“Once again, you have the bravery to reveal more fully another side of yourself.”— a blog reader named Erika wrote me this message this morning.

You get what you give, I think.

I haven’t had a hateful message in a month or two; I have been getting beautiful and affirming messages every day.

More than anything else that suggests I am beginning to change.

As the anger in me has receded and with it the impulse to defend myself or argue, people, see something different in me than before. Angry people have lost interest in me.

I’ve published this blog since Memorial Day of 2007, and an awful lot of people have been reading what I write since then. I listen to them; they know me better than I know myself.

That is the power behind the blog. I promised to be honest and open, and that is a promise, unlike some others, that I have fulfilled. The blog began the process of revealing me, for better or worse. And there was a lot of worse. But there was also a lot of honesty.

The person who knows me better than anyone is Maria, from the first she saw right into the deepest part of my soul. Ther is no lying to her.

She says I am changing; she says the spiritual track I am on is essential and fundamental. I trust and believe her. Love can do that for you.

I am changing.

I found a new purpose, a new job, and a challenge since 2016 when the world as I understood it began to unravel yet again(I’ve worn it several times in my life).

One woman wrote to Sue Silverstein at Bishop Maginn a few weeks and suggested I should not be allowed to meet  Bishop Maginn students, as I have admitted to experiencing some forms of mental illness. There are some good reasons why many people don’t choose to reveal themselves.

Sue deleted her message.

Amid all of the hatred and confusion, I heard a new message for me that was loud and clear a few years ago. It came to me in a voice.

Your job, said the voice, is to learn to love others without stopping to wonder or judge whether or not they are worthy. For me, that was no simple or easy task. I was a reporter for a good chunk of my life, and we don’t learn to love without stopping to judge.

This challenge is becoming a part of me, not simply a goal. As a writer, I ask myself what do people need from me?

They don’t need more anger, more argument, more complaint. They need something else, and if I can find it in me, I can bring it to them and do some good for all of us.

Without this idea of learning to love without judgment, I could never have become friends with the Amish family down the road, as many people hated me for doing. In one sense, that was a very controversial point in my evolution.

It is not a popular or widespread belief; we are a nation crawling with increasingly popular hypocrites. I never think of myself as brave, but maybe Erika has a point.

I decided from the first that I would not stop to wonder or judge whether or not my Amish neighbors are worthy. As a result, I am free to love and accept them. And other people as well.

“The greatest need of our time, ” wrote Merton, “is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds.” This is so. We are choking on a tsunami of information.

Sustained meditation and contemplation – and most of all, silence –  are helping me to clear my head, but it is an arduous process.

I believe that life is either spiritual or not spiritual and I want my life to be spiritual.

No man or woman can serve two masters. My life will be shaped by and determined by the end, for how I end up, not how I was or even am.

I am made in the image of my desire.

It is up to me and no one else.

No living thing can tell me who I am; I will never again let that happen. The spiritual life is, first of all, and above all else, a life.

It is not something to be contemplated and masturbated over and studied. It has to be lived.

For me, that has been profound and liberating because contrary to what I believed all of my life about myself, I see my good and my evil. I don’t need to judge myself either.

I am not one thing but many things. I am human.

If you can’t see it, you can’t change it.

I’m working at it every day. The point is not whether everyone likes what I am revealing or not; the fact is that I accept and finally understand who I am and why I am here.

“We have what we seek,” wrote Merton, “it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.” And then, we can begin to love and reveal our true selves.

Merton also wrote that art and creativity enable us to find ourselves and lose ourselves simultaneously. That is the miracle of the creative life and also the pain.