One of my favorite Dharma bums (and I know many Dharma bums…) is David Chadwick, Zen priest and biographer of the renowned Shunryu Suzuki. I visit his website with some regularity. This is what I picked up today… Read more

TWO ENTRANCES, FOUR PRACTICES A Meditation on Bodhidharma’s Way and Ours James Ishmael Ford 3 February 2012 Boundless Way Temple Worcester, Massachusetts Be patient to all that is unsolved in your heart And try to love the questions themselves, Like locked rooms and like books That are written in a foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answer, Which cannot yet be given to you Because you would not yet be able to live them. And the point is, to... Read more

NON CREDO On Believing and Loving Joan Richards 22 January 2011 First Unitarian Church Providence, Rhode Island Text And when he came to his disciples, he saw a great multitude about them, and the scribes questioning with them. And straightway all the people, when they beheld him, were greatly amazed, and running to him saluted him. And he asked the scribes, What question ye with them? And one of the multitude answered and said, Master, I have brought unto thee... Read more

Invocation delivered at the ninth annual Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr Hall of Fame awards at City Hall, Providence, Rhode Island. Once the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr, sang of an “inescapable network of mutuality.” And reminded us how we are caught in it, tied together within that “single garment of destiny.” This evening let us remember the connections, and how we come into this place surrounded, to use another metaphor, by a great cloud of witnesses, witnesses... Read more

A friend posted this cartoon at Facebook, and it set me to thinking. I fear its true about much of our lives, but mostly I found myself considering the nature of religions. It is a commonplace that within liberal religion, and I’m thinking of its major expression as Unitarian Universalism that one may “believe anything one wants.” And it certainly can be true. We’re all invited to the party as we are. But to be authentic to the invitation one... Read more

The Radical Spirit brings us Read more

On this day in 1661, The corpse of the former English dictator Oliver Cromwell was exhumed and ritually executed as a lesson of some sort for somebody. I gather Cromwell’s head was then stuck on a pole and displayed outside of Westminster Hall until 1685, the revenge of one set of thugs upon the dignity of another… I’m trying to figure out the lesson, but it escapes me. Read more

IN SEARCH OF THE WILD FOX A Meditation on the Ways of the Wise Heart James Ishmael Ford 29 January 2012 First Unitarian Church Providence, Rhode Island Text The thought of renouncing this world is awakened. But when this state has been attained, still, still, the fox remains. Daiko Myoshu Let me tell you a story. Somewhere at the beginning of the ninth century, in China, at a brief flowering during the long decline of the great Tang dynasty the... Read more

I had no idea until I found myself looking at Wikipedia’s listing for events that happened on the 28th of January that serendipity is a neologism, coined by the author Horace Walpole in a letter to Horace Mann, the radical educator, politician, and, yes, Unitarian, one of the founders of a church I once served. Some might look at the chain of connection and declare synchronicity, a meaningful coincidence. I would demure. I find this search for meaning and meaningfulness... Read more

So sad to hear Dick Kniss, the fourth member of Peter, Paul & Mary’s trio has died… Read more