The mediation was recorded live at The Seeker’s Table Sunday gathering at. If you would like to join us click: at 6 PM Eastern. This link will bring you to our ZOOM room. All are welcome. If you would like to call in click on our info page to find...Av Ian White Maher

Explore the promise and price needed for moral introspection and to grasp the true costs of our commitments.Av Ian White Maher

The mediation was recorded live at The Seeker’s Table Sunday gathering at. If you would like to join us click: join.theseekerstable.com at 6 PM Eastern. This link will bring you to our ZOOM room. All are welcome. If you would like to call in click...Av Ian White Maher

The mediation was recorded live at The Seeker’s Table Sunday gathering at. If you would like to join us click: at 6 PM Eastern. This link will bring you to our ZOOM room. All are welcome. If you would like to call in click on our info page to find...Av Ian White Maher

The mediation was recorded live at The Seeker’s Table Sunday gathering at. If you would like to join us click: at 6 PM Eastern. This link will bring you to our ZOOM room. All are welcome. If you would like to call in click on our info page to find...Av Ian White Maher

The mediation was recorded live at The Seeker’s Table Sunday gathering at. If you would like to join us click: at 6 PM Eastern. This link will bring you to our ZOOM room. All are welcome. If you would like to call in click on our info page to find...Av Ian White Maher

The older white man sitting next to me leaned in as the talk came to a close to ask if I was okay. “Am I okay,” I thought? No, no, I am not. I am broken. And I live in a world of brokenness. And I feel trapped by all of this brokenness. And I go through my day shutting the brokenness out, perhaps allowing myself to look at it in little doses like I…

If we want to become seekers of liberation we must dive into the practices that bring us back into communion. In addition to our personal disciplines of meditation and prayer we would be wise to explore spiritual companioning—the path of walking with others—as essential to our liberation. What would our houses of worship look like if, instead of tr…

A day later I remembered the famous verse from the Bhagavad Gita.We only have a right to our workWe do not have a right to the fruitsThe fruits should not be the motivation for your actionsAnd do not shirk your work(Chapter 2 Verse 47)This gave me comfort.I do not have a right to any particular outcome. All I can do is offer my work to the best of …

The transition from Michelle and Barack to Donald and Melania has been more than just a change of individuals. I miss the affection they modeled for us so well. As lovers they inspired me. For eight years we lived with a couple who loved each other, completed each other, desired each other, and now we have something very different, something very u…

On November 25th, 1915, a small, group men, robbed and hooded, climbed Stone Mountain in Georgia, to resuscitate the Ku Klux Klan. In the darkness of that cold night, the terrorist nightriders of the fallen Confederacy were brought back to life like some Frankenstein monster. The Klan has lived within us ever since, like a shadow in the American ps…

Marcus Aurelius famously said, “That which is not good for the beehive cannot be good for the bees.” (Sometimes this is rephrased as, “What is good for the bee is good for the hive,” which is not at all what Marcus Aurelius was saying but not a surprising reduction within the cultural dynamic that wants to put the individual first.) Human beings ar…

Our spiritual origins rest in this silent mystery. We cannot know God until we are ready to say yes to the dark. It is in the dark soil that the seed first begins to sprout. It is in the dark womb that the child is created. And it is in the dark mystery that our souls release our ideas of God, our ideas of ourselves in relationship to God so that w…

The God of my youth was a tortured figure forced to walk a high wire over dangerous beasts of prey who snapped their jaws below waiting for the tortured God to make mistake and fall into their pit. This God was a mockery, a buffoon, a clown I stuck high up on that wire. At the time, I did not live with a God of my own, but with the pale referents o…

I could hear my spiritual director lean into the phone as she asked, And how many people do you think Gabriel visited before Mary said ‘Yes’? Such an idea had never even crossed my mind. The story of Mary, for me anyway, always held a quality of predetermination, like she was chosen for this particular role. It had never dawned on me that there mig…

I don’t know if every spiritual experience requires suffering, but I would guess that it does, at least on some level. For the ego to collapse, for us to leave behind the story of who we think we are in order to step into the beloved darkness where there are no boundaries we have to say goodbye to something we have known, maybe even something we ha…

I don’t believe in fate nor in an interfering God. But I do believe that creation is always calling out to us, always inviting us into a deeper relationship, which is made visible in the world by a greater desire for health, and empathy, and connection. The call that comes through us is as much an enticement as anything. A beckoning into a larger e…

Our lives are not consolation prizes with our fantasies being the lottery ticket we missed out on, which is not to say we shouldn’t examine “be here now.” We should. We should examine it precisely because it seems to be so important to us, not just individually but culturally. The question is, Can we examine this fantasy without regret? Because a f…

What is our call as spiritually motivated people? As people who believe in the transformative power of faith? Is it a question of living out our character, of upholding and promoting a set of community values that is larger than our own egos? Or a belief in God that gives us the courage to walk through the darkness even if we are not certain in our…

The anger that lives in us comes both from our personal lives, pain and slights we have experienced, and from the larger community of which we are a part. We cannot fully resolve to be without anger if we are unwilling to address the suffering that exists around us. And we cannot address the suffering of the culture if we choose to see ourselves as…

There seems to be a whisper from beyond. A whisper we don’t quite hear so clearly, but we know it’s there. The whisper is so powerful because it calls out to us constantly, like the stream that wears away a rock. And the whisper is the call to beauty. There is a call from beauty, a sacred call, to bring to life, even if only for a few moments, some…

Anaïs Nin is famously quoted as saying “We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.” Which leaves a particular indictment of beauty on the table. The grasping for beautiful things, be they people or objects, often makes us look and seem quite ugly. But for those of us who seek the spiritual experience, who seek the sacred, beauty can also…

We are not here by accident. We have been called to honor the Sacred of the earth. We have been called to choose enlightened compassion over self-centered and socially conditioned power. We have been called to prayer as we move from dominating and controlling power to the power of love and empathy and connection. We have been called into a communio…

All around us we see people living divided lives because they think they need to protect themselves from the planet and either wall it off or stand above it. But on this sacred day, this day of changing light, even as division lives all around us, may we pray to know that wholeness is always a choice. It would be easy to condemn humanity, but not t…

We live in an era marked by a fleeing from darkness, a fleeing from the reality of mortality and that which we cannot control. We try to illuminate everything, because perhaps if we cast a light everywhere no darkness will remain, but the darkness is so much greater than anything we can even imagine. And so we race around shining our lights in a de…

We suffer from a crisis of grace. We suffer from the belief that there is just not enough love for us, for all of us, like there is some sort of grace scarcity. So we hoard and act selfishly believing we will starve tomorrow if we feed those who are starving today. And the tighter we grow and the harder we grow the more suffering we see and the sca…

Where is the intentionality to be in deep relationship with the Beloved, with the Divine, with the Holy? It is not just enough to walk away from the structures that don’t feed us; the kings and the creeds and the castes. There must also be an intentional picking up of something, of a sacred life, a community of sacred livers and lovers because the …

Lovers of love, we are not condemned to being condemned. Our purpose is adoration. But the adoration goes both ways. Just as we lay flowers on the altar, flowers are laid on our altar as well. Just as we light the worship candles, a flame is lit within us as well. We adore this mutilated world and we praise the Beloved. So put away the begging bowl…

Martin Buber wrote, “The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a You to become; becoming I, I say You. All actual life is encounter.” The encounters we have with one another are constant, our faith practice is to engage in them. Most often we don’t. The unhappine…

The body is a sacred instrument. It is powerful, it is full of possibility, it is beautiful. And yet most of the time we live disconnected, disembodied from this sacredness. This miracle of existence that has come from the stars, which pulses with life, is so often overlooked, undervalued, disparaged, criticized, even blamed for some of our so-call…

Shaking ourselves free from our moral conditioning is perhaps the hardest spiritual task we can take on. It is difficult because we are so adamant in our moral convictions. We would never say, “We know all there is to know about science.” Many of us would readily admit that perhaps 20% of what we now consider scientific fact will be disproven withi…

What you think about God really says more about you than it says about God. God is not a what. God is not a thing. There is no “this is” that can be called God. God is immaterial. But the water we swim in, that which we don’t even recognize all around us, is material. We objectify everything. We objectify ourselves. We objectify God. And we become …

We often speak of joy as if it is a synonym for happiness, but happiness and joy are different. Happiness is an intimately personal sensation. Joy is about connection...Joy is about feeling a part of something larger than yourself. It is the sensation that overwhelms the shell of the individual and opens us into a sense of belonging and being with.…

There is something incredibly beautiful about your soul. Something that draws others in, that draws God to you. What is it? What is it that God desires in you? I think it is not enough for us to try to be good. I think there needs to be some seduction in our spiritual discipline as well. It is important to show God that we are interested in being d…

Whether we like it or not, whether we think it is just or not, the world is now in the care of human beings. Our actions dictate and determine the life of every other animals now living on the planet. All so-called free space is circumscribed by human behavior. The most destructive behaviors are easy to see. The consequences exist right in front of…

I don’t want to move on from this grief just yet. All around me I hear the clamor of advocates demanding some action and I, too, want action, but I don’t want it just so I can avoid sitting with this grief. Our cup of meaning, the cup from which we drink our lives, has been broken. It is a mended cup so we knew that it has been broken in the past a…

Altars are the sacred sites on which we place both our gifts and our sacrifices. But the intention behind the act is the same — this I give to you, this precious part of me I give to you. Just because there is something in us to overcome, something in us that no longer serves, that needs to be put down does not mean that it is not precious. Every s…

What has to die in your life for you to be reborn? What sits between you and the more expansive life you know is possible? What has to die in your life to allow you to become part of the great awakening of humanity? If we are lucky, we will face the great challenge, the one the small and large character-defining moments have led us to, the one that…

Last summer I went to the desert with friends to watch some art burn. There were massive, intricate, ornate temples and pagodas created solely to be enjoyed for a few days after which they were set alight; offerings to the Gods of impermanence. The night of the great fire was a spectacle unlike any I have ever seen. Tens of thousands gathered aroun…

We are facing a changing time. The effects of the isolated self are coming home to roost. We can no longer plunder the Earth with impunity. We have come to understand that we are a nested, complex organism that has been thrown out of balance because we thought we were individual actors who didn’t impact the collective world. The coming collapse of …

I don’t believe in a Golden Age. Stories about how great the world once was always strike me as fantasy and I think about my friend’s grandmother who once looked at me from the side of her eye saying, “The Good old days? There were no good old days.” But that doesn’t mean things haven’t been lost. In a similar way, those of us seeking our spiritual…

There is something that happens to us when you and I agree we’re in relationship, something that flows from my eyes into your eyes and from your eyes into my eyes. It is a sacred acknowledgment of our mutual being. Nietzsche, who was obsessed with his own independence, named this thing that happens between us a debt that we owe to one another. In o…

Paradise is not a place with walls. Nor is it a place with no walls. Paradise is not an intellectual concept. Words are not going to get us there because in so many ways words force us to choose a side. The only answer is action, opening to the spiritual experience, being willing to be led by God into the awakened space of our unity in life and in …

Maintaining a daily meditation or prayer practice is the single most common desire I hear expressed when talking with people about their spiritual lives. But often it is framed as a desire for something that is just beyond reach. I wish I had more time, they say. I wish I had more discipline. It is normal for people to struggle with a daily meditat…

We are not so helpless and so fallen that our salvation depends on the judgment of God. God has no judgment. God does not have the capacity to judge. The creative force only wants to be with us, to move through us, but we must be willing to embody this force, to make room in our lives to be transformed. Rather than saying, “I will transform my life…

If you believe, as I do, that cultivating your spiritual life is vital to your sense of well-being in the world, vital to your very health then cultivating a sense of Yes in your life is of primary importance. Within us there is an awakening that wants to emerge. Thomas Merton once said we become contemplatives when God discovers itself in us, when…

We all suffer from an attention deficit disorder. Not in the sense that we can’t hold our focus, but that none of us get enough attention. And in our loneliness, we fill our lives with material substitutes for what we really want, which is just to be seen and heard and held. We are a culture that is gorging on material while starving for love and a…

There have been decades of choices that brought you to this moment. Are you ready to follow the spirit further? What would your life be like is praise rested at the center of your being? Praise for being offered the opportunity to be lifted into freedom?Av Ian White Maher

What keeps you from encountering the sacred love affair? Encountering God, experiencing the sacred as a living force in our lives, is the first step in healing our planet.Av Ian White Maher