About the creator

On Gabriel Walker

(and how The Infinite Heart came to be)

Also in What Is the Infinite Heart

What Is the Infinite Heart On Gabriel Walker

Gabriel Walker, Houston

Gabriel Walker is a writer, host, and the creator of The Infinite Heart, a contemplative cultural platform devoted to witnessing the indwelling well of love and intelligence within us, and to the ways that presence enlivens how we create, relate, care, lead, and belong.

He is also a baritone. A native of Houston, he appears regularly with Bach Society Houston and Mercury Chamber Orchestra, and has performed with Houston Grand Opera, the Minnesota Orchestra, Utah Festival Opera, Chautauqua Opera, Fargo-Moorhead Opera and Apollo Chamber Players. He holds a Master of Music from Northwestern University.

Through writing, conversation and gathering, he makes rooms where people can become more intimate with their own hearts and more available to one another. He lives in Houston, Texas.

I grew up in the church

I grew up in the church, and for a long time the church was most of what I knew.

When I was in high school, at the end of a youth Sunday, our pastor called all of the young people up to the front. There were quite a few of us. She lined us up and walked down the row, looking each of us in the eye, and one by one she started pointing people out and telling them to step forward. I was the last one she picked. She prayed over us, and then she told us that we would each be preaching a sermon in front of the congregation.

I had no real idea what she was asking of me. So I did what a church kid does. I found a scripture, I found a devotional, and I put something together.

I have spent a long time since then trying to understand that morning and what it was actually pointing at. It took me years to be able to answer it in a way that was mine.

The voice

I trained as a classical singer. I am a baritone, and I will always be a singer. Most of my work is Bach, opera and new music, and I have sung it in churches, concert halls and opera houses.

Somewhere along the way I wrote this down, and I still believe it. Our voices are an expression of the creative force that lives inside of us, and I have never thought that belonged to one genre.

What surprised me was how far that went. I found that I had words in me. They came from somewhere deep and sacred, and when I said them out loud they opened my own heart before they did anything for anybody else. That is how I knew to keep going. The gift wanted more than one form, and singing was the first one I had learned how to use.

The Infinite Heart came out of that, and it grew out of something I had already started. Years before, I made a platform called Ordinary Humans Doing Extraordinary Things, because I could not stop noticing how much beauty and courage and devotion was moving through the lives of people nobody was writing about. The Infinite Heart is an extension of that, the same noticing pointed at what is underneath it. Read the whole of it.

A ministry I did not want

For years I kept feeling pulled toward ministry, and for years I pushed it away, because the only version of it I had ever seen was not the one I was being asked to do.

What I do is not pointing people toward Jesus, or Buddha, or Krishna, or hypnotherapy, or breathwork, or any of the long list of traditions and practices and techniques people use to get somewhere. Where a person goes with that is theirs, and I have no interest in managing it. What I am pointing at is what is common in all of us. A greater Spirit. The Infinite Heart. The thing that connects us, which is not separate from us, because it is us.

So it is a ministry, if that is the word, of making belonging. I create rooms and language and questions so people can get back to that place in themselves, and then turn toward each other with more of themselves available. Everything on this platform is some version of that one job.

Where the work lives now

Letters

Essays and reflections, arriving each month.

The Heart Forum

The rooms. Public conversation, reflection and shared presence.

In Conversation

A public conversation series, hosted by Gabriel and co-presented with aligned organizations.

Speaking

Keynotes and facilitated conversations for organizations and gatherings.

Gabriel’s performance work lives at gabrielwalkerbaritone.com.

Come as you are. There is nothing in you that needs to be fixed before you begin.

Stay in the current

A letter arrives each month.

Essays and reflections from The Infinite Heart, with the first word on gatherings and conversations as they open. It is free, and you are welcome exactly as you are.

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