MYSTERY PILED UPON MYSTERY A Zen Buddhist Meditation on Easter James Ishmael Ford 27 March 2016 Pacific Unitarian Church Rancho Palos Verdes, California Today is Easter. Easter. That most holy of Christian holy days. The Gospel of Mark is generally considered the oldest of the canonical gospels, the time-hallowed stories of Jesus and his ministry. The sixteenth chapter of Mark tells the story of Easter in its most unelaborated version. And when the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary... Read more

In response to something I wrote in my last post to this blog someone thinking the Book of Enoch was in the Catholic canon objected to it being cited as a source for something being “Christian.” Setting aside that wasn’t a position in my post, in fact Enoch is considered canonical only by the Ethiopian church, it raised a host of questions. I wasn’t sure if the writer thought Catholics were not Christians, as in the old American Protestant canard,... Read more

This year in the Western Christian calendar today is Holy Saturday. A powerful moment in many ways. As a Zen Buddhist of a liberal sort, but raised and as it turns out inescapably culturally Christian, I find my mind goes to these big festivals of the church. And this week is filled with them. However, I also notice there is a strange confluence here on this particular day, where in the Eastern churches, who will not be observing Easter until... Read more

Today in the Christian calendar is Good Friday. That is the day God dies. How appropriate, as it happens it was on this day in 1811 that Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from Oxford for publishing, and at the same time sending copies to the heads of all the colleges, a brief tract, The Necessity of Atheism. In 1813 he published a somewhat revised and expanded version of his tract. For your entertainment as well as edification, the following is... Read more

I read the Hobbit when I was sixteen. The Trilogy followed quickly. That world has enshrined itself in my heart. As it happens in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, it is this day that Baraddur and the Necromancer Sauron fall together, at least according to journalist Sean Kirst, who organized this day as Tolkein Reading Day. As he wrote, “My grandparents were fishing folk from Buckie in the north of Scotland, carriers of the old stories and... Read more

In some corners of the Christian church today is marked as a feast in celebration of the life of Oscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdamez, usually more simply known as Oscar Romero. The onetime archbishop of the Roman Catholic church in El Salvador, Romero outraged many for speaking out on behalf of the poor, against poverty created by greed, as well as torture, and assassination as a political tool. It was on this day in 1980, while celebrating mass, he paused... Read more

It is claimed that Archimedes, probably in the neighborhood of 236 before our common era, invented the first elevator. And ever since then people have been fooling around with ways to get people up and down without the often difficult and sometimes impossible task of self-power. But, the biggest problem was safety. If something went wrong there was a terrible danger of terrible falls. As it happens it wasn’t until the middle of the nineteenth century in our common era... Read more

The good folk at Wikipedia tell us that it was on this day in 1784 that the famed Emerald Buddha was moved to its permanent (well as permanent as anything can be) location at the Wat Phra Kaew, in Bangkok. The Buddha image has blended religious symbolism with that of the state, and is considered a palladium, the sacred protective image of Thai society in a manner similar to Athena’s relationship to ancient Athens, or the image of the Theotokos... Read more

The old story has it, and apparently it is true, that when the poet Brendan Behan was passing through to the end of his life suffering from the consequences of a life time of alcoholism, his last words were to the nun tending him. “Thank you, Sister,” he is said to have said. And then added, “May you be the mother of a bishop.” Well, that’s nothing. Today in the Christian calendar is dedicated to the feast of Darerca of... Read more

Eddie James House, Jr was born on this day in 1902, near Clarksdale, Mississippi. We know him as Son House. Sometime preacher, killed a man and did jail time, legendary bluesman… Read more