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Shortly after Easter, the Episcopal bishop of Mississippi wrote of the “spiritual discipline” of “practicing resurrection,” which he noted “often must begin with a choice”—a choice to live in the real hope of resurrection instead of letting ourselves become bogged down in the pain & destruction all around us.

I think the ability to do this—to use our imaginations to take us to places of hope when otherwise there may seem to be no hope—is a gift the Creator gave us very deliberately! That is, he or she knows we need it, & means for us to use it!

But this choosing to set our minds in the realm of joy & hope for the next life is one of those spiritual practices that we in our human nature are inclined to do just about anything else under the sun instead of. Just like Adam & Eve, we prefer to use our own power to try to make things right—or at least to register our complaints that things aren’t right—rather than relying on God’s promises.

The poor are in a different category. The reason it says Jesus proclaimed the good news of salvation to them is, I think, because they’re the only ones who are normally interested in listening to it. The rest of us are too busy not only trying to control events by our own power but also chasing happiness (or at least diversion from our despair) by other means.

Mary Oliver’s poem “Spring Azures” shows why the poor are closer than the rest of us to hearing the message of salvation. Young Blake, “in the dirt and sweat of London,” sees “the bobbin of God’s blue body” on the sooty windowsill as he stares out into the darkness. Though he’s terrified, he at that moment turns away from the filth & destruction “to a life of the imagination.” He knows it’s his only way out.

I’m wondering if the oil spill might be the perfect state of affairs to get those of us whose situations are less dire than Blake’s into the habit of practicing resurrection. The gushing well, the growing slick, & the oil making its way to the marshes & beaches may be destructive & dirty & relentless enough to where the only way we can get even momentary peace of mind is to take ourselves out of this world entirely by dwelling in the new world promised by God.

In addition to making this conscious choice to think in resurrection terms, another way we can find joy is by taking on the role Jesus ascribed to us in the Beatitudes, as providers of mercy and peace to the poor and meek, like Blake. Thus we can practice resurrection both by looking to the next life and by spreading the kingdom of God on earth. (Praise be!)

If you have a hard time imagining the joy God’s got in store for us, just think of the most deeply joyful you’ve ever felt, and it’ll be like that, except even better and much more enduring.

If you think you haven’t felt any joy, think again—of things like the joy of music, or the joy you felt when you did something remarkable as a kid, or maybe when you simply did something that pleased a parent or other loved one. Or maybe the birth of your child. Or maybe community activities that made you feel uplifted because you knew you were serving the greater good. Or maybe some experience of the wonders of creation.

All these hints of heaven are, in my view, not only evidence of what it’s like but proof that it and God do exist! How else to explain the beauty and order and the deep connection we feel to the objects of joy?

God be with you as you practice resurrection!

In the Bible passage for Monday’s Forward Day by Day devotion, Hebrews 12:2 reads: “looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, . . . and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.”

I never before thought about this idea that Jesus followed through with his sacrifice partly for the sake of the joy that was set before him, but it really works as a confirmation of one of the principles I write about in my book; it’s nothing less than “smart selfishness” on a cosmic (and divine!) scale. This means that whenever we need motivation to continue on the path that we know we “ought” to continue on, we can recall that not only did Jesus endure the cross because he wanted to reconcile us to the God of Love, he also did it because he knew that he personally would experience greater joy that way than if he had backed down from the challenge he was faced with. He models for us not only that we “should” persevere in our trials, but also that if we do, we will be happier than if we don’t!

That’s a tip for why we should persevere in doing whatever we know deep inside we ought to do. A tip for how we can best do that, as well as how we can best accomplish all our purposes in life, was the subject of an email I wrote recently to a guy who felt he had prayed and prayed about something yet continually failed to get the result he wanted.

My message was based on John 16:24: “Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete.” (Italics mine.)

Who knows what Jesus meant by “in my name”—but it seems clear to me that it’s something each of us has to figure out for ourselves, in prayerful back-and-forth dialogue with God. And, based on the experiences I detail in my book, this requirement of our prayers being in Jesus’ name usually has something to do with learning new things about God and about ourselves, and making changes in our attitudes and our paths, so that we are continually becoming more & more loving of others, as Jesus suggests in the “new commandment” to love (John 13:34).

(Of course this commandment is an echo of the second of the two great commandments Jesus talks about in the other gospels, but for me at least, it’s helpful that here he mentions only the love of others and not the love of God. That’s because I’ve always been pretty good about loving God, but not so good about loving my neighbor. When the commandment about God was up there too, I could conveniently focus on it and pretty much ignore its pesky companion commandment to love my neighbor as myself.)

The upshot of all this is that for whatever challenges in our lives we’d like God to help us with, I believe there are nearly always things we need to change about our thinking in order to render our prayers more truly “in Jesus’ name” than they have been in the past. I also believe that whatever these spiritual improvements are, God will lead us to them if we truly open up & listen to him.

There’s a Kierkegaard quote I have as an epigraph to one of my chapters: “A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until in the end he realized that prayer is listening.”

I wish everyone good listening to God! Happy Easter!

If you’re familiar at all with the scheme I write about in Petitioning God, or perhaps even if you’re not, the spiritual task I’m faced with is that of letting God change me to where it truly doesn’t bother me no matter how low the Dow goes. This seems impossible, but hey, if that’s what it takes to get God to grant my petitions for my own prosperity as well as everyone else’s, you bet I’m willing to give it my all no matter how hard it is. If I could let go of my desire for romance with “Belinda,” as I describe in the book, I can do anything! So, taking a deep breath and opening my arms to the heavens (touching on that peace that’s the subject of the previous entry), I pray: God, batter my heart and rip out this clinging-to-my-life attitude that I and most other Americans have with regard to our money! And then, as soon as you can, please, fix the economy but in the most equitable way possible, with the most positive change for the most people possible. For poor people, give them more means of support, and for the rest of us, help us see the lessons we need to learn and the spiritual growth we need to undergo. Thanks!

This task doesn’t mean I have to get to where I don’t care whether the Dow is up or down, but I do have to get to where I’m completely accepting of whatever it does, going down as well as going up. And perhaps more to Jesus’s point, I have to get to where I’m completely unfearful no matter what it does. Because in his instruction that we pray (faithfully) about all things instead of worrying or fearing lies the fundamental challenge of this life, the challenge we must learn to meet if we want to continue to grow spiritually and find joy rather than stagnate and feel anxious. So, batter my heart, God, till I truly reach that stage! Because as it is, in many moods I’m still “betrothed unto your enemy” (that is, unable to stop worrying about something mundane) in the person of the Dow!

Whether we hurry-it-up Westerners realize it or not, relaxation is necessary for peace of mind and happiness. And in these extra stressful times, more people than ever can benefit from various organized forms of relaxation, such as meditation and yoga. Both of these are ways of quieting the mind and spirit, by focusing one’s attention on a single thought (meditation) or a physical position (yoga) that may be challenging to hold but that relieves stress by causing the mind to forget everything else but the bodily effort. (By the way, you don’t have to take classes to get the benefits; with a little practice you can learn to focus your attention on your breathing, your thoughts, & your movements so as to reach this state of occupying your mind so that it can’t worry. I do it frequently while running, stretching, & doing floor exercises.)

To take this discussion a step further, it seems to me that in all these instances of relaxing our worrying egos, we are reaching for (and hopefully finding bits and pieces of) nothing less than the “peace that passeth all understanding” from the Christian Bible. It’s been my experience over and over again that God is both within us and outside of us, and that our unconscious minds are part of the mind of God, so it stands to reason that by quieting our own conscious minds, we can touch on that peace, getting a measure of healing from it.

Many others in many different venues have indicated the same thing. After a Sunday school class last fall, I asked dreamwork teacher Karen Mori Bonner what advice I could give to people who asked me why they couldn’t experience God as vividly as I did, and her reply was, “Tell them to RELAX.” Liz Gilbert, in her bestselling book Eat, Pray, Love, writes, “‘the universe is a great spinning engine, & you want to stay near the core, in the hub of calmness–that’s your heart. That’s where God lives within you . . . . Just keep coming back to that center and you’ll always find peace.’”

Interestingly enough, relaxation is also a major technique for getting prayers answered. We may be afraid that if we relax we’ll lose control, but the larger truth is that it’s only by relaxing our puny egos into the vast creative power of the universe that we can actually accomplish many of our most cherished goals. More on that in my book.

Back to the subject of feeling good, if you want to feel the very best that you possibly can, get out there either literally or figuratively (such as on the ‘net) and help people who need it! Your “peace” may be momentarily interrupted, but that’s going to happen anyway as long as you’re human. And this carrying out of the second of Jesus’s two great commandments (to love thy neighbor)–and not merely the first (to love God)–is the key to that abundant life he promised us. Reach out and grab hold of it, it’s yours!

Back in my 20s and 30s, when most of my peers were married & raising kids, or at least spending their free time chasing the opposite sex, I, being single, childless, & gay, didn’t have any friends to hang out with. I lived with my mother (the best mom in the universe), & I can remember being occasionally embarrassed by the fact that I didn’t have anything to do. (Although I had never come right out and told her I was gay, simply because we didn’t talk about such personal things in the first place, I’m sure she knew by that time because she could see that I was simply not interested in men, period.) Anyway, on Friday and Saturday nights, I would frequently go out in the car & drive around by myself, or go to the mall, just to make it look to Mama as though I was at least going out with friends. But I wasn’t, since they were all busy with their honeys or children or whatever else. The point is that during this time, which was many years ago, I had plenty of practice in dealing with loneliness. Since, apparently, most people don’t deal with their own loneliness until middle age (such as when they divorce), I think I should try to share what I did, because it worked. I never ever feel lonely anymore.

I think the key that most people seem to miss is that in order to triumph over our loneliness, we must confront it head-on, which means we have to allow ourselves to BE alone and to BE lonely if we want to be able to get to the point where we are no longer vulnerable to loneliness. Our culture is partly to blame for this mistake, since it teaches us 24/7 that the normal thing to do is to be not only involved with people but also with them just about all the time (or at least talking to them on our cell phones). There’s basically no cultural recognition of the value of solitariness or solitude. Also, the prevalence of antidepressant medications (which I am not against if the person really needs them!) means that many of us are encouraged to treat our unhappiness (our existential despair, if you will) with pills instead of spiritual advancement, of which coming to terms with our aloneness is an important part.

Anyway, let me try to describe some of the things I did that ultimately worked to bring me to a position where I was comfortable with my status as a solitary creature, so that I never felt truly lonely again, no matter what happened. I say “truly” because sometimes I still do feel occasional brief bouts of loneliness, usually after spending more time with others than I’m accustomed to spending, but it’s never a lasting or deeply rooted feeling the way it was before I did the work. However, let me make this point upfront: overcoming your own loneliness does not mean you have to become a hermit like me! It simply means that you’ll be able to enter into and maintain relationships that aren’t based on your need to escape your lonelness. And yes, I do have plenty of deeply fulfilling friendships and family relationships, even though I am a self-imposed hermit about 90% of the time. So I hope no one will shy away from doing this work for fear of becoming like me! I love my life but I know most folks wouldn’t.

The first thing you have to do in order to confront your loneliness is simply to let yourself BE alone instead of doing the more common human thing and seeking out others at all costs. (Scott Peck didn’t call the process of psychic and spiritual maturation The Road Less Traveled for nothing.) In addition to spending some time alone, you have to feel the pain of loneliness. So resist the temptation to medicate it away or distract yourself from it in any manner. You don’t necessarily have to try to make the pain even worse than it would normally be, but you do have to FEEL it and embrace it in your mind. This isn’t fun, of course, but actually you may experience a certain relief over knowing you’re feeling your pain & loneliness, yet surviving. Also, it is perfectly alright to cry. (No honest show of emotion is ever wrong when we’re alone before God.) I personally don’t recall ever crying over general loneliness, only over feeling rejected by specific people, but I’m positive crying is OK with God.

In order to fully confront your loneliness, I think you need not only to feel the pain of not having anyone around but also, if you possibly can, to experience the sensation of dangling, solitarily, over the abyss of space & time, of feeling as completely as you can your own quota of existential despair. This means trying to imagine your aloneness in all its horror, just as vividly as you can. There’s a house on my running route that looks kind of like a haunted house against the night sky because it sort of frames a small portion of the sky so that all you can see in that portion is gray desolation. You can tell it’s the sky, & it’s vast & even infinite, yet there’s also, eerily enough, nothing visible in that particular patch of sky. No stars, no moon, nothing. Just gray bleakness. This seems a good illustration of the abyss we find ourselves in when we confront our aloneness in the universe.

Another location for the emptiness is within. As you try to confront, with your heart & mind & soul, the void of aloneness & nothingness, if you’re like me you’ll find that right there in your own stomach is the first place you can find that void. If you don’t like the idea of feeling the aloneness, you can reason it into view. I remember one time decades ago I was talking to an older person whom I admired because she seemed to depend only on herself and God for her happiness, and she pointed out to me, “You live alone & you die alone,” and I knew what she meant. No matter how much togetherness we have in our lives, each of us is alone in our corner of the abyss and in our relationship to our Maker.

Which brings me to the grand finale of the process of confronting your loneliness and triumphing over it. When you get to rock bottom (or before), you can then tune into your faith in the higher power that created you, and put you (and all other humans) into this abyss, and also created all the joy and wonder and order and love in the world as well. So you can conclude that your challenge is to believe in the Creator and the promise that you’ll soon be lifted out of the abyss, which is every bit as reasonable as the fact that we’re here in the first place, since we have no idea how that happened either! The glimmers of joy we’ve already witnessed (and surely all of us have witnessed a few, in the form of music & singing if no other way) are ample evidence of what the Creator has in store for us in the hereafter. Maybe we’re here now for the purpose of learning to align our hearts and minds with God and creativity and love instead of with the abyss of loneliness & despair.

If you don’t believe in any kind of higher power–well, I’m sorry, but I don’t know of any solution in that case. Maybe this is why it’s impossible to be truly happy in this life unless we believe in God.

Suppose, however, you do have a measure of faith and you have worked on confronting your loneliness, and you do feel better about your position in the universe. Now what? How can that translate into your actually learning to enjoy, or at least not be miserable during, the time you spend alone?

Well, since you now know that God is your only hope for happiness, then maybe you can imagine yourself in partnership with God trying to do whatever good you can for the world around you. Because this is what’s meant by spreading the kingdom of heaven, isn’t it? Or at least by the church as the body of Christ, doing his work in the world. And learn to pray, about everything you do, and for everything you want. I demonstrate the prayer aspect extensively in my book excerpts and sample chapter elsewhere on this website. When, by these and other means, you begin to make yourelf into a vital component of the kingdom of heaven, you can then feel close to everyone else who’s a part of it, as well as to God.

Getting into the habit of carrying on a dialogue with God may take a little work, but I think the fact that I carry on such a dialogue is a major reason I’m able to stay happy all the time, even when earthly things aren’t going so well. With regard to loneliness, you can try asking him or her not, “Why Me?,” but, “What do you, God, want me to learn from this experience of spending time alone, or of being alone in the universe? What godlike character traits are you trying to help me develop by putting me into this situation?” And then, try to put into practice what the philosopher Kierkegaard said he learned about prayer: that prayer is not talking but LISTENING.

Another tip about loneliness that helped me in the past was suggested by my dear friend & college roommate Dale, who pointed out to me that plenty of people who are in full-time relationships or marriages are lonely as well. This thought has helped me a great deal over the years. (Thanks, Dale!) Considering what I’ve learned about how the purpose of life is spiritual growth, and one impetus for spiritual growth is pain, it makes perfect sense that our existential aloneness and our propensity for feeling lonely are common conditions of human life. But this means that as soon as we acknowledge the possibility of growth & change in the face of loneliness, as opposed to the more natural responses of feeling sorry for ourselves or distracting ourselves with activities that are meaningless to us, then we’re already on the way to the happiness & deep joy that will be ours when we truly undertake the project of growing from the pain instead of stagnating in the face of it.

Another thing you can do to constructively deal with alone time is to get out in public and spread joy & kindness by interacting with others, even if it’s “only” the clerks at the all-night grocery store. (They usually put on happy faces while working, but that doesn’t mean they don’t desperately need your small kindness of eye contact & a bit of warm conversation.)

Another trick to staying happy when you’re alone, perhaps especially when you’re working, is to imagine someone you admire finding out about whatever you’re doing and being impressed. This is probably not as deeply useful as working on your spiritual growth or spreading kindness to others, but I use it occasionally, & it works for me.

I guess this is enough on this subject for now. (Sorry for the length of this post but it feels necessary to do justice to the topic.) Let me close by returning to that notion of finding the emptiness within my own gut. When I’m allowing myself to be disconnected from God (from the God of Love), I think my body does feel empty, even when I’m healthy. But when my mind is connected to the divine, my body is transformed so that it doesn’t seem empty at all, only a tad puny in comparison to the Almighty!

GOD EXISTS, GOD IS LOVE, and GOD LOVES US. Amen.

During this overriding financial crisis, we need God more than ever, but—oddly enough—the temptation is to avoid thinking about God and to feel instead that this is something “serious” (or perhaps something human) that we have to fix before we can relax enough to try to contact God. At least that’s the way I am.

Today, “the Dow” is only down a hundred and eighty-something points, so I’m doing better, but last night I was hard pressed to even try to pray because my natural inclination was to worry. And to continually watch discussions of it on TV, or to read about it online.

At one point I even got angry at God. Looking in the bathroom mirror, for a minute or two I yelled and cursed and clenched my fists. It made me so mad that this stupid crisis was forcing all of us to think about it when most of us would much rather be thinking about other things!

Fortunately, I was soon able to collect myself and humbly talk to God and begin to get back in touch with him. But it wasn’t easy.

One good thing that could come out of all of this is that maybe it will show some of us—even the wealthy ones of us—that we are NOT in control of what happens in this world. The illusion of being in control is another psychic fallacy we humans are prone to fall for, just like our desire to fix things like the money crisis instead of seeking out God’s help and peace and healing.

Jesus’s strongest passage about the power of petitonary prayer is in Mark 11, where he talks about the faith that can move a mountain (v. 23). After that image comes one of my favorite verses in the whole Bible, where Jesus says, “All things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they shall be granted you (11:24). (Neat!) In the next verse, Jesus offers one, and only one, bit of advice for getting right with God so he will indeed grant these petitions of ours: “And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your transgressions.”

Interestingly enough, this is precisely what I’ve discovered in my years of trying to improve my ability to get prayers answered. The main thing I always have to do is to first rid my mind of “anything against anyone”—any negative feelings whatsoever, from anger at someone in public who somehow got in my way to annoyance at people who happen to annoy me to irritation with friends and relatives whose attitudes happen to irritate me. There’s a passage somewhere in the Episcopal liturgy (& probably in many other liturgies as well) that says, “Create in me a clean heart, O God,” and this seems to be what it’s getting at.

Once we do this forgiving, this turning over of our negative feelings toward others to God and asking him to take them away, we find that our “hotline to heaven” suddenly works. We can actually ask for things that are in line with Love and God will give them to us. That’s because by submitting our angry or irritated wills to God’s will, we prepare ourselves to collaborate with the God of Love!

I believe, as Scott Peck did, that most illnesses & other physical conditions are psychosomatic & deeply spiritual. To truly get well, the person must undergo a spiritual (or psychic) transformation, in which he or she accepts, on the deepest level possible, forgiveness & salvation & the love of the God of Love. Understanding “salvation” as healing, as salve for our wounds, applies here.

The healing/salvation doesn’t have to mean the person is completely cured of all illness or deformity. In our mission as Jesus’s followers, many times all we can do is demonstrate God’s love & acceptance by loving & accepting & helping the afflicted ourselves; if they feel loved & accepted even momentarily, they will in that small way have had a taste of salvation.

So it’s up to us as Christians to never tire, never cease carrying out our mission of active & radical love & healing.