Lord, through all generations you have been our strength and our home. Before the mountains were born or the oceans were brought to life, for all eternity, you are. A thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it passes. You return our bodies to the dust and snuff out our lives like a candleflame. You hurry us away; we vanish as suddenly as the grass: in the morning it shoots up and flourishes, in the... Read more

      The 16th of September, 1885, is the birthday of the noted Neo-Freudian psychoanalyst Karen Horney. I’ve noted this a few times over the years and taken advantage of the moment to reflect a bit on her and her connections to Zen Buddhism. It’s been a couple of years and I thought I’d like to briefly revisit this very interesting figure at the dawn of convert Zen in North America and Europe. Horney was one of a relatively... Read more

Rev. James Ishmael Ford returns to the First Unitarian Church in Los Angeles in a big way for the 2022-23 church year with Second Thursdays with James starting tonight at 7pm PDT!  This season he’ll be exploring practical spirituality and covering a wide spectrum of spiritual topics. His first topic “Finding the Spiritual In and Beyond Religions” promises to be an exciting kick-off to the series. I got a sneak peek of his PowerPoint presentation for tonight and saw the... Read more

      I’ve been thinking about ministry of late. In the Christian tradition there are two general views of ministry, the technical terms are ontological and functional. The ontological view is the high view, it is seen as a shift in the nature of a person conferred by ancient rites. The functional view is that ministers are people doing ministry. The etymology of the word is circuitous but ultimately means to serve. Within Christianity Catholics, the Orthodox both Eastern... Read more

    In the broad middle of the Twentieth century there were a number of writers exploring a synthesis of Eastern and Western approaches to the spiritual life. I would hazard the best known of these was Alan Watts. For good and ill I have to count him among my teachers, if some of that was in reaction to his highly idiosyncratic version of Zen Buddhism. Another teacher for me, if somewhat more lightly, was Terence James Stannus Gray, who... Read more

The McLeod Ganj Psalter RSV, Week 4 Ken Ireland (Ken was Ivy League and Jesuit trained, and for some years a member of the Society of Jesus. He currently lives in Dharamshala. Ken’s a long time Zen practitioner and a friend. He’s taken an interest in my current deep dive into the Psalms project, and it inspired a poem cycle. This is the fourth of the cycle, first published at Ken’s Buddha SJ blog and shared here by permission.) The... Read more

    All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. W.H. Auden, fragment from September 1, 1939 At the time we lived in Massachusetts and I was... Read more

      I am not especially fond of the institution of monarchy. The reasons for this are many. I’m never not aware the whole institutions of monarchs, each and every one of them, are founded upon someone who killed and maimed their way to the top of a violent heap sometime in the past. There is simply nothing inherently worthy about these family businesses and their frequently unworthy successors. With that I’ve not particularly followed the doings of the... Read more

The McLeod Ganj Psalter RSV, Week 3 Ken Ireland (Ken was Ivy League and Jesuit trained, and for some years a member of the Society of Jesus. He currently lives in Dharamshala. Ken’s a long time Zen practitioner and a friend. He’s taken an interest in my current deep dive into the Psalms project, and it inspired a poem cycle. This is the third of the cycle, first published at Ken’s Buddha SJ blog and shared here by permission.) The... Read more

      It was on this day, the 7th of September, in 1911 that Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested under suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa. A classic example of the dangers of being an ironist in literalist times. Apollinaire was a renowned critic, poet, pornographer and the man who coined the term “surrealism” as well as “cubism.” He would come to be considered one of the signal Western literary figures of the early twentieth century. One could see why he... Read more