A reader of this blog wrote the following message to me… Hi Carl. Thank you for all of the incredible information about mysticism on your website. It’s been a tremendous…
Category: Contemplation
Can Love Be Saved?
Can Love Be Saved? Recently I was speaking with a friend of mine who is a hospital chaplain. She was lamenting how challenging it is sometimes to bring a prayerful…
The Theology of the Hail Mary: Contemplative Wisdom or Dualistic Fear?
A long-term reader of this blog recently wrote to me and posed this question: Carl, what do you think the last line of the Hail Mary means? “Holy Mary, Mother…
Quotations and an Examen for Making Our Contemplative Practice Real
This weekend I had the honor of giving the closing talk at the 2025 Centering Prayer Summit, sponsored by Closer Than Breath. Since my talk was the last talk of…
Guidelines for Centering Prayer (Video)
This video is an excerpt from a talk I gave recently on Patreon, as part of my new Practical Mysticism series of monthly Zoom calls. It’s simply my explanation of…
Judge or Healer: Some Thoughts on a Mystical Approach to God
A reader of this blog recently wrote this message to me: Hi Carl, I recently enjoyed your book Eternal Heart. I have a fundamentalist/Evangelical background and am relatively new to…
The Radical Sacred Podcast: A Conversation About Contemplation, Mysticism and Merton
I recently was invited to be a guest on the “Radical Sacred” podcast, hosted by spiritual director Jenny Misslin and Methodist minister the Rev. Phillip Dieke. They had gotten their…
Join Patreon and Get Access to a Meditation Library
Throughout 2024 I wrote and recorded twenty-four meditations, based on wisdom teachings from three spiritual traditions: The Eight Beatitudes from the wisdom teachings of Jesus; The Noble Eightfold Path from…
Register Now for the January 2025 Centering Prayer Summit!
Friends, I’ll be part of the January 2025 Centering Prayer Summit sponsored by Closer Than Breath. This online event takes place on January 25 and 26 —click here to register!…
Subscribe to the Mystical Journey Substack
I’ve started a Substack! If you’re not familiar with Substack, it’s like a blog that you read through email. My Substack is called “Mystical Journey” and will include a variety…
Themes that Inspired “Eternal Heart”
I’m writing this blog post the morning after returning home from a lovely weekend where I was the guest presenter at Minnesota Contemplative Outreach’s fall retreat. We spent our time…
Who’s Giving Up On (the Institutional) Church? It’s No Longer Just the “Casual Christians” who are Disappearing
Here’s a fascinating quotation from Laura Anderson’s important and insightful book, When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religion: Anecdotal evidence suggests that the largest…