Parish News

Dear People Whom God Loves, We continue with the shadow and meditation.  Difficult as it is for me to acknowledge my shadow, I do find it helpful to pray and ask God to help me see myself as I truly am.  I know that this will reveal a lot of ugly stuff.  It is good, […]

Dear People Whom God Loves, Now, how does meditation fit in all of this?  When we meditate, we just let ourselves be aware of any thoughts, feelings, emotions, or impulses.  We don’t judge them.  We just let ourselves be aware of them.  They are just there. Now, what is wrong with that?  Nothing.  What is […]

Dear People Whom God Loves, When I read Integral Spirituality about five years ago, I learned something.  In reading it again, I realized that I had remembered only that meditation was not a substitute for psychological therapy.  I now see more clearly why this is so.  Here is what is clear to me, but I […]

Dear People Whom God Loves, As we understand what the shadow—also called the disowned self—is, we can look at how our disowned self can be owned once again.  We could also put it this way.  How can we become aware of our shadow and thus prevent the harm that it does to ourselves and others. […]

Dear People Whom God Loves, We now turn to how we project onto others these disowned parts of ourselves that we no longer see as part of us. To use anger again.  When our anger has been put into our shadow (which means we aren’t aware that we are angry), why do we see others […]

Dear People Whom God Loves, Chapter 6 in Ken Wilber’s book Integral Spirituality is titled “The Shadow and the Disowned Self.” He makes the important observation: “…an understanding of psychodynamic repression as well as ways to cure it, is something contributed exclusively by modern Western psychology.”  Consequently, it is possible to be a good meditator […]

Dear People Whom God Loves, Continuing with the masculine and feminine principles of Wilber.  He writes that these healthy masculine principles of autonomy, strength, independence, and freedom can become unhealthy.  He writes: “There is not just autonomy, but alienation; not just strength, but domination; not just independence, but morbid fear of relationship and commitment; not […]

Dear People Whom God Loves, What I wrote in the last column about Kohlberg and Gilligan is what I remember from reading them a long time ago.  Please remember that weakness.  I will now write about Ken Wilber’s thoughts about Carol Gilligan’s moral growth stages. He writes about two different types that show themselves in […]

Dear People Whom God Loves, Before continuing with Ken Wilbur, I’d like to take a little sidetrack with Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan.  They write of moral development into six stages and merely touch on a seventh that I won’t consider. Kohlberg’s study was exclusively with men.  He found the stages that they went through […]