I was talking to friend who was ruminating on how as she’s aged she’s become invisible, in the sense that she no longer attracts sexually oriented attention. I think mostly she was glad. With a lingering sense of how this also is a harbinger of decline and death. As a male I’ve observed how I have moved into a status somewhere between invisible to young women and cute. It’s the cute I don’t think I really like… Yesterday afternoon I... Read more
In the early middle of the nineteenth century the brilliant, driven, and sometimes monstrous Samuel Gridley Howe, while Director of Perkins School for the Blind, building upon earlier work, particularly the theoretical musings of the philosopher Denis Diderot, and making it his own, discovered the secret of educating the deafblind. His first success was Laura Bridgman, a girl from New Hampshire. She, and with her, Dr Howe and Perkins became world famous. For a time Laura was second only to... Read more
I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the Service of the Living Tradition, where the preacher Vanessa Southern called the Unitarian Universalist community to a new awakening. I think Peter Mayer is the bard of that awakening, the first significant hymnodist of contemporary Unitarian Universalism. The theology he represents in his songs is the deep insight of radical interdependence, which we can find emergent in the twin assertions that the individual is precious beyond description and that individual, we, each... Read more
“(W)hen I say “God”, it is poetry, not theology. Nothing that any theologian ever wrote about God has helped me much, but everything that poets have written about flowers, and birds, and skies, and seas, and the saviors of the race, and God — whoever that may be — has at one time or another reached my soul. The theologians gather dust upon the shelves of my library, but the poets are stained with my fingers and blotted with my... Read more
The question of Zen’s kensho has come up several times in the last few weeks. That’s just the circles I move in, I guess. Kensho or satori are the experiences (although some will challenge, and for good reasons, the use of that word experience) of insight into our deepest reality. While perhaps most closely associated with the Zen tradition, if there’s a natural insight into reality, then obviously it is owned by no religion. One of the coolest things for... Read more
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