The Zen way has proven to be the cleanest path toward depth I’ve stumbled upon in the course of my life. It is the essence of practical mysticism, providing clear pointers to the goal of nondual experience, simple precepts for maintaining a harmonious life, and with shikantaza and koans provides two of the most effective spiritual disciplines I’ve ever found. And the Zen way has numerous problematic elements. I suspect that the foremost of these problematic elements is the Zen... Read more

BEING PEACE Julian of Norwichand the Wayof Radical Love A Sermon byJames Ishmael Ford 18 May 2008First Unitarian SocietyNewton, Massachusetts Text We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, unremembered gate When the last of earth left to discoverIs that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river The voice of the hidden waterfall... Read more

After you die…Unstuck in Time After death, you will become unstuck in time, and re-live various moments of your life. Time will cease to exist. One moment you will be learning to catch butterflies, the next you will be using your walker to go to the bathroom. You will live on forever in this way, constantly reliving the sweetest and not so sweetest of moments. Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com (Thank you, Druuid) Read more

A fascinating little think piece by New York Times columnist, and one of my favorite moderate right talking heads, David Brooks. (Thank you Dosho!) Read more

Okay, okay, you can usually tell I’m writing a sermon by how many postings I make to this blog in a single day… Anything to avoid the actual work, it appears. I’ve even cooked up a rationale for this, explaining that this is how it works: A burst of energy! I write a while, fingers dancing across the key board. My brain freezes. I step away for a cuppa or perhaps to surf a bit among my favorite blogs and... Read more

I’m setting aside working my sermon for a few minutes to do a brief wrap up of ruminations on this week’s events. Can’t help myself. So, please forgive some stream of consciousness… First! I’m so proud of California’s supreme court for noticing the inherent inequality of preventing gay and lesbian people from marrying. Hurray for my home state! On the other hand the initiative system in California is a horror, and I’m quite worried. For two reasons. First, I believe... Read more

One of those small errors of historical fact that persists is how Henry David Thoreau produced the first English-language version of a Buddhist text. It was an English translation of a French translation of a chapter of the Lotus Sutra. The origin of this mistake was simple enough. The chapter was included in an 1844 edition of the Transcendentalist journal, the Dial. The chapter was unsigned. The editor of the journal at the time was Thoreau. He was well-known to... Read more

In the middle of the nineteenth century Thomas Starr King, a Universalist minister who had been called to serve the Unitarian church in San Francisco was asked what the difference was between the Universalists and the Unitarians. To which King responded, “The one thinks God is too good to damn them forever, the other thinks they are too good to be damned forever.” While their theologies were nearly identical from the early part of the nineteenth century, both held a... Read more

Here’s a question you may well know the answer to: What connects Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr? If you don’t know, the answer is Thoreau’s Resistance to Civil Government which was published on this day in 1849. Probably best known as On Civil Disobedience. Gandhi read it under the later title and incorporated that term “civil disobedience” into his own amazing work. King was, of course, inspired by both men, and very much by that... Read more

I’m a big fan of Julian of Norwich. While she was never “officially” recognized as a saint, her life and teachings have been considered hallowed by Christians of many denominations, as well as many non-Christians. In the Roman church her “feast” if unofficial, is given a date, the 13th May. Her life is celebrated in the Anglican and Lutheran churches on the 8th of May. Little is actually known of her, even her real name is uncertain. Julian is the... Read more