A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness – Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow! It was today, the 14th of June in 1883 that Edward FitzGerald died. Today he is best known for his rendition of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat. In my youth I... Read more
When the rain beats down on the pear blossoms, a butterfly flies up. A Zen koan by way of Dahui Zonggao Butterflies: Reflections, Tales and Verse by Hermann Hesse Selected by Volker Michels Illustrations by Jakob Hübner Translated from the German by Elisabeth Lauffer Kales Press, a WW Norton affiliate Hardcover / 5×7 inches / 136 pages... Read more
Harriet Martineau, British novelist, lecturer, abolitionist and theological thinker was born on this day, the 12th of June, in 1802. She’s always been a favorite of mine. The family were active English Unitarians of Huguenot descent, her father a deacon at the famed Octagon Chapel in Norwich. The family was comfortably middle class. As was common among Unitarians in that moment she was educated well beyond the cultural norms of the day. Of her eight siblings, her closest... Read more
You are cordially invited to join us for a Zen retreat Wednesday Jun 21 – Sunday Jun 25, 2023 A multi-day Zen meditation retreat (Sesshin) hosted by the University Unitarian Church, in Seattle, Washington. We will meet in person and on Zoom. The meditation retreat will be facilitated by the Bright Cloud Zen practice group of the Empty Moon Zen Sanghas. This commuter retreat is open to all. Although some experience with silent, self-guided meditation is helpful. You do not... Read more
Jeanne Guyon died on this day, the 9th of June in 1717. Her life was complex, involved a very unhappy marriage, numerous deaths, and a lifetime of illness. She was also a mystic and author of a controversial text, A Very Short and Easy Method of Prayer. Madame Guyon’s treatise was an elaboration of what she learned from the Spanish priest and spiritual director Miguel de Molinos. Fr Molinos taught a form of presence that entails the annihilation... Read more
Back in April, Jan and I made our first visit to my seminary, the Pacific School of Religion since I graduated with my Master of Divinity degree in 1991. PSR nestles on Holy Hill above the UC Berkeley campus as a part of the Graduate Theological Union, itself composed of Catholic, Protestant, and Buddhist seminaries, as well as Jewish and Muslim centers. It is an amazing collaborative.... Read more
In 1960, while being interviewed on the television show “Meet the Press,” Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, observed, “I think it is one of the tragedies of our nation, one of the shameful tragedies, that 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours, if not the most segregated hours in Christian America.” Sixty years and change later, it’s still true. And, actually, the tragedy extends beyond Christian communities. Perhaps... Read more
The novelist Lidia Yuknavitch tells how once in her youth, “Joan of Arc visited me in a dream—in the dream, I was standing in our front yard and our house was on fire. She stepped out of the burning house and said ‘No one is coming to save you.’” Joan comes to us in dreams. She can do that. And those words. Well, if anyone knows those words, it would be Joan.... Read more
Today is the fiftieth day after Easter Sunday. In the Western church it marks the marvelous fable of the holy spirit coming to rest upon a throng of Jesus’ followers who had gathered in Jerusalem for the festival of weeks. While I might argue the point, Pentecost is usually called the birthday of the Christian church. I have a favorite trope that I cite from time to time. It goes “the spirit lists (or rests) where it will.”... Read more
Today marks the 220th anniversary of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s birth. Me, I consider this a signal event in the spiritual development of North America. And, who knows, perhaps the world. He was a central founder of the Unitarian Transcendentalist movement. For most of America, Transcendentalism was a literary movement. However, in fact it was a theological and spiritual revolution within American Unitarianism and only incidentally a literary phenomenon. I often think of how Zen’s rise... Read more
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