I was shocked to learn that Kyogen Carlson suffered a massive heart attack and died today. Kyogen was, I wrote “is” at first, and had to correct myself, one of the senior Zen teachers in North America, respected and loved across the continent. And my friend. My history of Zen in the West, “Zen Master Who?” contains the bare outline of his life. “Gary Alan Carlson was born in Los Angeles on October 8, 1948. His parents met in the... Read more

I was driving down the highway. While the radio was on to my favorite local NPR station, to be honest I wasn’t really listening. Then I caught a fragment of a sentence, from a Boston doctor who was observing there were more docs on one floor of his hospital, I didn’t catch where, than in the entire country of Liberia. By the time I focused in on the story it was pretty much over. The only other part I caught... Read more

TO A YOUNG RELATIVE WHO SHARED A RACIST FACEBOOK POST
 A Sermon James Ishmael Ford 14 September 2014 First Unitarian Church Providence, Rhode Island This summer has been filled with so much, some of it wonderful. But, too much of it marked by hurt. Of all the sadness that is our news right now, the rise of a murderous cult pouring like a plague out of broken Syria into divided Iraq, the spread Ebola in West Africa, and for me... Read more

When the heart of compassion walked through the gate of wisdom, she looked into the body of the world and each of us, seeing each of us and the world itself is boundless. And with this all suffering vanished. Dear one, all things are boundless; the boundless is nothing other than all things. Everything in itself is boundless; Boundlessness is all things. This is true of us and our feelings, experiences, and consciousness itself. Dear one, the stuff of the... Read more

Hard to believe it has been thirteen years since those planes flew into the twin towers. In the years following the Bush administration threw away the world’s sympathy and launched us into an endless series of wars, much of it having more to do with neoconservative fantasies of reshaping the Middle East in America’s image than with dealing with those who actually caused the attacks. Today, these thirteen years later, at home we’ve come to be divided even more than... Read more

THE BLUE BOAT A Homily at the Beginning of a Church Year James Ishmael Ford First Unitarian Church Providence, Rhode Island 7 September 2014 A READING Chapter eight of the Tao Te Ching The supreme good is like water, which nourishes all things without trying to. It is content with the low places that people disdain. Thus it is like the Tao. In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and... Read more

GOING WITH THE FLOW A Retelling of a story from Chuang Tzu for Children of All Ages (told at the Sunday service at the First Unitarian Church of Providence on 7 September 2014) James Ishmael Ford Have you ever heard of Chuang Tzu? He lived in China a very long time ago. He died around three hundred years before Jesus was born, around the time the Torah, the first five books of the Bible were being edited into the books... Read more

John Cage Would have been one hundred and two a couple of days ago… Read more

It was a small treat to see that the Episcopal Church has a feast day for Gregorio Aglipay. Certainly a fascinating figure, Aglipay who was born in 1860 and died in 1940, was a priest and fervent Filipino patriot, one of the leaders of the revolution, who led a schism from the Roman Catholic Church, founding the Philippine Independent Church. All the original clergy had been Roman Catholic priests. Following his election as their supreme bishop in 1903, the clergy... Read more

It was on this day in 1793 that “ministers, elders and messengers” from Universalist churches & societies in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, and New York who had joined together in Oxford, Massachusetts at a convention moderated by the Reverend John Murray, voted to create the first General Convention of the Universalist Societies in the United States. The Universalist Church of America consolidated with the American Unitarian Association in 1961 forming the Unitarian Universalist Association. In honor of... Read more