What is one to do when emotional pain comes on strong and unexpected? Many people regularly experience a chaotic mixture of pain and pleasure, joy and despair, that makes them ask what the hell is going on? Why do I feel great one moment and completely blitzed by painful emotions the next, and for seemingly…
So many Christians want to increase their faith. And why wouldn’t they? It seems only natural. But have they never read when Christ nearly rebuked his disciples for asking him to increase their faith? It’s the passage where he tells them that faith the size of a mustard seed is enough (small faith is enough),…
The Cherokee have a rite of passage for their youth. Whether the rite is still practiced I have no idea, but I hope it is. Apparently a father takes his boy into the wilderness, blindfolds him, and has him sit alone on a stump. The boy is to remain on the stump throughout the night…
The loneliest one is not the one who knows he is alone in the world. To know one is alone is actually the beginning of emancipation, and has little in common with the dread hopelessness of being truly alone. Awareness of loneliness has the power to make one at home in the earth, to integrate…
I often find myself wishing I were living the savage life. I use savage in the old sense to mean pre-civilized man. The savage had many advantages that modern man will likely never have, or even conceive of. For example, the ability to see the full night sky. Modern lighting has made this spectacle nearly…
There is a “very specific quality that distinguishes [man from animal],” says Rousseau, “about which there can be no argument: the faculty of self-perfection.” A horse never strains to be a horse but every man strains to become something other than what he is. And while every person is in pursuit of perfection they never…
Nihilism is a tricky mode of existence. How does one continue existing, in an existence one finds thoroughly meaningless, when one’s very being demands love and relationship with others to survive? Dostoevsky has a scene in the Brother’s Karamazov where a man, an elder of an Orthodox monastery, explains how the more he “loves humanity…
