God is graceful, but should we watch our step around God? Can grace and fury both characterize God’s experience? Read more
God is graceful, but should we watch our step around God? Can grace and fury both characterize God’s experience? Read more
One of my spiritual teachers, Gerald May, describes the spiritual journey in terms of taking time to pause, notice, open, yield and stretch, and respond. This is good Lenten advice. Lent is about mindfulness and opening to our current reality in all its fullness. A few wise colleagues responded to last week’s Lenten question – “Practicing a Progressive Lent: Simplicity and Celebration” – with the concern that repentance is essential to experiencing grace and that Ash Wednesday provides an opportunity... Read more
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27; Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35 The Quakers have a saying “a way will be made.” A variation of this is the affirmation that “God makes a way where there is no way.” Out of apparent scarcity, abundance emerges. Where there appears to be a dead end, a path appears. When we hit bottom, we discover God is with us and we can, with God’s companionship and inspiration, climb out of the mess in which we’ve found ourselves. When think... Read more
Moore and Yim did the remarkable: they heard about slavery and sex trafficking and chose to respond. They recognized that what appeared to be their powerlessness was in fact the seed bed of transformation. Read more
What are our temptations? What will keep us from following God’s vision for our lives? What good things do we need to defer to achieve greater things? Read more
I don’t go in very much for penitence. I don’t focus much on sin; its reality is much too obvious and frankly most people emphasize small lapses, too often feeling guilty about small peccadillos, rather than concentrating on the social evils that daily destroy families, lead to violence in schools, and contribute to planetary climate change. I’ve never felt the need to “give up something for Lent.” Instead, I see Lent as a time for joyful simplicity that opens the... Read more
Can we remember Ash Wednesday without guilt? Can Lent be an embodied, rather than ascetic season? Read more
Lectionary Reflections for Transfiguration Sunday – February 10, 2013 Exodus 34:29-35; Psalm 99; 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; Luke 4: 28-43 Transfiguration Sunday is a day for poetry, music, dance, delight, strobe lights, light shows, and DVDs and You Tube. Bring your iPads to share. Dazzling whiteness, glory, radiance, shining, brightness. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out like shining from shook foil; it gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil Crushed.” (Gerard Manley Hopkins) Nature is... Read more
One of my favorite films is 84 Charing Cross Road, the story of the twenty year correspondence of an American woman and a British bookseller. Completely chaste, a type of love emerges over books, shared events, and letters. Although the two correspondents never meet, there is intimacy about their relationship that exceeds that of many who live side by side and under the same roof. Antoine Saint-Exupery gives one definition of love as looking together in the same direction. This... Read more
I found Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking a great read. Of course, I may be biased. I am an introvert who makes his living moving from the quiet world of reflection and writing to an active life of lectures, retreat leadership, and marketing, not to mention preaching and teaching on a regular basis. Cain’s narratives of the challenges introverts face mirrored my own experience. It is wearing at times to be... Read more
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