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Thomas Aquinas is a man of mystery. Born into a wealthy, powerful family he chose the simple life of a poor friar. He was a large lumbering man whose classmates labeled “the dumb ox.” Yet he proved himself quick of wit and the possessor of a brilliance so rare that his voice has been heard “bellowing across the ages.”

This summer I was vacationing with my family in Europe when I was slapped in the face by a sentence hiding in a book. We were near the end of our adventure and had worn most of the print off our four Eurail passes. My wife and two daughters were napping, and by reading Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions, I was trying not to join them. Somewhere between London and Edinburgh, I found the words that left me red-faced: “Paul, whose letters epitomize the concerns of the early Church, knew what Jesus had taught, but he almost never quotes him.”

Donald Harris is a remarkable man. While serving as a Navy chaplain, he developed an affinity for outcast sailors, finding himself drawn to those who repulsed most others – the abused and the abusers, the afflicted and the addicted, the yellers and the smashers. Hollow, angry eyes were for him a siren call for grace. But the young lieutenant had a major problem. The ones who most needed his help often had hearts of stone – impenetrable to his offer of God’s love.

I have a secret. This is a secret I try to keep not only from others; it is one I try to keep from myself. It’s seriously at odds with how I want others to see me, but it also makes a mockery of how I want to see myself. It is, in reality, tremendously disruptive to life as I naturally want to live it.

I’ve gotten the question several times:“Do you believe the Bible is the inerrant Word of God?” Three occasions burn in my memory.

The first occurred during a job interview. It was the final stage. Several faculty members from a conservative seminary in the Midwest had me encircled, peppering me with questions, trying to see if I would fit in with the group or stand out like a Speedo in the baptistery. I don’t recall my exact words, but I got the job offer, and I didn’t lie.

Running home to Mom and Dad . . . Returning to the nest . . .In a culture in which renting rooms is no longer widespread, and relationships lack stability, adult kids are returning home to live with their parents, who have become their economic safety net. But when Mom and Dad are deceased or unsafe as living companions or unwilling to have those kids come home, homelessness abounds.

After eight issues of Conversations on various aspects of the spiritual formation process, it is definitely time to devote an issue to spiritual direction. At one point we considered making this the thrust of the whole journal but decided we didn’t want to confuse a means with the end. But spiritual direction is such an important resource for journey that we are excited to be able now to present an issue that brings it onto center stage.

Over the past four decades I’ve learned the same foundational truth about discernment from three very different people. One is my Uncle Otis, a semifamous faith-healing evangelist who was Charismatic long before it was cool. The other two are Dallas Willard and Ignatius of Loyola.

I love retreats, real retreats! I love their expansiveness and freedom. We need to be cautious in our use of the word, which is increasingly applied to almost any activity that takes us away from our usual surroundings. Marathon off-site business meetings, parish-sponsored family outings, and trips to the beach or ski slopes for the youth group are often billed as retreats. Necessary, productive, or re-creative as such events might be, they are not retreats.

A tailor prayed, “Lord, I cheat on pieces of cloth; you let babies die. But I am going to make you a deal. You forgive me my little sins and I’ll forgive you your big ones.”

Lew Smedes included that haunting anecdote in his important little book, Forgive and Forget. He uses it to call attention to a concept that might be more comfortable to ignore: theodicy and the problem of pain. Or more to the heart of the matter, what is the impact of our pain and suffering on the way we view God?