My blog has moved

With the publication of my book Spiritual Intelligence, I've shifted my blog to a new site: www.spiritualintelligence.co.uk Hope you can find your way there. Many thanks.

The 'Lent 40' Reflections

‘Soul is a dangerous thing to have. It makes you restless, links you into the infinite, whether you like it or not, and won’t let you rest happily in your mediocrity and escapism.’ John O’Donohue

Lent starts on February 25, and this year I’m writing a series of daily reflections for leaders like you, to help you make the most of a season packed with potential, and to regain some soulful perspective.

Personally, I've always found Lent to be an exceptionally fruitful time for focused reflection; it offers a profound period in the calendar to think about ‘what we do’ and how it really aligns with ‘who we are’, for a start.

My brand new e-mail reflections won’t take you long to read, but they will help you to start each week-day in Lent as you mean to go on – by reflecting on who you are, what you do, and how this links with Lent. They’ll include inspiring quotations, incisive questions and practical ideas, and will form a 40-day journey of spiritual re:discovery.

My suggested contribution (for those who can afford it) is £20 for the series (groups such as cells, businesses and churches may sign up corporately for £80). To receive the ‘Lent 40’, please e-mail me at brian.draper@ntlworld.com, quoting 'the Lent 40' and saying ‘Yes please’. I’ll put your name on the list and send you details of how to pay.

Your journey will begin on February 25. Now – at this time of all times! - is the chance to regain some soulful focus.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Man made God in his own image

A neat observation in Eckhart Tolle's most recent book, A New Earth, about the way religions have distorted the purity of their message because of the ego: while the Bible tells us that God made 'man' in his own image, it also turned out that 'Man made "God" in his own image. The eternal, the infinite, and unnameable was reduced to a mental idol that you had to believe in and worship as "my God" and "our God".'

soul biographies

Thanks to Dave Ebenhoh for putting me onto soulbiographies.com - a delightful and inspiring collection of short films by Nic Askew.

reflections on calling and gift

John Ortberg's lovely book If You Want to Walk on Water, You've Got to Get Out of the Boat contains some lovely material on calling and gifts. Here are two quotes he uses:

My calling is 'the place where my deep gladness meets the world's deep need'. (Frederich Buechner)

'There's an electricity associated with giftedness. Give a person the chance, and he'll jolt you.' (Arthur Miller)

the soul is a wild animal

A lovely description of the soul from Parker J Palmer, of the centre for courage and renewal.

'Just like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, savvy, resourceful and self-sufficient: it knows how to survive in hard places. Many of us learn about these qualities in the darkest moments of our lives when the faculties we normally depend upon utterly fail us—the intellect is useless, the emotions dead, the will impotent, and the ego shattered. But sometimes, way back in the thickets of our inner lives, we sense the presence of something that knows how to stay alive and helps us to keep going. That something, I suggest, is the tough and tenacious soul.

'And yet the soul, despite its toughness, is also essentially shy—just like a wild animal. It will flee from the noisy crowd and seek safety in the deep underbrush. If we want to see a wild animal, we know that the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods yelling for it to come out! But if we will walk into the woods quietly and sit at the base of a tree, breathing with the earth and fading into our surroundings, the wild creature we seek may eventually show up.'

He writes beautifully about how to explore a 'pedagogy of the soul'. Read more here.

Evelyn Underhill

Recently, I went on retreat to an Anglican retreat centre at Pleshey in Essex. There, I discovered Evelyn Underhill, a mystic who straddled the 19th and 20th centuries.

Here are two quotes that I gleaned from her book The Mystics of the Church, while sitting in the wonderfully atmospheric library at Pleshey.

‘We cannot say that there is a separate ‘mystical sense’ which some men have and some men have not, but rather that every human soul has a certain latent capacity for God, and that in some capacity is realised with an astonishing richness.’.

‘We might indeed call mystics the eyes of the Body of Christ. They maintain that awestruck outlook towards the infinite, and that warmly loving sense of God’s indwelling grace, without which all religious institutions quickly become mechanical and cold.’

I am trying to open my eyes, all of the time.