RAISING UP DEVASTATIONS FROM OLD A Meditation on the Work of Justice James Ishmael Ford A sermon preached at the First Unitarian Church of Providence, in Rhode Island on the 16th of May, 2010 Text All beings tremble before violence. All fear death. All love life. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do? Dhammapada 129-130 Not long ago Jan and I left directly after a three-day intensive Zen meditation retreat in Worcester, I... Read more

Just ’cause… Read more

Well, I’ve just booked my tickets. I will be in Arizona on the 29th of May, joining with, I expect many, many people, but included among that number our denominational president, the Reverend Peter Morales and numerous other Unitarian Universalist clergy. (Together, perhaps, with a Zen priest or two…) If you’re in the area, perhaps we’ll see each other. We’re starting at 8am at the corner of E Indian School Road & N 3rd Street and will march to the... Read more

The recent legislative event in Arizona criminalizing illegal immigration together with a requirement for law enforcement officials to determine who looks like they might be here illegally and to ascertain whether they are, has brought the issues of immigration, legal and illegal to the forefront for many of us. This week the Board of Trustees for the Unitarian Universalist Association has put on the agenda for our 2010 General Assembly whether to join a call to boycott Arizona and to... Read more

Hard for me to put my feelings to words on this one… (and, thank you, Bartholomew, for both the pointer and for probing a little deeper into this bit of nastiness...) Read more

Well, here I am sitting in the hospital. This time its not my colonoscopy, but Jan’s… Friends have been giving us various tidbits to contemplate. One is John Green’s tale of his Colonoscopy. It is delightful… Some people who missed how I posted it when announcing my own experience on the table forwarded links to Homer’s colonoscopy. Others thought we would be informed by Katie Couric’s colonoscopy. For unknown reasons still others suggested Billy Connolly’s experience. Particularly right on the... Read more

Lena Horne (1917 – 2010) One of the good ones… Read more

And, perhaps, a wise Lesbian. Or, not… Not quite as liberal as I might have wished. (Or, I gather the term de jure is progressive…) Whatever, the operant term here is wise… And on balance, I’m happy… Read more

It was the late nineteen sixties, and just a few years after I started sitting regularly. I decided I wanted to be a priest. I figured if only I were ordained then all my problems would be solved. The difficulty was that the Zen center expected people to go through a very long apprenticeship, why it could take years. And that didn’t seem to make any sense to me. Besides just getting to speak to the master seemed beyond me.... Read more

In the nineteen fifties when, thanks in large part to DT Suzuki and his popularizer, Alan Watts, Zen hit the intellectual communities across America and it bled into things and deeply informed Beat culture, some of the poets and writers decided rather than just to be inspired in their work to go a little closer to the source. One of them, Gary Snyder, traveled to Japan. He became a serious Zen practitioner, and would continue to practice on to today.... Read more