“God speaks to us all the time and in many ways, but it requires spiritual discernment to hear God’s voice, see what God sees, and read the signs in daily life.” – Henri Nouwen

I don’t know about God, but I am hearing voices and seeing the signals of life: move forward, take advantage of the new and rich opportunities coming to you when I am hungry for them.

I can’t read the signs of daily life alone; I don’t think anyone can.

I turn to our religious traditions, our most profound thinkers for help, and also to the wisdom others have gained and recorded from their triumphs and failures, their journeys and struggles. The best minds in the history of the world have taken on the search for spirituality; they are a rich lode of inspiration and help for me, my silent teachers, and angels.

For much of my lifetime, searchers turned to books and other types of reading when looking to discern God’s way forward or their own. Books are the journals of the spiritual life.

There is nothing comparable to reading books about spirituality when it comes to learning for me. Reading means gathering information in a solitary way, acquiring new ideas and insights and knowledge, and learning about and mastering new ideas.

Academic reading can lead to degrees, discoveries, diplomas, and credentials, but  spiritual reading is different. It means not just reading about spiritual things but spiritually reading about spiritual things as I read the prophets and mystics and priests (the Kabbalah, Augustine, Aquinas, Jesus, Paul, Merton – I get a sense of what it is the Gods have been trying to tell us over the ages.

In my lifetime, people have begun turning away from books and writers and philosophers and looking instead to their reading and searching on the Internet Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and TikTok. I refuse to be another old fart clucking about the dumbing down of America, but I see the books that have been so central to me fading into the background. People are looking elsewhere, and you only have to read the news for a few days to see the consequences of their new gurus and guides.

We have become spiritual people, obsessed mainly with money, security, and power. Our leaders abandon the great spiritual call for compassion and mercy and look instead to domination, lies, and domination. We spend hours and hours on computers, most of us don’t have time to read, whose who still do are pushed to the edge of society, reading on the edge of life.

These are the new intellectual and spiritual centers of our world, like it or not, choose it or not. I’m not here to judge them or anybody who reads them instead of Thomas Merton.

But I can’t help but see that many people’s messages from their reading are anger, grievance, judgment, and hatred. Those are the movements growing louder and louder, leaving our and their lives hollow and cold.

That’s not what the Spiritual writers through history have preached or taught. That’s not what I learned. It’s what Facebbook and Twitter preach and teach, quite openly and without shame.

When I first came up to the country in 2000 to write Running To The Mountain, I spent a year reading Thomas Merton; he was my guide and inspiration; his writing transformed me and altered the course of my life. I can’t imagine where I might go today to learn the lessons he taught.

Merton was my spiritual guide through his journals and books; his approach to the spiritual life taught me what I know about reading the signs of daily life, the need and the way to go forward, not in anger and judgment but openness. Anyone reading this knows how often I fail, but also that I sometimes succeed. The point of my remaining years is to shift the balance.

Merton taught me that a meaningful life is a life of love and doing good for the needy and vulnerable. He planted the seed that became the Army Of Good.

Merton was my teacher on how to read the people life places in my path and how I could pursue a spiritual life without giving up my own. He was and is a model for how to find God’s guidance – whatever God is to people –  in books, including what the mystics call “the book of Nature.” He is why I moved the country, to bring animals and the natural world deep into my life.

He also helped me understand how to read and react to and survive the times’ signs, changes, and turmoil. Like most people I know, I couldn’t come to this thinking on my own. I still can’t. I need to read the thoughts of other people to help me.

I can’t find these signs and signposts on social media, I imagine they are there, somewhere, but they are drowned out by argument, confusion, and almost hypnotic hatred. I use these new tools every day, and they have helped make my good life possible and conceivable.

But they so far can’t offer me a path to spiritual life, a life of meaning and wisdom and depth. I use them what I have to, and the rest of the time, I turn to read and my books for the spiritual nourishment I crave. Argument and rage are poisons, darkening our world.

I’m not sure about God – neither was Merton – but my idea of God is always speaking to me. Spirituality for me is the will and desire to hear that voice, see what they do, and read the signs of daily life.

I’ve had a lot of signs in recent weeks – surgery, discoveries about my body, challenges for the future, masks to help me breathe and sleep. My God, whoever that is, is sending me signal after signal telling me it is not time to look back or worry.

My idea is to embrace these changes, not lament them or complain about them. Each one is a sacred flame, lighting up my path forward.

It’s time to move forward, to see all these sparking opportunities sitting in my path, and one by one, pick them up and get on with making a good and meaningful life. That’s what I’m hearing, that’s what I’m reading. That’s my way forward.

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The Way Forward, Photo by Maria Wulf