Everyone knows that life sometimes serves up lemons. Hell, sometimes it feels like you’ve been airlifted into the belly of a grove of lemon trees. But the lemonade soothsayers have long urged us to make from the stuff can still taste pretty bitter if you didn’t mix it in the right frame of mind. Richard Rohr takes out his pitcher and spoon in a new book, “Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life,”...
As the world pauses to mark a decade’s passage since its first devastating contact with a new kind of terror, it’s illuminating to reflect on how humans modify their behaviour in times of crisis. Withhold your erupting four-year-old’s flopsy bunny and watch him transform into the picture of sweetness. Deny your defiant teenager her night out with friends and watch her promise you the world. Subject a morally...
It took forever to arrive and now, after what seems like no time at all, it’s heading for the hills. Summer was, at last, a fair-weather friend. Sure, it offered us butterflies and Slurpees and optimism while it was in our midst. But then it went ahead with its plans to go away—even in spite of the times we shared and the secret hope we harboured that maybe our sunny companion would change her mind about...
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself,” author C.S. Lewis once pointed out. “It has no survival value; rather, it is one of those things which give value to survival.” Like we didn’t know that already, courtesy of our childhood stays in the 100 Acre Wood. As much as it’s been meticulously dissected by keen-eyed scholars and assigned complex meaning by erudite intellectuals...
They call it “soul riding,” and it’s just about the most magical thing on offer for mere mortals with a taste for something more. Here, spirituality finds glorious intersection with exhilaration, the two forces coming together in a storm of powder on the ski slopes. The sensation snowboarders experience as they’re flying down a mountain is akin, say some, to those associated with achieving spiritual communion in...