About a million years ago I decided to try Zen meditation. I’d been shopping for a spiritual practice for a while. And in the San Francisco Bay Area of the nineteen sixties that meant I had lots of options. And I tried a number of them. But nothing really caught me. But all the time people kept saying, “You should check out the Zen center.” I’d heard all sorts of things about the master over in San Francisco, Shunryu Suzuki.... Read more

Sigmund Freud is one of the great and complicated figures who brought us kicking and screaming into modernity. Profoundly brilliant and deeply flawed, his mistakes hurt many people, and his insights opened the world of the mind to others. Now, as we take our first steps to some new modernity, it can’t hurt to pause and remember… Read more

Cinco De Mayo is a ubiquitous holiday of my youth. I gather more an American holiday than a celebration in the home country, rather like St Patrick’s Day… Not much observed in these parts. And I miss it… Read more

Today in 1776 my current home state of Rhode Island became the first of the colonies to renounce all allegiance to the king of England. Today in 2010, after a shower, a little zazen and a trip to the local Starbucks for a hit of caffeine,  I’m sitting in the great room at Friendly Crossways contemplating my sins as we await breakfast and the beginning of the day’s program for my district clergy retreat. I also realize if I wag... Read more

Two things float in my mind today. One is that car bomb that didn’t happen in Times Square. If anyone is surprised it is pretty clear they’re not paying attention. I’m just grateful that this one was of amateur construction and fizzled instead of exploding. Of course there will be another. Welcome to the twenty-first century. The second is how in the draft immigration reform legislation put forward by the Democrats there is a provision to establish a “biometric social... Read more

On this day in 1955 Tenessee Williams won the Pulitzer for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof… Made me think of that famous, famous scene… I think one reason it is so memorable, among many, is how we all can find ourselves at the very pit, and crying out, crying out… So sad. So true… Read more

To Whom it May Concern, There is little doubt these are rough times. And no doubt it is important to understand how we find ourselves in any situation. Sadly, one shadow of our human hearts is a desire less to know how something came about and how to deal with it, but rather to simply identify some other as the problem and to make them suffer for it. This impulse is as old as human history. Today one of the... Read more

I see that today is Pierre Teihard de Chardin’s birthday. If my basic math is right he would have been one hundred and twenty-nine today. This Jesuit paleontologist and theologian had a passing but important influence on me. Somehow I enjoyed how in his youth he had something, not quite established, to do with the Piltdown man hoax. In my youth “everyone knew” he was mixed up in the fraud. Even another of those people I admire much, Stephen Jay... Read more

Annie Dillard was born on this day in 1945… I find her one of the more interesting thinkers writing. A poet, essayist and novelist, she has a lucid and compelling style that gives voice to her sense of our great interconnectedness in ways we can all access. As Annie says, “We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place” And, bless her, she has… Read more

And she means that as a good thing… The Duke was born on this day in 1899. Read more