Hints and Guesses

Examen, AI and 3 Kinds of People

It's the time of year to do a like searching spiritual inventory, a Great Annual Examen.  This requires discernment, a word that's not all that common anymore.  I also want to talk a little about AI and about becoming the kind of person who joins the Cosmic Dance.  Happy New Year.  Enjoy!

Risk Longing: On the First Day of Advent

A winter storm canceled church, so here's a sermon of sorts.  Enjoy!

Maybe you need a Blessing

Happy Thanksgiving!  Here are a few thoughts on blessing, pilgrimage, monastic creativity, and the new dark age.  Wishing you all many blessings.  May the road rise to meet you.  Enjoy!

Shadow and the Prophetic Imagination

The ancient prophets were something like the first shadow detectors, and had the courage to externalize their vision of the world.  What ever happened to such prophetic imagination?  Are there any lessons we can metabolize from the prophets in our age of madness?  What would it be like to stand between the way of power and the way of denial, a creative alternative to the tantalizing polls of scapegoating and blame?  Enjoy! 

Covenant with Limit

I'm borrowing this phrase "covenant with limit" from Martin Shaw.  Perhaps it's time to reconsider how freedom is actually found.  In this episode, I discuss briefly Wendell Berry's poem Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, the ancient art of fasting, and the imaginative possibility that we might want to make a covenant with limits before we go mad in the wrong direction.  Enjoy!

Nature, Nurture, Unanswered Ancestral Questions

What if we inherit not only biological material but existential and spiritual questions from our ancestors?  What's ours to carry that's been handed to us?  I've been wrestling with these questions for a while now, and some big changes in my life have brought them into new focus.  I hope you hear and hint or guess for your own spiritual life.  Enjoy!

Letter to the Lost

"We have to know the darkness to be able to search for the light," according to Henri Nouwen.  And he goes on to claim that we need lostness, in the search for meaning.  With so much disorder, lostness, darkness, denial and confusion, I'd like to read most of a letter written by Nouwen that seems to address our age, people like you and me.  I hope you'll hear something encouraging, no matter how wild and meandering your path.  Enjoy!

Hell is Endless Autobiography

In an age obsessed with "knowing oneself," how do we not get stuck in endless autobiography and self-absorption?  At its best, a healthy spiritual and religious life helps free us from the cul-de-sac of narcissistic feedback.  In the episode, we'll look at a story from Saint Antony, a paragraph from C.S. Lewis about hell, and I'll outline the four foundations of a spiritual life from the book Journey Into Emptiness by Robert Jingen Gunn (a book about Dogen, Merton and Jung).  See below for the link I promised in the episode about the Cree mountains of human development.  Enjoy!  

https://decolonialfutures.net/portfolio/fourmountains/#:~:text=Each%20mountain%20represents%20a%20stage,one%20mountain%20to%20the%20other.

https://www.patreon.com/c/kentdobson

 

The Christ Symbol: Part 7 - Authority and Resurrection

Here's the final episode of The Christ Symbol.  This episode is about Authority and Resurrection (stage 6 and 7).  What does real authority look like?  What does it mean for a "grain of wheat to go into the ground and die?"  What is the nature of real change?  Hope you hear something from Jesus own transformed life, that may in fact trans-form your own.  Enjoy!

The Christ Symbol: Part 6 - Wilderness and Mission

Here's the next episode in The Christ Symbol.  This episode is about Wilderness and Mission (stage 4 and 5), the necessity of the desert and the nature of a soul-oriented mission in the life of Jesus, a life transformed.  Hope you hear a hint or guess for your own spiritual growth.  Enjoy!