Archive

Hope not as destination, but as the line we draw along the way.

Mark Nepo on welcoming the life-force.

Lynda A. Archer

A recollection of the first moment of being at one.

A Report on the 2015 Parliament of the World’s Religions.

Seeing the light when it is darkest

Stephanie Unger is a writer who lives in Buffalo, NY. She has studied poetry at workshops led by Martha Heyneman and others at the Rochester Folk Art Guild in the Finger Lakes Region of New York State.

Connecting with the cosmic through the grace, hardship, and gifts of a garden.

Cooking for the sage king

A conversation with Kabbalah expert Rabbi Dr. Raphael Shuchat

For the last five or so years, as readers may know, I’ve been the poetry Editor at Parabola magazine, while also fulfilling various other duties as a Senior Editor. […]

Fertility, birth and death, ferocity, protection, sexuality: all of these are surely aspects of the goddess, and not mutually exclusive of each other.

The Sufi master on meeting the inner and outer challenges of our time

Among fields of lavender, understanding comes

THE STILLNESS OF THE LIVING FOREST: A Year of Listening and Learning by John Harvey. Reviewed by Jan Cheripko

ilustraciones de Jean Zaleski Era un lluvioso y helado atardecer de diciembre en Manhattan unos días antes de Navidad. Esperaba bajo una llovizna persistente el autobús de la Sexta Avenida para que nos llevara a mi y a mis cuatro hijos desde Greenwich hacia el norte de la ciudad hasta nuestro…

Cezanne, Fruit and Jug on Table, Detail (1890-94). “Before she could speak, my daughter taught me the language of silent things: fruits, flowers, an oaken chair. I came to understand, through my relationship to this small being, why the word adult forms the root of adulteration and adultery. Watching her, it became…

On true seeing

The Unknown — our beautiful An­glo-Saxon word, intimate, reverberant, profound, not so much to be understood but stood under while it rains upon us — that is something I could well live with and, indeed, have revered, cherished, and tried to serve for many a year and day.P.L. Travers, “The Interviewer,” from Vol. 13 No….

JFK, Ram Dass, and the mystery of Being

Imagination itself may be our best resource for experiential recovery of a vibrant, participatory, and wildly sacred Earth.

Photograph courtesy of Monastero di Bose “There must be monasticism in the twenty-first century!” So said a friend not long ago. Both his implicit protest and his conviction make sense. The landscape of the spirit in the West would be torn and lacking if the monastic way vanished in our time….

The way in, the way out

Hamada, Leach and Yanagi in the United States, probably Hawaii, in 1952 “The institution of Living National Treasures was started in the fifties–when Japan’s machine culture was preparing to overtake ours–barely a hundred years after the West had forced the opening up of its insular, agricultural society. The title “Living National…

Sick of what it is called
Sick of the names
I dedicate every pore
To what’s here.
—Ikkyu

Owen Barfield and the history of consciousness

The science and spirit of awareness

“We shall not cease from exploration,” wrote the Catholic poet T.S. Eliot. “And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

Reflections from a Death Row inmate; inspired thoughts from a Sikh guide

Reconnecting to the sacred, from a Sufi teacher

What is the weight of wealth? Is it the weight of the money itself or is it the weight of responsibility of having that money?

An anonymous Hindu tale retold by Rama Devagupta.

I was determined not to let dialysis take over my life. But it already had. […]

One bright spring day, Parabola met with Karen Armstrong  in her suite at the Parker Meridian hotel in Manhattan.  The petite, friendly 62-year-old British ex-nun, arguably the most influential commentator on religion in the English-speaking world, was on tour to promote her latest bestselling book.  Lauded by critics as “magisterial” and “magnificent,” The Great Transformation…

Sound, scientific advice on attaining happiness

Mary Oliver was an astonishing poet beloved by many and also a frequent contributor to PARABOLA over the years.

New York City At Night, ca. 1935 from Wikimedia Head down, hugging a grocery bag, I hurried past gutted buildings and empty lots, back to my ex-boyfriend’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. It seemed like a good idea at some point, having dinner together as friends. But the little Spanish market on…

Julian Nyca, Golden Temple, Amritsar, India, Wikimedia Commons The night Nimo, Jay, and I arrived in Amritsar, India, we made a cursory survey of the Sikh Golden Temple, wandering around the outer area and meditating at its river banks. The next morning, we woke up at 3:00 A.M. to get there…

Bön monks flee the invaders of Tibet

Rare wisdom on “how to see.”

“For it seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward…

On the night of Thanksgiving 2015, our family got into a conversation about the nature of Grace and Mercy. Having written about these subjects recently, it occurred to me that it might be worth collecting the essays into a small booklet.

The summer after I graduated from college, days before I moved to New York City to launch a real adult life, I saw a ghost—an apparition, a spirit, an angel.

Little Gidding has been described as a “thin place” where there is only a slim veil between time and eternity.

In mid-August 2015, Viral Mehta, a co-founder of ServiceSpace.org, was diagnosed with an acute form of bone marrow suppression. In the passages below, his wife, Pavithra. “Pavi” Mehta, offers an update on Viral’s condition and speaks with him about his challenges and recovery.

The annual winners of the Poetry of the Sacred Contest (2021), chosen by the Center for Interfaith Relations.

Of might and right, and the future of the world’s art

A hopeful report from the 2021 Parliament of the World’s Religions

Discovering the divine in her own backyard

Many people may be surprised to learn that the surface of our brain is actually dark and that this darkness has consequences for our experience of consciousness and transformation itself, including our ultimate transformation at death. It also has consequences for the most subtle form of light we know, the light we associate with religious…

Was she “first among the apostles” of Jesus Christ?

A conversation with Frankl’s grandson and a Frankl family champion.

Part of an Ancient Story: A Conversation with Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

The extraordinary inner life of a great public figure.

Tobias and the Angel, detail of painting by Raphael. National Gallery, London. From Peter Lamborn Wilson, Angels (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980). A Hebrew Myth, a potent element in the annals of the bees, tells us that when a child is born an angel takes it under his wing and recites…

King David, Leonard Cohen and the Search for Meaning

They say the legendary hitter Ted Williams could see the seams of the ball as it came out of the pitcher’s hand. …

The most powerful teachings and teachers are those that bring us back to ourselves, as we are now, helping us see our true nature: vulnerable and exposed, along with both our nascent strengths and formidable obstacles. […]

A journalist and a monk exchange revelatory letters

Exploring the “hidden face of God”

Lee van Laer, Red-Tailed Hawk, Piermont, NY Like the rest of the Parabola readership, I’ve been watching the developments on the borders of Europe — the influx of desperate refugees, the corpses of children — in a mixture of astonishment and horror. We live in what we believe to be an…

A conversation with wildlife photographer, author, and conservationist Staffan Widstrand

A conversation with deep psychologist Michael Penn

How the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca created a fiesta of music.

To meet her destiny, she needed a miracle

The greatest shocks can inspire the deepest wisdom

Meeting death with dignity

There is a middle ground, a basic Reality embracing self and Self. It may be called my true nature. To discover what
prevents me from the experience of it, I have only to look at myself, just as I am. […]

All movies are an illusion. We think we are seeing motion but in fact we are seeing twenty-four still pictures every second. Half the time the screen is actually black. Yet movies seem so real, and some have the potential to reveal great truth. […]

Anonymous / Haida
Retold by Leslie Hebert

Sleeping. Louis Sussman-Hellborn (1828–1908) I’ve had quite a tumultuous relationship with fairy tales. The Little Mermaid was always my favorite as a child. Not just the Disney version, where everyone lives happily-ever-after, but the original, where the mermaid feels like she’s walking on a thousand knives and almost stabs the prince to…

Intelligence is a quality available to choose, as a function of mind that can live itself through us. In this article, I will focus on spiritual intelligence as understood within the Western Monotheistic traditions. Here we will explore five forms of intelligence:  1) moral, 2) analogical, 3) intuitive, 4) imaginal, 5) esoteric. Before proceeding, a…

Listening for an answer beyond words

Remembering Harold Bloom and Jacob Needleman

Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, The Prado, Madrid I think we tend to create inward forms of our own — adopted, that is, from things we encounter outwardly — and then stalk each other with them. This process is writ large on the social and political landscape;…

On my college campus in the late Spring of 1970, I witnessed the events surrounding the deaths of four Kent State students from National Guardsmen’s bullets. Something changed in me.

A conversation with civic visionary Jonathan F.P. Rose

A visit to Havana, a priceless discovery

Impressions from the land of Rumi

An interview with Keith Buzzell

Protecting the places where the magic folk roam

Shamanic memories from an Indian visionary

More than three-quarters of the way through this extraordinary biography (though that label barely captures this book’s breadth and richness) of the scholar of religion Huston Smith …

Are we the generation that will lose the Earth?

Parabola Magazine · Parabola Podcast Episode 47 The Golden Rule Story Editor Betsy Cornwell shares excerpts from the Winter 2021-2022 issue of Parabola, “The Golden Rule,” including this year’s grand prize winner of the Poetry of the Sacred contest from the Center for Interfaith Relations.

Transforming repetition into renewal

This was the time in his life that Abd el-Kader had intended to devote to peaceful pursuits such as prayer, teaching, and charitable deeds. He might have turned his back on the growing tensions in Damascus: It would not have been unreasonable. Yet he could not escape the world around him, or the role that…

The spiritual awakening of a world-class drunk

The special power of classic films

Among the tasks or “yogi jobs” a participant can volunteer for during silent retreats at the Insight Meditation Society, a Buddhist meditation center in rural Massachusetts, the most resonant in every sense is that of bell ringer.

Newton’s inward search for hidden truth

Frederick Law Olmsted’s village in the woods

A child retells the legend of the Sumerian goddess Inanna and her descent to the Nether World.

The fluidity of who and what we are reflected in embodied transformation

A meditation teacher loses her voice—and finds her way

Rabbi Douglas Goldhamer, with Peggy Bagley, “Spiritual Laws: The Hidden Wisdom of Kabbalah”

I would first and foremost like to follow an age-old injunction that every writer, before giving out any advice or critique to anyone else, should obligingly give an honest account of their journey. So before doing an appraisal of the 27th All & Everything International Humanities Conference I offer a short yet pertinent brief. Having…

What makes the Wizard of Oz an iconic American tale that has entered into the language? Some expressions are so well known they need no further explanation, as for example “You’re not in Kansas anymore”.

Paul Reps (1895–1990) was an American artist, poet, and author best known for his pioneering book that helped introduce Zen to the West, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. Parabola is honored to have the opportunity to […]

In the autumn of 1971, John G. Bennett inaugurated the International Academy for Continuous Education at Sherborne House, Gloucestershire, England. …