This is my love letter to the servant-leaders of the world. Being a leader, a real, true, leader, whose commitment is to the Beloved Community, often means being the one who sets the limits and holds the boundaries. The ache of leading does not mean you are failing; it means that you accept that your work is service, and you are trying very hard to do it right. Read more
This story isn't about Ferguson, Missouri alone. It's about every city and every town in the United States. It's about the way white Americans have never really cared to see the forest for the trees, have always preferred to hunt for some specific detail that will allow us to turn away, to deny, to pretend we don't know. We need to reach out, center down, and begin. Read more
To write is to share the truth of your life, your heart. To teach is to hold that sharing in trust, and to nurture it. And many of my students have lives, have hearts, of extraordinary beauty. Read more
If I were to write my own ‘prayer for today’ to bring before the Gods or to hold in the Light, what would I ask? Read more
As a Pagan, I learned to listen to the spirit within the parts, and of relationships among them. As a Quaker, I learned to listen to the Spirit within the whole. Read more
Schoodic Lake is beautiful. But too often, beauty seems either reserved for the very rich, or to come with a price tag of grinding poverty for the rural poor. Fewer and fewer people in my culture seem to have beauty in their daily lives. Yes, my grandfather worked hard for everything he got, and so did his four children. And I honor and respect that hard work. How could I not? But how many men and women have worked just as hard over the decades, and not been rewarded for that work? Read more
What does it mean to worship a god or goddess of smiths, but never to have worked with iron or bronze? What does it mean to worship a goddess of the hearth, but never to learn to bank a fire to last through a winter’s night? How can we understand gods of brewing or hunting or grain if we never make our own beer, clean our own game, bake our own bread or grow our own food? Read more
Setting aside thoughts on how lots of people seem to substitute a blind adherence to a creed, and wave allegiance to it like a flag of loyalty, I think there are real differences in how humans are drawn to religious experience or not--and, among those who are drawn to the spiritual encounter, how we perceive it. With the exception of those who would turn Mystery into an excuse for a tribal loyalty test, I don't think these differences are moral in nature. It seems as though they simply are. Read more
I want a Pagan Isaiah. I want us to know, to be absolutely and utterly convicted of the thought, that our gods hate our indifference to the poor. That turning away refugees from violence is odious; that refusing the feed the hungry is selfish and ugly; that justifying it in the name of a spiritual libertarianism masking itself as religion is unacceptable. I want us to bring it into being together, my friends, and I want us to do it now. Read more
Every year, I get to ask myself, what is the right way to live? In particular, what is the right way to live a spiritually-centered life? What would my spiritual life be like on a perfect day? I am running an experiment in perfection, and yesterday, I had a perfect day. Read more
Quaker Pagan Reflections
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