, or belief, or doctrine, but to communiy.

To build community for the sake of community, and nothing else. Have you considered that most communities are not actually rooted in community? There is often a hidden agenda beneath the gathering. What I learned in my formation with the sisters at the monastery is that this is not the heart of Benedictine life.

When I took my vow to become an oblate at this monastery, I was not committing to their theology or ideology. I didn’t have to become Catholic or adopt their way of life. The commitment was to the community itself.

This is the depth of community I’ve been studying for the last seven years, and it is this approach that has changed my family’s life, allowing us not only to have the most rich community we’ve ever known, but also to not be tossed to and fro by the winds of change.

What This Looks Like In Real Life

Almost ten years ago, a small group of us decided we were going to build a committed community. Not just friendship, but something deeper. At the time there were three kids between us. Now there are more than ten.

We’ve shared dinner almost every Thursday night for ten years. We’ve taken trips together around the country, gone camping each summer, had an annual fall retreat, guys’ weekends in Vegas, and so much more.

People often ask us about the nature of this community and how it has become what it is. It sounds simple, but it is harder than it sounds. Almost like joining a monastery. We made a choice, went full tilt into that choice, and protected that choice. At some point we made the stark decision that this matters enough to work for.

This is the part most people resist. We want community, but not the cost of it. We want belonging without obligation, connection without inconvenience, depth without the slow work of staying when it gets uncomfortable. But that kind of community does not hold.

We also didn’t build this community around a book or belief system, or even around radical similarities. There are political differences. All the couples but one are bi-racial. We attend different spiritual communities. In many ways there are more differences than similarities. But this is the point.

That, in many ways, is what the Benedictine tradition has always known. Community is not comfort. It is not something that happens on its own. It is formed through repetition, through staying, through choosing one another over and over again.

In a world that is more connected than ever but often deeply lonely, this matters. We are not formed in isolation. We are formed in relationship.

It is the commitment and diversity that has formed us. It hasn’t always been easy. There have been conflicts, misunderstandings, seasons where it would have been simpler to drift apart. But because of our commitment, we didn’t. We stayed. We talked. We adjusted. We kept showing up.

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The Fruit of This Community

A lot has happened over the last ten years, both in society and in our personal lives. There has been deep loss and grief, big wins, dreams chased and shattered. We’ve gone from two kids to ten in the group. And in the world around us, so much has changed. We’ve endured a lot together, and it has not been easy.

And yet I think we’ve begun to taste something of what I’ve seen in the sisters as well.

Learning how to endure pain and conflict, joy and celebration with one another has helped us endure the same in our wider life. And knowing we can endure together gives the comfort of knowing we are not alone. Because this community is built around community, not ideology, not ambition, not money. And because of that, even as everything around us shifts, the foundation holds.

Not long ago, I had dinner with a couple who have been part of a film club for over twenty years. Once a month, the same group gathers—film, meal, conversation—across decades of changing life. When I asked what held it together, their answer was simple: commitment. Just people choosing to keep showing up.

I’ve seen this in a small way in my own life, what the sisters have lived for fifteen hundred years. They have watched the world rise and fall again and again, and learned that a rooted community allows you to witness chaos without being undone by it.

Things rise. Things fall. Life changes shape. But when you are not alone in it, you do not meet it with panic.

Our Invitation

What I’ve found amazing about the Rule of St. Benedict is that while it is shaped by Scripture and a particular Christian tradition, it is not only for Christians. There are communities of all kinds that have adopted the Rule as part of their communal practice. Even more than that, it is not just for monks or professional religious people. It is a communal invitation for all of humanity into a simple, rhythmic way of life.

The invitation is not to become a monk or Benedictine. The invitation is to grow in commitment to community, and commitment to people. Not to political or religious ideology or charismatic leaders, but to the community. This becomes the common thread that can hold through the chaos of the world.

A kind of portal to a peace that transcends understanding.

God has felt distant.

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When I become aware of the dry spells in my soul, that awareness typically leads me back to my guides: the Sisters of Benet Hill Monastery and the Rule of St. Benedict.

I’ve spent most of the last three days at the monastery studying the Rule, Benedict’s wisdom book with the sisters. At the beginning of St. Benedict Rule is a section called the Prologue. In my opinion, it’s one of the most potent pieces of writing…ever. Few pages carry so much guidance, clarity, and wisdom. In many ways, all one really needs is the Prologue. It contains enough wisdom to guide a person for a lifetime.

One of the questions Benedict raises there is especially helpful in seasons of desolation like the one I’ve been feeling. Drawing from Psalms 15 and 115, he asks:

How do you dwell in the tent of God?

How do you find rest on the mountain of God?

It’s a question we all ask. It’s the primary question I hear in my office as a spiritual director almost every day, and it’s the question I’ve been asking myself this week.

How do we find ourselves back in the embrace of a mother holding her child?

How do we become awake once again to the Divine tent we want to dwell within?

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In the Prologue, Benedict suggests that we can see the way back into the tent. I’ll paraphrase the Rule a bit here, but two themes emerge as pathways back to God when we feel far away.

The first is to embrace justice, honesty, and compassion.

Benedict writes of those who “walk without blemish and are just in all their dealings; who speak truth from the heart and do not practice deceit; who do not wrong others or listen to slander against their neighbors.”

His ancient wisdom speaks into our modern landscape with remarkable clarity.

We live in a world that often rewards outrage more than understanding, image more than integrity, and certainty more than humility. We are constantly being invited into comparison, judgment, gossip, and tribalism. Every day seems to present another opportunity to tear someone down, assume the worst, or build ourselves up at the expense of another. As long as we embrace a lifestyle void of justice, honesty and truth, we might find the tent hard to find.

Benedict points us in a different direction.

The way back to God is not hidden behind complicated theology, powerful platforms, or people who win at all costs. It is not reserved for the loudest voice in the room or the person who successfully claws their way to the top of the economic or political ladder.

It is found in the ordinary work of becoming honest, just, and compassionate people. It is found in speaking truth, acting in love, and refusing to participate in the cycles of harm that have become so common in our culture.

Consider, for a moment, the landscape many of us inhabit every day. Social media often trains us in the opposite direction. We scroll through outrage, practice comparison, sharpen our judgments, and quietly learn to see other people as opponents rather than neighbors. We become convinced that being right matters more than being compassionate and that winning an argument matters more than understanding another human being.

Benedict would likely suggest that this way of moving through the world makes the tent difficult to recognize. Not because God has left, but because our attention has been captured by so many things that pull us away from honesty, justice, and love. The path back to God may be less complicated than we imagine. It may begin with speaking more truthfully, listening more generously, and treating the person in front of us as someone who, like us, already belongs to God.

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Secondly, Benedict makes it clear that while good deeds and justice matter, there is very little we can do to manufacture God’s presence. Our works alone do not conjure God’s nearness.

One of Benedict’s central themes, and one of his primary hopes for us, is that we learn to see God everywhere. And when he says everywhere, he means everywhere.

For this to be true, we must recognize that God’s presence does not arrive only after we’ve finally gotten our act together. God is not waiting at the finish line of our goodness. God’s presence is not dependent upon our performance.

He writes:

“These people revere God and do not become elated over their good deeds; they judge it as God’s strength, not their own, that brings about the good in them. They praise the Holy One working in them and say with the prophet: ‘Not to us, O God, not to us, but to your name give the glory.’”

What I hear in these words is an invitation to trust a grace far greater than our own effort. The tent is not something we can build on our own.

This is difficult for many of us to accept because we have been formed by a culture that tells us everything depends on us. We optimize our schedules, track our habits, chase self-improvement, and often carry the belief that if we just try hard enough we can fix ourselves or find ourselves back to God’s tent.

Benedict offers a different vision. Healthy spirituality does not place the full weight of transformation on our shoulders. Instead, it teaches us to cooperate with a God who is already present, already active, and already at work within us.

There is profound relief in this, especially during seasons when God feels distant. We do not have to force God’s presence into our lives or strive our way back into the tent. We simply begin to notice where God has been all along: in the laughter of our children, in the ache of our longing, in the work that exhausts us, and in the beauty that restores us.

If anyone is doing the heavy lifting, it is God.

And that frees us from trying to earn our way back into the tent. It allows us instead to wake up to the reality that we never left it. The invitation is not to find God somewhere else. The invitation is to become aware of the God who has already found us.

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Now there is an interesting tension in both of these approaches Benedict offers.

On one hand, he seems to be saying, “Do something! Live the way of justice, and you will find yourself back in the tent.” On the other hand, he is equally clear that it is God’s work, not ours.

This tension runs throughout Benedict’s teachings. He is never trying to get us to choose one over the other, nor does he seem concerned with neatly resolving the contradiction. Instead, he allows both realities to stand side by side. Somehow this is the spiritual way.

Our openness to God’s work and our participation in that work belong to the same movement. They are not separate things.

A faith that never expresses itself through love, justice, compassion, and action will eventually leave us wanting. Faith without works is dead, after all. Yet we must be equally careful not to believe that God’s presence depends upon our performance. The moment we begin measuring our worth, holiness, or proximity to God by what we accomplish, we find ourselves carrying the very disease of the Pharisees.

The invitation is neither passivity nor striving. It is participation. We cooperate with the grace that is already at work within us.

Benedict knew this tension well because he lived both sides of it.

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Early in his life, disenchanted with society and the state of the world around him, Benedict withdrew to a cave, following in the footsteps of the Desert Fathers and Mothers before him. He devoted himself to intense prayer, piety, and spiritual discipline.

In many ways, this early chapter of Benedict’s story mirrors much of modern spirituality. We place enormous emphasis on personal growth, individual discipline, and self-improvement. We measure progress, track habits, optimize routines, and evaluate ourselves according to how well we are performing. Even our faith can become deeply individualized. We ask questions like: Am I praying enough? Am I reading enough Scripture? Am I growing? Am I becoming more disciplined? Am I getting this right?

None of these are bad questions. In fact, they can be important ones. But they become problematic when they become the primary focus of our spiritual lives. We begin to treat spiritual formation as a private project of self-improvement. The goal subtly shifts from participating in the life of God to becoming exceptionally good at being spiritual.

As a result, we can become more concerned with personal holiness than hospitality, more interested in our devotional life than our neighbor’s wellbeing, and more focused on spiritual achievement than love itself. And over time, this inward focus can shape not only how we see ourselves, but how we see others. When we encounter people who think differently than we do, or belief systems that challenge our own, we often withdraw, judge, or distance ourselves. What could have been an encounter becomes a threat. What could have been a conversation becomes a line we refuse to cross.

We learn how to curate a spiritual life but struggle to pour that life out for others.

What emerges is a faith that may be disciplined, sincere, and morally serious, yet remains disconnected from the very people God calls us to love.

Benedict experienced this tension and how this radical nature didn’t sustain his spirituality as much as he had hoped and eventually left the cave.

What emerged was not a rejection of contemplation or spiritual discipline, but an expansion of it. He founded communities built around prayer, hospitality, work, relationship, and shared life. The goal was not simply to become holy as individuals, but to create a way of life where the presence of God could be encountered together.

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Benedict understood that our relationship with God is not revealed only in private prayer. It is revealed in how we treat one another, how we welcome the stranger, how we share responsibility, and how we participate in the flourishing of the world around us.

In Benedict’s world, prayer and work are not competing forces. They are held together in a single rhythm of life. Prayer is not an escape from the world, and work is not a distraction from God. Both become places of encounter. The daily labor of the hands and the steady turning of the heart toward God belong to the same life.

Ora et labora is not merely a slogan about balance. It is a vision of integration.

Again and again, Benedict brings us back to the same reality: real spirituality is lived in real life. It is expressed through justice, humility, compassion, honesty, hospitality, and love.

What does this mean for those of us trying to find our way back into the tent of God?

What am I to do in a season like the one I find myself in now?

Should I retreat from the world, focus on my inner life, and try to fix what feels broken? Or should I get busy, serve more people, start new projects, and hope to find God through activity?

Benedict refuses to let us reduce the question to either option.

He seems to suggest that the question itself is shaped by a division he is trying to heal, as though prayer and work are two separate roads and we must choose the more “spiritual” one. In the Benedictine imagination, there is no such split. There is only one life.

A life where prayer is not withdrawal from reality, but deeper attention to it. A life where work is not an escape from God, but participation in God’s care for the world.

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I think if I were to sit down with St. Benedict and tell him how my soul feels disconnected right now, he would not tell me to go and find the tent. He would invite me to see the tent of God in the life I am already living.

He would ask me to notice God in the middle of my ordinary days. Where is justice, honesty, and compassion showing up in my actual life right now? And where am I being invited back into them?

Because yes, there are seasons where we need retreat, silence, and prayer. There are seasons where we step back in order to see more clearly. But Benedict would never let that become an escape from life. A cave can clarify the heart, but it is not the goal of the heart.

If I am only in the cave and not in the world of people, responsibility, and relationship, I may become very aware of God in theory, but miss God in practice. And if I am only in activity without returning to prayer, I may become very busy and still lose sight of the One I am working with.

The tent is not somewhere else. It is here. Where else can I find God in my life other than by going out and living my life?

He would remind me that yes, there is work to do. There are prayers to pray, meditations to sit in, the poor to feed, my family to love. God is not encountered apart from life, but through it. Our days become the place of engagement.

But he would also caution me not to be too quick to assume I am the one doing most of the work. For it is God who is already here, already moving, already sustaining all of it. And if I can slow down enough to see clearly, I begin to realize that God has been present long before I became aware of it.

The invitation is not to strive my way into that presence, but to recognize it. To wake up to what has already been given.

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Not necessarily as a theology or belief system. We sing that God’s love knows no bounds. We recite verses about grace. We affirm that there is nothing we can do to make God love us more and nothing we can do to make Him love us less.

Yet the inner narrative and lived life tell a different story.

Many of us carry an invisible scorecard. There is constant counting, measuring, and evaluating beneath the surface. We quietly assess whether we’ve prayed enough, served enough, obeyed enough, produced enough, or grown enough. Beneath all our lovely language is an anxiety that belovedness must somehow be maintained.

So we live as though God’s affection must be secured through our performance.

When we’re praying consistently, reading Scripture, serving others, and making good choices, we feel close to God. We feel confident in His presence. But when we fail, struggle, or drift, we often pull away. Shame creeps in. We assume God must be disappointed. We act as though His posture toward us has somehow changed.

What does that reveal?

It reveals that while we may believe in grace intellectually, many of us have never learned to trust it existentially. We affirm grace with our minds while continuing to earn our worth with our lives.

The deepest beliefs are not the ones we profess. They are the ones we practice.

And we hardly practice belovedness.

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The invitation of the spiritual life is not merely to agree that grace exists. It is to trust that God’s love for you is not hanging in the balance of your success or failure. It is to trust that His delight precedes your transformation and becomes the very thing that makes transformation possible.

Because belovedness is not a feeling you achieve after becoming holy enough. It is not a reward for good behavior, spiritual maturity, or moral success.

Belovedness is your deepest identity before it is yours to prove, earn, gain, or lose. It is the truth that existed before your accomplishments and remains after your failures.

It is the reality that you are loved by God not because you have proven yourself worthy of love, but because love is God’s nature and you are God’s own.

The journey of faith is not ultimately about becoming beloved.

It is about awakening to the belovedness that has always been true.

You were born beloved. And still are.

The anxiety of time, the crippling nature of busyness, and the chaos of an overscheduled life are not being solved by AI bots and apps. Every day in my office I witness the disease of promised efficiency continuing to sink its fangs into the already overworked. Yes, we may be granted more time, but for the masses, the time we are given is filled with an even greater expectation to produce and accomplish more. The standard of production only continues to rise.

I work a good bit with folks who struggle with substance abuse. It’s not unusual for me to hear sarcastic and negative commentary about addicts who just can’t seem to stop returning to their vice. And yet, when provided with an extra few hours, or even a day in their life, the common man can’t seem to exist without jonesing for, if not fully engaging in, their addiction to production and busyness.

While I think the tech itself absolutely deserves critique, the modern distress in the technological age is not exclusively the fault of the powers that be. It is easy to scapegoat social media and cell phones for our inability to be present in our own lives. Yet the reality is that we have significantly more control over how we respond to the powers that be than we do over those powers themselves, or over what they create and advance next. We can choose to panic over the continued advancements of tech, or we can choose to lean inward and consider what it is within us that cannot seem to respond to these advancements in a more holistic way.

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We move faster than any generation in human history. Information arrives instantly. Communication is immediate. Work follows us home in our pockets. We work, and overwork at a continuous, unrelenting pace. Of course this is not new. This is how we have been existing, over and over, with great momentum. Thomas Merton names this when he writes, “The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.” The homie wrote that in 1966.

More tech, providing us more time and space is clearly not the answer. The violence Merton warned us of still persists. We can blame whatever tech we want, but the disease simmers much deeper than the enemy we try to blame our ailments on. Merton, and the many contemplatives before and after him, also seem to be able to name the issue at hand and offer us a holistic path forward. One that we can carry with us, well beyond whatever evolutions of technology continue to persist as we know they will.

The true crisis of our age is not that we do not have enough time, it is that we have forgotten, and for many have never known, how to encounter reality directly. We have developed a belief in arrival and destination that has quietly poisoned our collective soul. Our inability to meet reality in the present moment has produced a longing to work and achieve our way toward the place we believe we are trying to reach.

We live inside a kind of modern spiritual imagination that treats life as a problem to be solved and then transcended. Happiness becomes a horizon line that always shifts forward. Even God, for many, is relocated into the future tense, as something we will finally encounter once we have become enough, healed enough, disciplined enough, successful enough.

We begin to construct pathways of arrival that we convince ourselves will become the foundation of contentment. If I can just earn this amount of money. If I can just lose this weight. If I can just get sober enough. If I can just fix what is broken, then I will arrive. And beneath all of it is the quiet assumption that where I am is not yet life, and who I am is not yet enough to meet it.

Much of contemporary spirituality, even in its more progressive or therapeutic forms, still subtly reinforces this false narrative of becoming. It speaks of healing, growth, alignment, and expansion, yet can still smuggle in the same underlying premise: that presence is something we graduate into, rather than something we awaken to. We turn awakening itself into another achievement, another stage on the ladder of arrival.

Thus, whenever we can efficiently or more impactfully construct a path to wherever we long to arrive, we will take advantage of it. If God, love, or life is something to be achieved, then we must spend every waking moment getting from here to there. Any waking moment not working is a moment wasted, revealing our inability to leverage the space and time we could be afforded to have.

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The actual poison here is not the technology that distracts us. It is the belief systems we have built our lives upon that tell us we must arrive at a particular place. It is the theology, spiritual frameworks, and discipleship pathways that have formed us to believe that God, holiness, and goodness are somewhere out there, rather than right here.

But we would rather point the issue outside of ourselves rather than within, because it is much easier to blame external reality for our inner turmoil than it is to take the longer, more demanding journey inward.

But the deeper invitation, the one echoed across contemplative traditions, is not progress but presence. Not escape from reality, but the courage to finally meet it without mediation. We skim. We scroll. We consume. We react. But we rarely behold. We have never learned to sit in communion. With ourselves, with one another, and especially with God.

This is why contemplation is not merely a spiritual practice among other spiritual practices. It is an act of resistance. Perhaps one of the last acts of resistance still available to us in the modern age.

To become contemplative is to refuse the tyranny of constant stimulation. It is to reject the assumption that a meaningful life can be assembled from endless inputs and endless activity. It is to challenge the modern myth that our value is determined by our usefulness or our arrival. To be contemplative is to believe that we are the beloved right here in this moment, even if we didn’t achieve one additional task.

I don’t think we are victims to the way technology can capture our attention as much as we often claim. We are victims, more deeply, to our inability to sit still without something filling our space. We are victims to a theology that tells us we must be busy in all things in order to earn our worth and satisfaction. We are victims to a society that measures worth by what is done and consumed, rather than who we are on the inside.

Technology is simply the common person’s heroin, numbing us from the pain of not knowing who we are in the silence. We want to pin modern tech as the disease, when in reality it is the drug numbing us away from our inner exile.

You can complain about data centers or about how scrolling has been engineered to keep us addicted, but what might it look like to let go of the landscape evolving at rates we cannot control, even for a moment, and see what it might look like to liberate yourself from the system?

Until we can retrain our inner world for contentment beyond accomplishment and the constant need for action, we will remain tethered to the tech.

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The issue at hand is as old as time. As long as we believe our arrival is anywhere but here, we will remain addicted to the hustle. And as long as we are addicted to the hustle, our addictions will persist, especially the ones that keep us doing more and more and more, filling every gap with production over presence.

Eve believed it was in the fruit, that if she could just reach for that extra knowledge, then she would be complete. Leaders, ancient and new, have believed it is found in conquest, in land, in political power. In the modern age we believe it is in the next promotion, the next achievement, the next accumulation of net worth. Much of spiritual life can fall into the same pattern, oriented toward a life beyond this one rather than the life already here.

While the issue is ancient, so too is the solution. It begins with a shift in consciousness from a spirituality of arrival to a spirituality of presence, one that learns to see God, heaven, and wholeness not as destinations to reach, but as realities to be encountered here, in this moment, as it is.

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The deeper invitation, then, is not to reject technology, nor to romanticize a pre-digital past, but to see more clearly what has always been at stake beneath every age of acceleration. The tools change, but the human tendency remains: to live as though life is elsewhere, just ahead of us, just beyond our current capacity, just beyond this moment. When we believe this, we will use whatever tool is available to bridge the imagined gap, whether it is a piece of fruit or a large language model, always trying to fill the distance we feel within ourselves.

Technology, in this sense, is not the root problem. It is a mirror held up to a deeper restlessness. It amplifies what is already present within us. If there is anxiety, it accelerates it. If there is hunger for distraction, it provides an endless feed. If there is a belief that worth must be earned through production, it offers infinite opportunity to produce. The machine is not simply shaping us. It is revealing us.

And so the question is not ultimately what we will do with technology, but what kind of inner life we are cultivating while we use it. Because no external system, no matter how advanced or addictive, can fully account for a person who has learned to remain present to their own existence. The real spiritual crisis is not new technology. It is attentional exile. We are estranged from the present moment, and therefore estranged from ourselves.

The contemplative path is not an escape from the modern world but a return to it. The contemplative sees what the hurried mind cannot: that reality is not delayed, that God is not deferred, that life is not withheld until we finally become enough. Contemplation is the practice of learning to see what is here, as it is, in all areas of life, and to discover that what we are seeking has never been absent.

The freedom available here is the freedom of noticing. The freedom of returning. The freedom of choosing presence. We can go to war with the many forms of escape we use to avoid the present moment, or we can do the deeper work of learning how to stay, how to be with what is, and in that staying, rediscover love itself as immediacy rather than destination.

The machines, technologies, and tools of escape will continue to evolve. The pace will increase, and the noise will not go away. But beneath it all, we can learn to stand still. Not in withdrawal, but in wakefulness. Awake to who we are beyond the constant pursuit of proving our worth, beyond the restless attempt to arrive elsewhere.

And when we slow down enough to truly see, we begin to recognize what the contemplatives have always pointed toward: that the divine is not waiting at the end of striving, but is already here, woven into the fabric of this moment. And in that recognition, even efficiency can be redeemed, no longer a tool for escape into more doing, but a means of freeing space for more being.

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As I write in my book coming this fall: “God’s love is something we sing about the most, and yet it seems to be the thing we understand the least.”

We know, in theory, that we are loved by God. We sing about it, write about it, and talk about it. And yet something about it still feels distant and inaccessible. It’s worth asking, do we know what belovedness actually feels like in our lives? Would we know it if we saw it?

It is worth noting that Divine love is vast. There are countless ways of experiencing it, naming it, and embodying it within our own stories. One of the challenges of speaking about love is that we often try to reduce it to a single experience or expression, as though it should feel the same for everyone.

This is especially true within certain religious frameworks that shrink the mystery of God’s love into rigid categories of who is in and who is out, who is worthy and who is not. In doing so, we can miss the depth, beauty, and expansiveness of the very thing we are trying to describe.

And yet, for all its mystery, there is also something wonderfully simple about love. Something universal. Something that transcends theology, personality, and experience.

It is that simple, often overlooked dimension of belovedness that I want to explore in this essay.

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It seems a great deal of this difficulty is that many of us have learned love in a limited form.

Love is something we have often encountered through filtered expressions. Parents doing their best but carrying their own wounds, coaches who believed in us but only as far as performance allowed, teachers who rewarded achievement more than presence, and spiritual communities that often unintentionally or lazily translated God’s affection into expectation.

Even in its healthiest forms, the love we receive in this world is often mixed with conditions we barely notice. It’s a love that provides, but with condition. Love that is present, but not always fully delighted. Love that keeps us safe, but does not always make it clear that we are wanted.

And so we inherit a subtle confusion:

Love means I am safe. It might mean I am provided for. But it does not necessarily mean I am wanted…or liked.

I could be loved, but still feel like I am in the way.
I could be included, but still feel simply tolerated.
I could belong, but still wonder if I am actually liked.

And without realizing it, we begin to project that same emotional architecture onto God. They become:

The ultimate responsible caretaker
The moral supervisor
The authority figure who is present out of obligation.

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To be merely tolerated or provided for with additional conditions is to encounter a love that is not fully known. It is not belovedness. And yet, this often seems to be the kind of love we most deeply understand.

We settle for fragments: approval without delight, acceptance without desire, and provision without presence. In time, we reduce belovedness and settle for an inferior version of what love in its totality can offer us. We convince ourselves that being allowed, being included, or being deemed “enough” is the pinnacle of love. But in doing so, we miss the deeper reality that love and union with The Divine was always meant to be.

The soul does not long for a partial love. It hungers for the real thing. It longs to be fully seen and fully welcomed. To be known without hiding. To be cherished without earning it.

And perhaps this is where many of us have misunderstood the love of God and is why belovedness seems so ethereal.

Because acceptance is not where belovedness ends.

At the core, the belovedness our soul longs for is a holistic love. It is a love that is cosmically all-consuming. It’s whole, undivided, and fully present. And as long as the love we receive is fractured in nature, we will continue to long to receive it, feel it, and know it in its totality.

The question for so many of us then beocmes…what does belovedness in its totality look like?

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Have you ever considered that God does not just love you, but that God actually likes you?

I know that might sound almost irreverent to some ears. Too casual perhaps. And yet I wonder if that is exactly why so many of us struggle to experience belovedness in its fullness.

Many of us have spent our lives receiving versions of love that were real, but incomplete. Love that protected but did not delight. Love that included but did not enjoy. Love that remained present, but never quite communicated, “I am genuinely glad you are here.” Over time, we begin to assume that this is simply what love is.

And so we carry that same assumption into our spiritual lives.

We imagine a God who accepts us but does not enjoy us. A God who forgives us but does not delight in us. A God who remains committed to us while secretly wishing we were a little more mature, a little more faithful, a little less complicated.

But the God revealed in Christ seems remarkably different. Again and again, we encounter someone who is comfortable in the presence of ordinary people. He shares meals, attends weddings, welcomes children, and lingers with friends. He does not appear reluctant to be near humanity. He appears drawn toward it.

Perhaps this is what belovedness has been pointing toward all along.

Belovedness is more than acceptance. It is more than being tolerated, included, or allowed to stay. It is the experience of being fully seen and fully welcomed. It is knowing that nothing about your humanity places you outside the reach of God’s affection.

To be beloved is to discover that the One who created you is not merely committed to you, but delighted in you. That God’s posture toward you is not one of reluctant obligation, but genuine affection.

And when that truth begins to sink deep, our inner world begins to rest. The striving softens. Fear loosens its grip. The exhausting work of proving our worth slowly gives way to the freedom of belonging.

Maybe that is what our souls have been longing for all along. Maybe this is what belovedness feels like.

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Perhaps the foundational truths in beloved living is to learn to trust that God is not watching our lives from afar with folded arms and measured approval. To trust that the One who knit us together delights in the sound of our laughter, smiles at our becoming, and remains tender toward the unfinished parts of us. It’s to begin an embodied knowing that we can encounter a Divine present that is genuinely glad to be with us. A God who does not simply make room for humanity, but delights in it.

The invitation of belovedness is an openness to welcoming our own exisance with the same kindness that God does. To simultaneously embrace our uniqueness and things that make us distinctly ourselves. Our laughter. Our creativity. Our peculiar ways of seeing the world. The gifts we offer. The questions we carry. Even the unfinished and evolving parts of us. Not because God loves some future version of who we might become, but because God is present to who we are right now and likes who God sees.

Before you accomplish another thing, before you heal another wound, before you become the person you think you ought to be, belovedness reminds us all that you are already held in affection. You are already wanted. And perhaps, in the end, belovedness is simply learning to believe that God is genuinely happy to have you here.

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Some come for spiritual direction. I walk alongside them as a spiritual companion, helping them notice where God is already present in the midst of their lives. I don’t teach theology. I don’t spend much time arguing doctrine. More often than not, we simply practice noticing. We pay attention. We learn how to quiet the noise. And over time, as people become more aware of the Divine presence that has been with them all along, spiritual formation seems to happen on its own.

Others come to me for coaching. Leaning on my experience in life development, consulting, entrepreneurship, and adventure, they are looking for a guide to help them move from where they are to where they want to be. While there is still plenty of self-discovery, coaching tends to involve a bit more action, a bit more intention, and a bit more direction.

They are undoubtedly different practices with different training, certifications, and approaches. One tends to emphasize awareness while the other leans toward action.

But regardless of their differences, they are still cousins. Part of the same river.

Both are interested in growth, healing, transformation, and helping people become more fully themselves.

And after years of doing both, I’ve noticed an undercurrent that runs through each space. A subtle poison that brings very little freedom, liberation, or growth.

The same wound keeps showing up.

It simply wears different clothes.

The Gap

In spiritual direction, most people carry a deep and persistent feeling that they are somehow separate from God. Not intellectually, of course. Many know their holy texts well. Many can debate theology far better than I can.

But underneath their prayers and spiritual practices is a quieter assumption.

God is over there. I am over here.

God is close to other people. But maybe not me.

Belovedness becomes a distant hope rather than a present reality and the ache of feeling separate from love can be paralyzing.

As a result, much of modern spirituality becomes an attempt to bridge the gap between ourselves and God rather than a practice of noticing the love that already surrounds and sustains us.

The effort is exhausting.

People spend years trying to become worthy. Trying to become spiritual enough. Trying to finally arrive at the place where God can love them.

They climb spiritual ladders where every prayer becomes another rung. Every discipline another rung. Every retreat, every devotional, every act of service is another rung trying to climb higher towards God’s love.

Additionally, every failure becomes a reminder that they are not nearly as close to God as they hoped.

The great tragedy is that this separation is not a spiritual reality.

Within the contemplative traditions, you begin to encounter a very different story. One that suggests you cannot arrive where you already are. One that teaches that spirituality is less about earning union and more about discovering it.

Less about climbing.

More about awakening.

Father Richard Rohr often says that we cannot attain the presence of God because we are already in the presence of God.

That changes everything on the spiritual landscape.

Imagine a life where you are no longer striving with God. No longer competing with other people or even yourself for holiness. No longer trying to earn love.

Imagine knowing, deep in your bones, that you are already held, seen, known, and loved by God. Not for anything done or left undone, but simply because you exist.

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The Story of Separation

So where does this misunderstanding come from?

If it is possible to rest in the love of God rather than earn it, why are so many of us trapped in striving? Why does so much of Western spirituality feel like one long effort to become acceptable?

I think it comes down to the foundational story we tell.

While it is certainly not a universal Christian teaching, much of modern Western Christianity has repeated a narrative that says we were born bad. Born sinners. Born separated from God. Born outside of love and in need of finding our way back.

And if that is your starting point, then the rest of your spiritual life becomes an attempt to close the distance. Every prayer becomes an effort. Every spiritual practice is another rung on the ladder. Every failure is evidence that you still have more work to do before God can fully love and accept you.

But what if the story begins somewhere else? What if before there was original sin, there was original blessing? What if the first thing spoken over humanity was not condemnation but goodness?

In my book coming out this fall (you can join the launch team and receive exclusive giveaways, signed books, and other surprises here), I explore this idea through the Genesis story. Before humanity accomplishes anything, before there is religion, before there are rules, before there is success or failure, God looks upon creation and calls it good. Not useful. Not productive. Not spiritually mature. Good.

This matters because it establishes the foundation of the story. Humanity does not begin cursed. Humanity begins blessed. It begins beloved.

And when the story unfolds and the first spiritual couple step out of alignment with love and goodness, something fascinating happens. God does not disappear. God does not panic. God is not preparing a speech about rejection and abandonment. In fact, the text tells us that God is walking in the garden in the cool of the day. It is a surprisingly gentle image. God remains present. God remains available. God remains near.

The hiding begins with humanity.

Adam and Eve are the ones who run. They are the ones who hide. They are the ones who become afraid.

In many ways, we do not get exiled from God. We exile ourselves.

We withdraw. We cover ourselves. We become convinced that our shame has separated us from love. Yet separation and the feeling of separation are not always the same thing. Anyone who has ever felt alone in a room full of people understands this. The feeling may be real, but it does not necessarily reflect reality.

This, I believe, is one of the great tragedies of modern spirituality.

When we believe we are born separated, born defective, born as problems to be solved, our entire spiritual life becomes exhausting. We are always trying to get somewhere. Always trying to earn what cannot be earned. Always trying to achieve what was never absent. We spend our lives searching for a God who has never stopped searching for us.

And this kind of spirituality rarely produces love, freedom, or liberation. More often, it produces exhaustion. Burnout. Anxiety. A constant preoccupation with our own brokenness. Because when your foundational story is that something is wrong with you, your spiritual life becomes one long attempt to fix yourself.

But when your foundational story is belovedness, everything changes.

Spirituality becomes less about earning union with God and more about awakening to it. Less about climbing and more about noticing. Less about fixing what is wrong with you and more about remembering what has been true all along: that before you ever accomplished anything, before you ever failed, before you ever got your theology right or wrong, you were loved.

The Self-Help Industry Has Its Own Version

What’s fascinating is that I see a remarkably similar dynamic in the personal development world.

To be clear, there are incredible coaches, teachers, authors, and guides doing meaningful work in the self-help and coaching universe. Some of the most transformative people in my own life have come from that space. I’ve learned from them. I’ve hired them. I’ve been shaped by them.

Yet the narrative that plagues much of the spiritual world often finds its way into personal development as well.

Once you see it, it becomes almost impossible to unsee.

Much of the marketing, messaging, and even many coaching frameworks begin with the assumption that something is wrong. Something is wrong with your life, and something is wrong with you.

You’re too lazy. Too undisciplined. Too distracted. Too broke. Too unhealthy.

There is something you don’t know. Some missing piece. Some secret that this coach, guru, program, framework or course can provide that will finally make you successful, fulfilled, or whole. The diagnosis varies, but the formula stays the same.

First establish the person’s inadequacy.

Then sell them the solution.

It’s effective because fear has always sold better than love.

The problem is that when we pursue a better life from this place, we unknowingly build our lives on a cracked foundation.

And foundations matter.

You can build a beautiful house on a cracked foundation. From the outside it may look impressive. People may admire it. They may even envy it. But eventually the cracks underneath begin to reveal themselves.

We see this pattern over and over again.

People who achieve everything they once dreamed of yet still feel empty.

People who build remarkable careers yet remain haunted by the feeling that they are not enough.

People who reach extraordinary levels of success only to find themselves sabotaging their own lives in ways they cannot fully explain.

Why?

Because they never built their lives upon their goodness. They never built from belovedness. They built from deficiency. From the belief that they were somehow lacking.

But no amount of achievement can sustain a life built on the belief that you are not good enough.

Starting Somewhere Better

It seems to me that much of spirituality and self-help are making the same mistake, and in doing so, harming many of the very people they’ve set out to help.

The problem is the starting place.

You can call it sin, inadequacy, or the missing piece. However you name it, if transformation begins by first convincing someone that there is something fundamentally wrong with them, it will never lead to authentic transformation.

Which leads us to a fundamental question:

What if transformation begins somewhere else entirely?

What if growth does not require self-rejection? What if healing does not require self-hatred? What if becoming something more does not require believing you are less?

What if we could build beautiful lives from belovedness rather than brokenness?

As I continue to walk alongside more and more people, I find myself increasingly drawn to a different starting point. In many ways, I have become convinced it is the only starting point that leads to lasting change.

Belovedness.

Not because we are perfect. Not because we don’t need healing. Not because we don’t have blind spots, wounds, or patterns that need attention.

We do.

But those things are not the deepest truth about us.

The deepest truth is not our brokenness. It is not our failures. It is not our inadequacies. The deepest truth is that beneath all of those things, before all of those things, we are loved.

And when we begin there, everything blossoms in incredible ways. .

Growth no longer becomes an attempt to prove our worth. Healing no longer becomes an effort to fix what is wrong with us. Transformation becomes the beautiful process of living more fully into what has been true all along.

And when we believe that, when we build from that foundation, we can begin creating the most beautiful lives imaginable.

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Please hear me: I am deeply committed to mutual care, shared responsibility, and a love that binds us together. Community matters. Interdependence matters. But in our warnings against being “me-centered,” we’ve begun to treat selfhood as dangerous. Self-expression has become suspect. And this has had nuclear implications on our personal and communal health.

I often hear Christians mock language like “self-care” or “finding yourself” as a distraction from following Jesus. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, we learned to mistrust anything that sounded like being a self at all. In pushing back against selfishness and isolation, we didn’t just critique ego—we clobbered uniqueness. Within the fear of “find yourself” culture, we quietly taught folks to abandon themselves instead.

One of the deeper sources of disenchantment with spirituality I see in my clients isn’t always political division or the hypocrisies we so often point to. Beneath the surface is something more painful:

It’s the sense that following Jesus requires abandoning oneself. And this leaves many at a head-on collision.

They feel forced to choose. One path is embracing their unique identity and self-expression, the very way God designed them, but doing so carries the fear of being labeled selfish, arrogant, or ego-driven. The other path, the one many live within, is self-abandonment: suppressing their unique makeup and desires in order to be a “good Christian.” It feels safer, and it is rewarded by the culture, but it leaves a quiet ache. Life lived out of alignment never brings life to the soul; it only dulls it.

Thomas Merton once wrote, “For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is, in fact, the problem of finding out who I am and discovering my true self.”

That’s not self-centered spirituality. That’s deeply Christian spirituality. Sanctity, for Merton, was not about becoming someone else. It was about becoming who you already are in God.

The idea of self-discovery and being oneself is not some modern notion dressed up in therapeutic language or a new-age distortion. Long before personality tests and self-help books, Saint Augustine prayed a simple, prayer: “Lord, let me know myself and know You.” Not instead of one another, but together. Augustine understood that self-knowledge and God-knowledge are intertwined. To reject the self is not holiness; it’s blindness.

When we live out of alignment with who we truly are, we are forced to perform a version of ourselves that fits a religious mold. Editing our desires, silencing instincts, muting creativity, restraining questions. All in the name of faithfulness. But living as a false self, even if we think it’s for God, fractures the soul. It drains joy, disconnects us from our bodies and intuition, and dulls our sense of God’s presence. Life feels heavy, brittle, exhausting.

True joy, by contrast, becomes far more accessible when we are allowed to be ourselves.

In this conversation, the idea of the flesh often comes up. Isn’t this the thing we are to deny? Isn’t our natural self and our instinct the part of us we are to deny and destroy?

I’d suggest that when we speak of denying the flesh, it is not a call to reject our true selves. The flesh refers to the coverings we have draped over ourselves in shame and fear. The armor Adam and Eve fashioned in the garden when they hid from God.

It is the false self, the distorted mask that keeps us small, anxious, and disconnected from the life God intended for us. To deny the flesh is to shed that false self. It is to refuse what is in opposition to your authentic design, to unclench the tightly wound version of you shaped by fear, judgment, or conformity. In its place, you step into the fullness of your God-given self: tender, wild, particular, and alive. Denying the flesh is not denial of self…it is reclamation of it.

Dearly beloved, God did not design us to fail. We are shaped with sacred particularity for our flourishing and for the flourishing of those around us. To be yourself authentically is not to withdraw from the world or diminish others, but to participate in its beauty more fully. Your life, lived in alignment with your design, becomes a source of life for others as well.

You might ask, If life becomes about discovering and honoring ourselves, do we risk selfishness or self-consumption? Don’t we need Jesus, and don’t we need one another? Of course we do. But the deeper question is what that dependence is meant to produce. What if following Jesus was never intended to erase our uniqueness, but to awaken it? What if spiritual formation is not about shrinking the self, but about freeing it from fear, shame, and distortion so that it can finally become whole?

To deny the flesh, then, is not to deny our true self but to release the false one. It is to shed the layers we have taken on through fear, comparison, and conformity, and to step into the life God actually designed for us. In this way, authenticity is not rebellion but obedience. It is the lived expression of trust in the One who formed us with intention. When we live from that place, something opens. Our presence becomes a conduit for grace, and our uniqueness begins to serve the world rather than shrink within it.

Howard Thurman captured this beautifully when he said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” The world does not need more exhausted, self-erasing lives. It needs people who are awake, rooted, and fully alive. In the same spirit, Bono once said, “Free yourself to be yourself, if only you could see yourself.” So much of our struggle comes from not seeing ourselves as we truly are: designed, loved, and entrusted with something only we can offer.

Jesus never seemed threatened by human particularity. He called fishermen, skeptics, mystics, and misfits, and He did not flatten them into sameness. Grace did not erase their humanity but fulfilled it. In the same way, communities become most alive not when people are diminished, but when they are freed. When uniqueness is suppressed, something in us goes quiet. But when it is honored, love becomes more spacious, not less.

So may you have the courage to be who you actually are, not the version shaped by fear, approval, or expectation. May you honor the way God has designed you, and stop apologizing for what He has placed within you. Your voice, your creativity, your desires, your tenderness, your fire all belong to your calling, not outside of it.

And may this courage show itself in simple, embodied ways. Speak what you have been holding back. Create what only you can create. Step into the life that is quietly waiting for your yes. These are not small things. They are the beginning of wholeness. They are the practice of becoming real.

As you live this way, may your life become an offering, not of perfection but of presence. May your becoming give others permission to become. And may your authenticity be a quiet testimony that to be fully yourself is not to move away from God, but to move more deeply into Him.

My friend Brian, who I had gone to Vegas with, watched this unfold with curiosity about the instant intimacy between strangers. He asked me how I was able to connect so quickly and closely. It made the most sense to say:

It’s like we are part of the same religion.

We shared stories, saints, songs, and culture. Together we believed in something beyond ourselves and beyond our control.

Now, as a professional religious person, that might sound like heresy, or at the very least incredibly cheesy. Yet the more I’ve thought about it, the more true, helpful, and beautiful it seems. The spirituality of sport. The way we long for God on the football (soccer) pitch. The more I’ve thought about it, this idea has revealed so much about the spiritual space of our lives.

In a world where many spiritual people are worried about the future of faith and the fragmentation of spirituality, the spirituality of sport might be something worth paying attention to.

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I’m writing this just after that very team, Tottenham Hotspur, won a match that mattered to us in a profound way. The stakes feel disproportionate to the reality and weight of life. Yes, I know it’s just a game. But to us, this game really mattered. Legacy, identity, history, all of it condensed into ninety minutes of collective attention.

I screamed, called my brother, laughed, buried my head in the couch, and felt tears well up in my chest.

I watched by myself in the basement while also somehow in unison with my brother in Minnesota, my friends in Denver, my new friends from Vegas, and millions of other devotees around the world.

It’s like when you pray the Lord’s Prayer. You start by saying “our” Father. It’s communal. Even when you are speaking alone, you are tethered to people you will likely never meet, connected to something you will never influence.

Obviously I am not unique in this. From soccer to American football, from pop culture phenomena to social movements and art, we are drawn toward things that connect us to a greater whole, even when we are physically alone. It’s part of our spiritual DNA. Something that is and will always be there.

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In my line of work, there is a lot of conversation about how society is becoming less spiritual. The narrative says religion is declining. And yet I just cannot buy into that. (neither can the data). Aside from that, sport seems to show the way for some of us.

The human impulse toward meaning, ritual, devotion, and belonging seems as strong as ever. Spend any time around sport and you begin to realize the soul’s longing for the spiritual has not disappeared. It has simply found new expressions.

Communal songs sung in unison. Rituals and weekly gatherings. Myths and stories passed down through generations with villains and heroes at the center. Commentators interpreting events almost like theologians trying to explain what matters and why. Saints remembered. Myths and sacred stories retold.

You can call society’s devotion to sport immature or problematic if you want. But I think it points toward something deeply hopeful. It reveals that humanity is still profoundly spiritual and that our longing for transcendence remains intact.

Religion, in many ways, is the structure we build around spirituality in order to make sense of the Divine, which ultimately transcends our understanding. Sport might simply be one of the clearest modern examples of humanity trying to make communal sense of the deeper realities of life.

We are still deeply spiritual.

Deep down, we long to be connected to something beyond ourselves. God is so far beyond our understanding, so far beyond us, and yet I believe we were designed for union with the Divine.

And no, I am not saying sport replaces religion or replaces God in full. But I do think sport reveals something important about the human soul. In some ways, I think it functions as a kind of spiritual formation tool, even filling gaps that much of the modern church often leaves untouched. Like any spiritual practice, it can help reveal the deeper movements happening underneath the surface of our lives.

As someone who works professionally in spiritual formation and contemplative practice, I think it is vital that we pay attention to the things that help us pay attention. Not only to the things themselves, but to what God might be revealing through them. Sport, at its best, becomes a contemplative invitation. A mirror. A place where, if we are willing to look closely, we can begin to notice what is being formed in us.

What makes sport so powerful is that it invites us into surrender. We cannot control the outcome, the decisions, or what happens next. And yet we willingly devote ourselves to it. Then we gather with others doing the same thing, and in that shared devotion we are drawn together.

This is what healthy spirituality has always done. When you seek that which is beyond you, beyond your control, that which humbles you, it brings you into community.

Healthy spirituality contains uncertainty. And uncertainty, as uncomfortable as it is, has a way of forming people. It humbles you. It stretches your capacity to care about things you cannot control. It teaches you how to hope without possession. How to suffer without abandoning what you love. How to return again and again to something that has disappointed you before.

Unhealthy religion often moves in the opposite direction. It longs for certainty and control. But sport, and devotion to a team and community, forces you into contact with something we spend most of our lives trying to avoid: uncertainty.

Sport also mirrors many of the rhythms healthy spirituality offers us. Life, death, resurrection. Failure and redemption. It stretches our ability to care deeply while surrendering control. It teaches us how to love something that disappoints us and still hope for renewal.

Sadly, my club Tottenham is a very good teacher in this way lol.

But similar to the work I do with my clients, committing myself to this team and community has slowly formed me over the years. Hope, loss, return. Grief, joy, disappointment, belonging. It is not just entertainment. It is a rehearsal for life.

The more we learn to trust what is beyond us, expose ourselves to loss and failure, especially with others, the more we can make sense of what is in front of us.

Sport also forms us into an actual community. Much of the modern community today is built less around what we love and more around what we oppose. Both the political left and right are guilty of this and thus much of the church at large. Many communities become organized around outrage, ideology, or enemies rather than love, our healthy passion.

When you devote yourself to a team, by and large, you are gathered in a significantly more healthy way. You do not choose the people you belong with. You simply recognize them as your own based on what you love.. Someone wearing the same colors becomes instantly familiar. A stranger becomes known to you not through biography, but through devotion.

That is not small.

In fact, it may be one of the most overlooked forms of belonging we have left.

In a world where so many people feel fragmented and isolated, sport still creates spaces where emotional language is shared without introduction. Where grief can be spoken without explanation. Where joy can be amplified because someone else understands what it costs you to feel it.

It gives us a place to practice being together.

And perhaps this is what fascinates me most. Sport reveals that we are still devotional beings. We are still shaped by ritual. We still long to belong to something larger than ourselves. We still ache for meaning, transcendence, and shared experience.

These spaces are not distractions from spirituality. Often, they are expressions of the same longing underneath it all.

In the end, the question was never whether humanity would stop being spiritual. We are spiritual creatures. We are in God and God is in us. There is no place God is not.

The question is whether we can recognize the sacred when it appears outside the places we expected to find it.

Because what I once only saw in churches and monasteries, I now see in stadiums, living rooms, pubs, and crowded basements full of people hoping together.

And for many of us, somewhere between kickoff and final whistle, we find ourselves standing at an altar we did not realize we had built. Together. Hoping. Watching. Waiting to connect with something beyond ourselves.

Longing for love. Longing for belonging. Longing to feel part of something larger than our isolated lives.

And it seems to me that when we pay attention to that longing, we often discover that God has been there all along.

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I share this experience with my clients often. Many turn to what is meant to be a healing text, only to find a book that feels heavy in their hands and hearts, leaving them burdened, isolated, and confused.

Growing up, I was more or less taught to view the Bible as an instruction manual. The world’s oldest IKEA packet, every sentence and story was a precise life description and instruction. Tighten this belief here, obey that command there, or the whole structure of faith might collapse. If your life is not going right, it’s probably because you don’t know the scriptures well enough.

For a long time, this approach was tidy and safe. I knew what to do, what not to do and it all pretty much worked out. Until it didn’t. In the midst of real suffering, this text book of sorts became quite suffocating. The deeper the darkness got, the less it seemed to be able to hold the vastness of what I was going though. I didn’t want to abandon this sacred text, but the way in which I held the Bible up to that point made it a tool that truly couldn’t hold me.

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We are more than thinking beings. Intellect alone cannot carry the weight of grief, longing, love, or loss. We are bodies and hearts, breath and imagination, intuition and wonder. We feel, dream, wrestle, laugh, and weep. This is our shared humanity, and it’s precisely this humanity that Scripture is meant to encounter.

Literalism, while useful in its proper place, often leaves much of that complexity behind and is why it leaves us isolated in our suffering. When Scripture is treated only as an intellectual exercise, it serves the mind but hardly the whole self.

We see it in people all the time. The ones who have all the answers. They are doctrine obsessed and will argue with any heretic until the cows come home. Yet behind the curtain anxiety lingers, fear persists, judgment grows, and love remains largely theoretical. The words are mastered by these folks, but the transforming power never reaches the depths of the heart. Love seems distant.

For many, a primarily literal or brain-focused reading of Scripture begins to clash with the love of God they have come to know along the way. After wrestling through doubt, fear, and the letting go of old dogmas, many encounter a God of love, grace, and mercy, only to find parts of the text suddenly jarring or foreign. Is God really this angry, this distant, this harsh? The contradictions grow louder, and certain passages no longer seem aligned with the Divine love they have experienced. The text can begin to go to war with the God of love they came to know.

For many, the question arises in the midst of a grand wondering: Is the Divine voice truly in Scripture? And if it is, how do we find God’s love within it? Is there a way to hear God’s voice in the words without being trapped by rigid literalism? Is there a God of love present in and around these ancient texts?

After my mother’s death, I especially found myself in that very place. I knew the Bible intimately, having memorized entire books, yet in the cave of grief it offered little comfort. The text I had always known felt lifeless, stripped of oxygen. Where was the breath, the mystery, the poetry, the life? I did not need more rules to follow. I needed a friend in the darkness.

On the edge of letting go of spirituality altogether, I arrived at a Benedictine monastery, seeking compassion, hope, and guidance. There, held by the quiet warmth of the sisters and their gentle teaching of St. Benedict’s ancient wisdom, I began to encounter Scripture anew and rediscovered the compassionate and transformative power I had always been told it could hold.

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Long before literal-only readings of scripture took hold, the Christian tradition offered another way. St. Benedict especially points us toward a slower, prayerful rhythm of reading, one that listens with the ear of the heart and allows Scripture to shape not just the mind, but the whole person.

C.S. Lewis once wrote that “modern readers have lost the art of reading allegory”. I believe it’s this very loss of allegory, metaphor, and poetry that has robbed us from experiencing scripture to the depth by which it can actually transform us. In a culture built on data, certainty, and speed, we’ve lost our ability to notice what lies beneath the surface. We skim, scroll, and rarely pause to look deeper.

I studied film theory in college. The premise was that any film with lasting cultural impact had layers of meaning woven into every scene. Nothing was accidental: the colors and textures of clothing, the way light fell across a room, the overlapping layers of music all carried messages. Much of which would go unnoticed at first glance. Watch a film literally and you’d miss the gifts the film had to offer. Metaphor and allegory weren’t add-ons; they were structural, foundational, essential to the story. I became skilled at analyzing color, symbolism, and thematic threads that ran throughout a film. We learned to read not just what was shown on the screen, but what was whispered between the lines.

But what I was never taught (what few of us are) is that this same kind of layered seeing is exactly how we are invited to approach texts of real significance, especially spiritual ones. Scripture, like great art, asks us to look deeper, to notice the hidden currents, to listen with our hearts as well as our minds.

Northrop Frye writes in Anatomy of Criticism:

“Genuine allegory is a structural element in literature: it has to be there, and cannot be added by critical interpretation alone.”

The point is that reading books, like the Bible, solely in a literal way is to read only part of the book. To leave out the beautiful complexity that lies beneath the literal is to leave out the wisdom of the book itself.

Sadly, as modern readers, we have largely lost the faith that Scripture can hold meaning beyond the literal. With it, we’ve lost the curiosity to explore what the Holy Text and the Divine inspiration behind the ink might offer us. In some circles, the very idea that Scripture could speak on multiple levels has even been vilified. This fear has obscured its beauty, turning God and the text into something harsh, angry, and hurtful. And yet, in truth, they are far more life-giving, tender, and loving than we often allow ourselves to see.

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So then, what do we do with Scripture? And what does St. Benedict have to do with reading the Bible in a way that actually heals rather than harms? It’s worth noting that Benedict took Scripture with utmost seriousness; his Rule is drenched in biblical language. But he also understood something we’ve largely forgotten:

The purpose of Scripture is transformation, not trivia.

What I began to learn from the sisters and from Benedict is that the transformative power of Scripture isn’t unlocked through academic invention. It emerges through a soul-level, intuitive, contemplative, and compassionate way of listening. Transformation comes through the ear behind the ear, through patient attention, through the quiet inner posture that listens with the whole self.

This ancient way of reading assumes, from the very beginning, that Scripture has layers upon layers of meaning. It mirrors the way I first learned to watch films in college. Not skimming the surface or taking everything at face value, but listening for symbol, metaphor, archetype, poetry, allegory, and soul. Never face value alone. Always asking: What else is here? What deeper truth is trying to reach me?

Not only is this a liberating way of reading Scripture, it was for much of history, the only way most people could encounter it. Long before anyone could parse Greek verbs, cite commentaries, or conduct verse-by-verse exegesis, ordinary people still received the sacred text with wonder and depth. Most couldn’t even read. Their engagement wasn’t intellectual; it was soulful.

They listened. They lingered. They prayed. To assume the text must be understood only through our modern analytical lens feels almost arrogant, as if those who came before us, immersed in their faith and devotion, were somehow cut off from the full depth of God because they lacked our tools and methods. Nothing could be further from the truth. The sacred text has always been alive, waiting for the heart to meet it. Could it be that this ancient way might still serve us in the modern world?
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This is precisely what St. Benedict understood so profoundly and why he wrote his Rule the way he did. Benedict does not ask us to exclusively study Scripture. He invites us into what he called “prayerful reading,” or what we now know as Lectio Divina.

This ancient practice is less a “Bible study” and more like sitting on the front porch with God, letting the words speak personally and presently to you. It is the simple spiritual practice of showing up and listening with the ear of the heart, not just the brain.

This is not some new, woo-woo approach to Scripture. It is the way monks, nuns, and followers of Jesus have been engaging the Holy Text for centuries. Our modern obsession with literal-leaning reading is actually quite recent in the grand sweep of history. It took shape during the Age of Enlightenment, the 17th and 18th centuries, when reason, categorization, and measurable facts were elevated as the highest forms of truth.

Sure, we gained some enlightenment via science, analysis, and precision, but somewhere along the way, we lost something precious. In our confidence that facts and creeds alone could save us… wonder, depth, curiosity, and beauty quietly slipped out the back door and were ultimately sacrificed.

Mystery and metaphor were treated with suspicion. Poetry and allegory became optional. And Scripture, once a living conversation, was reduced to something to be mastered rather than encountered.

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A sacrament is a meeting place between the visible and the invisible. The human and the Divine. I believe engaging scripture the way St. Benedict invites us to, allowing the text to become just that. A Sacrament. Just as water in baptism becomes more than water, and wine more than wine in communion, the words of Scripture carry the living presence of God. Human language mediating divine reality. When metaphor and allegory are welcomed, the Bible transcends being a textbook or instruction manual and becomes something more alive: a doorway, a spark, a vessel of cosmic presence.

When Scripture is approached as sacrament rather than mere study, it gains the capacity to speak directly into our specific lived experience. It meets us in the particularities of our own stories. Early readers trusted this. They expected layers of meaning that spoke to their specific life. Scripture was never static; it was and is a living conversation. To allow the complexities to transcend certainty, ultimately lead us to transformation.

If God truly meets us in and through the text, then we must allow it to speak beyond the flat surface of the words. This frees us from suffocating, weaponized interpretations and opens us to a voice that still heals, surprises, and awakens. The Bible is not a tool for control, but a living, breathing invitation to love, ready to meet us where we are and lead us into more freedom, more love, and more life.

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At its heart, this prayerful reading Benedict invites us into is slow, beautifully slow. It asks us to resist the modern urge to skim and study, and instead to feel the weight of divine love simmering within each word, the way you might savor a piece of dark chocolate or linger over a sentence that feels as if it’s speaking directly into your life.

You read a line. You breathe and wait for the shimmer. The phrase that tugs at you, stirs something just beneath your ribs. And then, you trust it. You assume what rises within you is not distraction, but God speaking in the way God so often does: quietly, personally, through the contours of your own heart. You follow the invitation hidden in the metaphor and symbol. You notice the comfort or challenge meant just for you. Like a gentle hand on your shoulder, like a whisper for your soul.

It is here, where the soul is finally allowed to encounter the text, that real transformation becomes possible. Not just the mind gathering ideas, but the interior world waking up, softening, shifting. This is where Lectio becomes less about reading Scripture and more about allowing Scripture to read you. Where information gives way to formation, and a single line becomes a doorway into something deeper, truer, and more alive. All that is required is that you listen…with the ear of the heart…and trust it.

Benedict’s invitation into a prayerful, heart-led reading of Scripture can feel intimidating. Many fear they don’t have the right tools or might get it “wrong,” so they turn outward to pastors, commentaries, or experts. Helpful, perhaps. But if we stop there, seeking correctness over contemplation, we miss the Spirit whispering directly to us. We trade inner attentiveness for external authority. No wonder so many know the Bible inside and out, yet remain untouched by it.

Lectio asks for a different posture. It invites us to stop controlling the text and allow the text to shape us. To trust that the Spirit speaks through these words, here, now, and personally. Treat Scripture as black and white, and it expects every person, in every culture, in every circumstance, to travel the same path. No wonder it leaves us most untouched. We are too cosmicly diverse for just one path. Lectio meets us where we are, reshaping the soul according to where we are on our journey, comforting and confronting, revealing what we are ready to see, and guiding us into growth.

Knowledge alone cannot transform us, but encounter can. As Father Richard Rohr often says, “You can’t think yourself into new ways of living; you must live yourself into new ways of thinking.” I didn’t become an ultrarunner by reading books on running; I became one by running. Transformation comes through encounters.

In the ancient world, Scripture was rarely studied privately, and in that public, communal engagement it became a true encounter. Many couldn’t read, of course, but the practice of hearing it read slowly and thinking about itself led to deeper encounters. Some scholars even suggest that Benedict’s monks whispered Scripture to themselves, engaging body, breath, ear, and heart. Their reading became an embodied, soul-level encounter, alive, relational, and transformative, not merely an intellectual exercise working to memorize facts and formulas.

The Rule St. Benedict begins with its most famous line: “Listen with the ear of your heart.” His entire hermeneutic in one sentence. Don’t just analyze. Don’t cling to the literal as if it could hold the whole mystery. Listen. Let the text come alive. Let it read you. Let it be an encounter.

This is a word of liberation. You are not bound to an exclusively literal reading of Scripture. You are free, invited even, to read in ways that are contemplative and poetic, layered and sacramental, personal and communal, Spirit-led and deeply transformative. This is not a modern rebellion against tradition. It is the tradition. It is how monks, mystics, and seekers have engaged the Word for centuries, trusting that it still speaks, still surprises, still heals.

May you reclaim this ancient art.
May you listen with the ear of your heart.
And may Scripture become again what it has always been:
A living encounter with the God who longs to speak with and listen to you.

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About two years ago, I found out I had an unruptured aneurysm in my brain. A kind that could not be operated on. The neurosurgeon said, “The only thing you can do is go about your life and live as if it’s not there.” At first that sounded liberating ... .then about 10 minutes later it shifted in me. Yeah. Sure. Thanks. Easier said than done. One wrong day, one wrong sneeze, it felt like, and I would be toast.

I cried in my car for what felt like forever, and then it hit me: mortality isn’t abstract anymore. It’s not a lecture you half-listen to at a funeral or an inspiring instagram post about the stoics. My new friend, this aneurysm, was a neon sign blinking above your head: time is real and it is limited.

Naturally, I asked myself the question no one wants to ask until they absolutely have to: If these were my last days, how the hell would I live?

Cue the bucket list. At first, it was small, the restaurant I wanted to try, the bands I wanted to see, the places I wanted to go with my family, but soon it grew into a goddamn novella. I am not short on passion or imagination; there were endless things I wanted to do, be, and see. What hit me with a crushing clarity was that even if I lived to ninety-five, I could never do it all. There would never be enough time.

Any remaining anxiety I could summon swelled as I realized that it wasn’t just about dying too soon. Even if I lived long, I would never do or become everything I could dream.

The Anxiety of Time

With or without an aneurysm, we all live under the tyranny of a clock. Not just in life, but in every damn thing. The subtle fear that we’re late: late to save money, late to heal, late to figure out who we’re supposed to be. The tyranny of time runs through our veins like the blood that keeps us alive. It whispers most every moment, hums beneath our scrolling thumbs, and gnaws at the edges of every choice we make.

It’s probably the most common theme in my coaching practice: “I should have started five years ago.” “They did it decades before me.” “What’s the point now?” The anxiety isn’t just about missed opportunities; it’s the weight of existence itself pressing down. There is simply never enough time to do what we feel we should, to be who we imagine ourselves becoming, to experience all the moments we hope to grasp. If we die today or in ninety years, the truth seems to be the same: there is just not enough time.

And yet, this is exactly the paradox of being human. We carry the grief of limited hours and the yearning for infinite possibility all at once. We hustle, we plan, we panic, thinking that if we move fast enough, we can cheat time, outrun it, or bend it to our will. But the clock is relentless, the hours fleeting, and the fear of falling behind is a shadow we can never fully shake. Every human life carries this weight, whether whispered in a doctor’s office or shouted in the quiet of our own heads.

For me, the origin of this fear started with my mother who was chronically ill for the majority of my life. Every day carried the shadow question: Will she be here tomorrow? While we made the most of our life the consideration of time lodged itself in me. As a result of this idea that time was scarce I learned to hurry, to squeeze life, to multitask like my nervous system’s life depended on it. Because somewhere deep down, it did.

Exhaustion felt noble. Urgency felt like love. Productivity felt like control.

Around a year ago, I was in a season of complete overwhelm. Multitasking too many projects, drinking too much Red Bull, and carrying a constant shame that I wasn’t doing enough, no matter how much I actually did. At a breaking point, I turned to breathwork. I spent about an hour trying to get out of my head and into my heart. I asked God what the hell was going on with this season of my life. God said, “Your multitasking isn’t ambition. It’s a trauma response.”

In that moment, something clicked. My constant effort, my endless doing, it wasn’t just ambition, scatterbrain tendencies, or even ADHD. It was the echo of a childhood spent under the shadow of my mother’s fragility, a nervous system shaped by the fear of losing her and by the urgent sense that life and time were always borrowed.

Think about that for a moment. How many of us carry patterns, habits, and urgencies that aren’t really ours? My patterns of hurry, my relentless need to do more, my guilt over never being enough they were inherited, passed down in the wiring of my nervous system as it related to the world I grew up in. Could it be that how we view time, is not an accurate depiction of how reality is, but it’s as much an inherited story as anything else.

Radical Presence = Divine Time

After the aneurysm, I realized there would never be enough time to do everything. And that led me to a life-changing realization. If I could not do everything, then I had to choose the few things I would do. It was no longer about what my priorities were, but about what my priority is. Not about dreaming big in a thousand directions, but about dreaming monumentally, cosmically big about the one thing I could not abandon.

This was my first invitation out of the bondage of scarce time and into the present moment, or what I often call Divine Time, which is endlessly abundant. The more I focused on one thing in the very present, the more time, hope, inspiration, and opportunities seemed to appear. It was as if the less I tried to control time, the more time I had.

It sounds comically simple, but until we let it unfold in our lives, it can be hard to see. For example, when I stopped trying to write three books at once and just focused on one, I ended up getting one published and a second written all in less than a year. The liberating truth continued to become clear: our arrival, our being on time, has nothing to do with clocks, goals, or milestones. It is measured by a rhythm of presence and the attention we give to this moment.

God is not pacing the room, tapping a foot, muttering, “Get a move on.” God delights in being with us. Even in our mistakes, our delays, our detours. The more fully we inhabit the moment we are in, giving it our attention and our all, the more we feel the Divine standing there with us and with that comes cosmic power and inspiration. The Divine is not somewhere in the future hoping we catch up. God is here, now, in the moment.

I often think that my endless time travel—worrying about the future, obsessing over all the shit I had to do or wasn’t getting done—kept me from seeing God in the present moment, from seeing where I was and what was actually happening. Only when I can truly be present can I see reality clearly, can I notice the opportunities, the love, and the guidance that have always been here, patiently waiting for me to stop rushing and simply be.

Daily Bread, Heaven, & Divine Time

The Lord’s prayer has become a place for me that speak a good bit into time. There are two major sections of this prayer that are , in part, inviting us to reorient ourselves around time in a new way.

First, Jesus invites us to pray for this day our daily bread. A radical call to the present moment. We are not taught here to pray for yesterday’s bread. That bread has gone stale, grown moldy, and cannot nourish us now. And we are not taught to pray for tomorrow’s bread, because that bread has not even been baked yet. It does not exist. It echos additional teachings of Christ “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” There is a kind mercy in that. A grounding. An invitation to stop living in imagined futures or replayed pasts and instead root ourselves in what is real, right now.

Daily bread is about today. About what is in front of us. About trusting that what we need will meet us here. To pray for daily bread is to resist the urge to time travel. It is to come back into our bodies, back into this moment, and to trust that there is enough here to sustain us.

Then we are invited to pray, “on earth as it is in heaven.” In praying this, we are asking that a timeless, Divine, cosmic reality would enter into our soil-covered, flesh-and-bone lives that we inhabit as humans. To me, this prayer is as much about inviting a new perspective of time into our lived reality as it is anything else. In heaven, as I imagine it, there is no anxiety about being late. No scrambling to make the most out of limited hours. No quiet panic that life is slipping through our fingers. There is only presence.

And because of that, one can give their whole self to whatever is in front of them. No divided attention. No rushing ahead. Just a full, wholehearted presence to what is here.

This prayer is not just about a distant reality. It is about this one. Jesus is teaching us to pray in a way that forms us to live differently.

And I can’t help but wonder what would happen if we actually let these words shape us. If we let them rewire the way we move through time, the way we hold our lives. I think we would begin to see something beautiful unfold. Not all at once, but slowly, quietly, like light breaking through in places we didn’t know were dark. What if this prayer, the way of Jesus, is an invitation into a kind of rebellion? A rebellion against a world obsessed with time, driven by urgency, and haunted by the fear of being behind. What if we could begin to inhabit a different rhythm?

A rhythm where we are not constantly chasing the next thing or trying to make up for the past. A rhythm where we are not measuring our worth by how much we can fit into a day. What if this prayer is an invitation to live untormented by time? To be fully present. To trust that this moment is enough. To give ourselves completely to what is right in front of us, and to discover, maybe for the first time, that this is where life has been waiting for us all along.

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Present Potential

In the season after the aneurysm, I began to feel something I had never fully known: a sense of being held in time rather than chased by it. The patterns of hurry, the guilt over not doing enough, or having enough time began to soften. Not because I did more or accomplished more, but because I learned to give my whole self to the moment in front of me. I learned that presence, wholehearted attention, is to enter into Divine time.

Healing as it relates to time, I discovered, does not come from filling our hours with endless doing. It comes from inhabiting the now. It comes from offering our attention, our energy, our hearts fully to what is before us.

For it it was not in wishing my aneurism away so I can live fully, or in overworking myself because I had it. Both are inauthentic and dishonest. Freedom came from being honest that I might die and doing what I would do today anyways.

This is the invitation I offer to you: to live in the rhythm of Divine Time, to stop racing against clocks and inherited fears, to let go of the illusion that your worth depends on how much you do or how fast you move. Look at what is in front of you. Give it your presence, your love, your all. Trust that this is enough. Trust that this is where life—and the Divine—has been waiting for you all along.

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“Be careful,” we were told. “Your heart can lead you astray. It can’t be trusted. It’s wicked.” An entire generation of Christians, a people whose spirituality is centered on God entering a human body, has been formed to be wary of their own bodies and, especially, the heart at the center.

We were taught to override the impulses of the soul and treat our inner voice with suspicion. If the heart longed for something, felt drawn somewhere, or sensed deeply, the safest response was often to question it immediately. Over time, many of us internalized a cautious posture toward ourselves. We learned to second-guess our instincts, to distrust our interior world, and some of us even lost the ability to recognize what was happening within us at all.

The consequences of this perspective reach far beyond theology. Beneath debates about doctrine is always a human being, a person with a story, trying to convince themselves and the world that they are wicked at their core. This is not an argument or debate; it is a tragedy. When someone pushes against these ancient teachings, I don’t see a critique of scripture; I see a person who truly believes what they are saying about themselves. It is heartbreaking.

How cruel would it be to hold a newborn in your arms and declare them evil, wretched, or destined for brokenness? It is ludicrous, scary, and harmful. Yet this is often exactly how we end up seeing ourselves—a profound and sorrowful tragedy.

When someone allows their spirituality to move beyond mere intellect, they begin to see that these messages do more than distort self-perception; they shape our relationship with the Divine. If the deepest part of you is considered inherently corrupt, what does that say about the creature God made? And what does it say about the Creator? These reflections become more than theological ideas. They are beliefs projected onto both ourselves and God, creating a cycle of unnecessary wickedness that was never truly there.

This belief also hinders our ability to recognize God’s image in others. As we view our hearts as untrustworthy, we see ourselves as dangerous villains in our own story, and suddenly, the invitation to love our neighbors as ourselves is twisted. We project the same suspicion we feel toward ourselves onto everyone around us.

It is no wonder that much of modern Christianity, particularly in the West, often feels more divisive than unifying. A faith built on suspicion of our own hearts produces more critics than disciples, more adversaries than allies, fostering a culture of fear, self-denial, and mistrust. When we cannot perceive the goodness and divine image within our own hearts, it becomes nearly impossible to recognize the love and dignity others—especially those on the margins—truly deserve.

Relationships, communities, and even spiritual practices risk becoming battlegrounds rather than spaces of grace. For a spirituality that repeatedly teaches us not to fear, it is striking how often we end up fearing the very thing at the center of our spiritual and physical being: our own hearts and, by extension, the hearts of everyone around us.

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How Did We Get Here?

When I hear someone desperately insisting that their heart is bad, that something essential inside them is wrong, waves of sadness swell within me. I pray that parents, teachers, missionaries, and grandparents do not carry and teach these same burdens. What a heavy and unnecessary weight.

How did the story of a God who calls creation good, who breathes life into humanity, who places the kingdom of God within us, become a story where people feel compelled to argue for their own corruption? From the beginning, God has spoken goodness over us, breathing life into our first moments, whispering in our deepest selves, naming us beloved, calling us holy. Somewhere along the way, we began to doubt that voice, forgetting that the same God who calls all creation good calls us good too.

What if the deepest part of you is not the enemy? What if the truest part of you, the part God designed to be good, beautiful, and whole, is not something to fear but something to listen to and trust?

The Wisdom of the Heart

The verse often used to support this harmful view, Jeremiah 17:9, says, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” It is quoted with certainty, often as the final word. Do not follow your heart. Do not trust your desires. Do not listen too closely to the voice within.

A closer look at the Hebrew changes the story. The word translated as “deceitful,” ‘aqov, can mean crooked or difficult to grasp, but it also conveys something winding, layered, or complex. Some ancient translations render the verse, “The heart is deep beyond all things.” Not deceitful, but deep.

The human heart is complicated. It holds grief and longing, wounds and wisdom, fear and love. Depth can feel confusing, even deceiving, especially in a world that prizes quick answers and certainty. But complexity is not corruption. The heart is not shallow; it is layered. The challenge is not wickedness, but the patience, presence, and honesty required to truly listen. It is easier to declare the heart bad than to do the work of interior reflection, discerning the wisdom God has placed within us.

Within the heart’s depth, wisdom resides. The heart that has endured struggle, wrestled with longing, and sat quietly with sorrow becomes a wellspring of insight. Like an old grandmother who has lived a rich and complex life, a heart that has navigated joy and pain carries wisdom that cannot be reduced to good or evil. The deeper we go, the more the heart emerges not as a source of confusion but as a guide, full of intuition and understanding.

Wicked

When people hear “wicked” in Jeremiah 17:9, it is easy to internalize it as “my heart is fundamentally corrupt.” This is not the wisdom of God. It is not how God sees you, and it is not who you are.

The Hebrew word ra’, translated as wicked, is far more nuanced than modern English allows. Biblical Hebrew rarely speaks in absolute terms like “utterly wicked.” In context, the heart can be misguided, self-centered, or misaligned, but it is not inherently corrupt, and it is certainly not beyond renewal (see Ezekiel 36:26: “I will give you a new heart”). The “wickedness” refers to human tendencies to wander, deceive oneself, or act out of fear or ego, not an eternal condemnation of being. The nuance is complexity, misdirection, or difficulty, not foundational corruption.

Which is to say, the work is not to declare yourself bad, but to ask, “Is this the self God created speaking here, or is this fear, ego, or an old wound?” To do this, we must first trust that the heart is not wicked. We must believe it is deep, layered, and wise, capable of holding grief, joy, and insight all at once. Only from this starting point can discernment unfold.

Ancient Wisdom

This is not a new idea. The invitation to trust the depth of the heart is ancient, woven into the fabric of Christian wisdom long before modern interpretations emphasized suspicion and fear. The desert fathers and mothers, Christian mystics, and monastic elders all understood that the heart is a sacred space where God’s voice can be heard. Richard Rohr writes, “The contemplative life is a call to be present to the movement of God in the depths of your being.” Joan Chittister reminds us, “The spiritual life is not an escape from reality; it is a confrontation with the self that leads to transformation.”

St. Benedict, writing nearly fifteen hundred years ago in his Rule, exhorts his followers to “listen with the ear of your heart.” This is a disciplined spiritual practice. Benedict understood that the heart is where the divine speaks most clearly, but hearing it requires patience, attentiveness, and humility. Thomas Merton echoed this wisdom, saying, “The real problem of our time is that we are out of touch with our interior life.”

Jesuit spirituality adds a complementary lens. Ignatius of Loyola taught discernment of spirits through consolation and desolation. Consolations: Those stirrings of peace, clarity, and love are signposts of God’s presence. Desolations: Experiences of emptiness or agitation. A call for reflection and patience, not panic or judgment. This practice reinforces what the mystics and monastic elders always knew: the heart is a living space of guidance, capable of insight when cared for.

Scripture affirms the heart’s central role, not as a source of corruption but as a place of God’s formation and goodness. Proverbs 4:23: “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” Ezekiel 36:26: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” Psalm 51:10: “Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” These passages show a heart that is responsive, moldable, and capable of reflecting God’s love.

Modern teaching that portrays the heart as fundamentally untrustworthy is new, born of fear, misunderstanding, or cultural interpretation. Ancient wisdom tells a different story: the heart is deep, capable of insight, and oriented toward God. Learning to listen to it is learning to recognize God’s guidance, an invitation far older than any modern doctrine that suggests otherwise.

How This Impacts Our Life

The way we view our hearts shapes everything. If we believe our heart is untrustworthy, we carry a quiet tension inside us. We second-guess our desires, doubt our instincts, and defer responsibility for our lives. Fear and suspicion become default modes, making it hard to act with courage, love fully, or trust others. We live half-alive, always measuring whether we are “good enough” or “holy enough” to be loved. In doing so, we abandon the design God placed within us, living out of alignment with our destiny, gifts, and passions.

But when we see our hearts as deep, wise, and oriented toward God, everything changes. The heart becomes a guide, not a threat. We discern fear from God’s voice. We notice stirrings of compassion, courage, and intuition. As we listen to our hearts, we step fully into our lives and become more of our true selves rather than who shame or expectation has told us to be. Relationships deepen, decisions become clearer, and the love and wisdom God has placed within us can flow outward.

You are not an accident. You were created with intention, with depth, with a heart capable of reflecting God’s love. As the Jesuits teach, pay attention to your consolations—those moments when your heart feels alive, stirred by love, truth, or beauty. Let them guide you. Trust your heart, follow its wisdom, and step into the life God designed for you. God’s image is within you, and the world needs the fullness of your unique self to shine.

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