Somewhere along the way, I came to believe that if I could just arrange the circumstances of my life in exactly the right way, contentment would follow.  But chasing is an exhausting way to live.  I’m slowly but surely discovering another way.

Spirituality, at its best, does not ask us to float serenely above the suffering of the world. It asks us to enter it, to stand with those who have been harmed, to hold people and institutions accountable, and to change the conditions that allowed the harm in the first place.

These days, what warms my heart is much simpler: showing up for the people I love, resisting the temptation to reduce anyone to a label or a concept, savoring ordinary miracles, spending time with close friends, and loving on my family. That feels like plenty.

I spent much of the first half of my life sorting the world into neat little piles: right and wrong, success and failure, sacred and ordinary, me and you, us and them. I drew lines and gave things names. I knew where everything belonged—or at least I thought I did. I carried more certainty in those days. Age, in its quiet mercy, has loosened my grip on much of it.

In a noisy world, art teaches us to listen. In a lonely world, art reminds us that another human being has stood where we stand and felt something remarkably similar.  And in a frightened world, art keeps pointing toward what fear would have us overlook: beauty, tenderness, grief, wonder, community, mystery, the natural world, and the stubborn sacredness of ordinary life.

Perhaps our growing isolation is not simply a private problem requiring private solutions. Perhaps it is a tear in the social fabric itself, and repairing it will require more than another app, another self-help book, or another exhortation to take better care of ourselves. Perhaps we need to take better care of one another.

Perhaps spiritual hunger, like every deep hunger, requires more than something we consume. Perhaps it asks for relationship, community, practice, service, silence, mystery—and the occasional inconvenience of showing up for one another.

And deeper still,

beneath history,
beneath horror,
beneath Alleluias,

beneath language,
beneath everything
we have presumed to name,

water returning to water,

the earth’s ancient prayer
moving through us

on its way
home.

Maybe we need larger margins in our lives. Places where the unedited truth can appear. A conversation over coffee. A table where nobody has to pretend. A friendship spacious enough for sorrow. A community where brokenness does not have to be cropped from the picture.

Finding our center doesn’t mean we stop wobbling. Life will see to that. We will be disappointed, frightened, confused, caught off guard. There will be losses we never anticipated and questions we cannot answer. Finding our center simply means that somewhere beneath all that movement there is a deeper place to which we can return—a place of groundedness, belonging, and trust.

It is especially difficult when I look deeply into the eyes of my children and stepchildren. I know something they do not yet fully know. I know how much life will ask of them. I know there will be losses they cannot imagine, disappointments they cannot prepare for, and complicated griefs that will leave their marks. Every life, no matter how fortunate, eventually gathers a few scars.

Maybe great art belongs not only in galleries, but beside the places where we actually live our lives—above the kitchen table where the bills are paid, near the chair where we drink our morning coffee, in the hallway we pass through a dozen times a day without noticing, beside the bed where we lie awake worrying about someone we love.

The Holy One has never been confined to our buildings, our doctrines, or our denominations.  The Spirit, after all, is not housebroken.  It refuses to stay where we put it.  It slips through stained-glass windows and wanders into art studios, libraries,  hospitals, classrooms, forests, kitchens, and seashores.  It laughs with children.  It whispers through poets and scientists.  It surprises artists.  It comforts the grieving.  It unsettles the comfortable.  It speaks through strangers.  It has always been gloriously free.

We spend so much energy trying to escape the dark—or imagining everything that might go wrong—that we rarely stay still long enough for our eyes to adjust. We rehearse worst-case scenarios about our health, our children, our communities, and the future. Our minds are wonderfully creative, but they are unreliable fortune tellers.

What if we asked a different question?  What if something beautiful is quietly taking shape? What if this uncertainty is making room for wisdom, this grief deepening our capacity to love, this darkness holding colors we simply cannot see yet?

Art is one of the ways God teaches us to carry what words alone cannot bear. Sometimes a poem speaks the grief we cannot name. Sometimes a photograph catches the loneliness we have hidden even from ourselves. A melody gives voice to longing. A quilt stitched together over many evenings becomes an act of healing.

Through creativity we wrestle with fear, loneliness, exclusion, rage, self-contempt, and the quiet ache of realizing how often we have misunderstood ourselves, one another, and even our spiritual mentors.

But art also makes room for joy, gratitude, tenderness, delight, wonder, and awe. It slows us down long enough to notice what our hurried lives so often pass by: the curve of a leaf, the laughter of children, an aging face illuminated by afternoon light, or the holy silence that lingers after the birds have finished singing.

We all make mistakes. We all occasionally discharge something into the atmosphere that affects everyone around us. The real test of character isn’t whether we get everything right. It’s whether we’re willing to admit we’ve caused harm, say we’re sorry, and try to make things right.

It is surprisingly easy to spend a lifetime overidentifying with our thoughts while rarely making space to truly listen to them. So much of who we are circulates beneath the surface—old joys and quiet griefs, forgotten hopes, unanswered questions, intuitions waiting patiently to be welcomed. Even after sixty-eight years, I continue to discover unexplored rooms within myself. The deeper life doesn’t usually emerge under interrogation. It prefers an invitation.

Love steps into another person's compost pile.

Love doesn't remain safely at the edge, offering instructions about the mess. It enters it. It gets its hands dirty. It chooses presence over solutions, companionship over explanations. It is willing to stand in the places that smell of disappointment, grief, fear, failure, and uncertainty simply because someone else should not have to stand there alone.

Our lives are wonderfully beautiful and undeniably messy. We need not add to our burdens by imagining that our struggles are unique. Behind nearly every front door—and certainly behind every Facebook profile—is a story of hidden courage, private heartbreak, and unfinished healing.

The deeper lessons are older, simpler, and infinitely harder to live. They concern forgiveness and fearlessness, the willingness to be broken open by beauty, and the courage to keep saying yes to life despite its griefs and cruelties. They concern making room for silence, paying attention, and finding grace in the ordinary gifts that surround us—a perfect peach, a ripe avocado on the kitchen counter, sunlight pooling on a wooden floor, the face of someone we love.