If the notion of living repentantly suggests chronic guilt or obsessive self-flagellation it needs to be redeemed and reclaimed. Repentance has a long and troubled history that has led the scrupulous into thickets of confusing and debilitating guilt. But at its best it is a life-giving habit of mind. Both Catholic and Protestant traditions, as well as many other people of faith. recognize recurrent rituals of repentance as “meet and right” for maintaining spiritual health, right-minded humility, and clarity of... Read more

If, as some of us believe, our country is becoming more militarized, if more people carry guns and feel encouraged to use them, if civil protest is treated as terrorism, if refugees, immigrants and Muslims are targeted for deportation and worse and those who shelter or support them subject to increased surveillance, if more whistleblowers are imprisoned and more prisons are run for profit, even those of us who think we’re ordinary, decent, law-abiding citizens and people of good will... Read more

I listened this morning to the King’s College boy choir singing the sacred carols that lift me beyond seasonal nostalgia into a wider place of mystery and awe. One began with the bell-like voice of a child,  amplified and echoing in the great stone vault of the chapel. After the opening verse others joined him—male voices blended in their particular kind of beauty, supporting that poignant child-sound with rich, full layers of harmony. Choral music often opens up prayer space for me,... Read more

The ambiguity is entirely intentional. Live lightly in the sense of treading lightly on the earth and its vulnerable life-systems. Live lightly in the sense of practicing a “lightness of being” that does not take oneself too seriously, does not weigh the spirit down with old resentments, forgives readily, laughs because the comic dimension is redemptive. Live lightly by consenting and learning to be a “light bearer,” inhabited and filled by the indwelling Spirit who gives us life. Simply by... Read more

Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Kindness” speaks of how loss and sorrow are prerequisites to the “tender gravity of kindness”—how kindness comes from empathy with and identification with those who suffer. When you have woken up with sorrow, she writes, when you see how the Indian lying dead by the side of the road could have been you, you can begin to recognize that “it is only kindness that makes sense any more . . . .” What the poem teaches... Read more

In his fascinating book Space, Time and Medicine, Dr. Larry Dossey explores the way our health is related to how we imagine and occupy space and time. He writes of his work with Native American patients whose understanding of time is more cyclical than linear and how that image of time shapes the way they live into a day or a week or a season. The notion of time as a line, a road, a race to a goal imposes... Read more

“Purity of heart,” Soren Kierkegaard famously said, “is to will one thing.” That pronouncement didn’t make much sense to me when I first heard it. The world, after all is “vast and beautiful” and there are many things to want and plan and hope for. It took a bit of living before I came to appreciate that “willing one thing” did not mean abstemiously whittling down and excluding, but rather being wholly present—mindful, intentional, and aware—in the moment one is... Read more

It’s a question I ask a child when another child has hurt her in some minor way: “Do you think he did it deliberately?” It’s a question juries are bound to consider. It’s a word that is often used with reference to misconduct. But deliberation is a powerful practice and a good measure of maturity. The original root word was librare—to weigh, though later it also came to be associated with liberare—to free or liberate. Both root meanings are pertinent:... Read more

Among the things a poet must depend on, according to Wendell Berry in his poem “How to Be a Poet” is “patience, / for patience joins time / to eternity.” I’m not entirely sure what he means by the rather abstract idea that patience joins time to eternity, except that it reminds me that God has time. And in the order of creation, things take time to unfold in their appointed ways. Among the many instructions to the faithful in... Read more

It was only after I memorized Portia’s lovely speech for Mrs. Matson, my exacting senior English teacher, that I learned the actual meaning of its first line: “The quality of mercy is not strain’d.” “Strained” meant “forced or constrained,” and the line insists simply that mercy cannot be wrung from God or others by force, but must be freely given. No law compels a judge or an adversary to be merciful: the law is about justice. Mercy transcends justice when... Read more