Truer words were never spoken or written: “The world is too much with us; late and soon,/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers…”[1]  How could William Wordsworth who penned this sonnet around 1802 have known our world so well? We lay waste our powers– our attention, our truer selves, our purpose, our talents […]

  “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness sake; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the […]

  “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” [KJV] Today I am starting a nine-week series on the Beatitudes, looking at each one from several different points of view. I’ll be referencing the works of Dallas Willard, Cynthia Bourgeault, Neil Douglas-Klotz, Jean-Ives Leloup, Jim Forrest and the Message. Let’s […]

I have run from pain as if I could escape its reach. I have avoided pain, tried to block it from surfacing. I have engrossed myself in books and TV and games. I have hung onto, but repressed my pain so I don’t have to feel it. This I have always done. But over the […]

As we begin a new year, we need to realize that the world in which we live today is filled with fear and anxiety, with Armageddon-like exaggerations, with the collapse of so much of what we thought was our democratic system. There is no feeling of peace in this world. This is the atmosphere that […]

Following all the heroes of the Old and New Testaments we aspire to be servants of God. From Abraham to Moses, from David to Isaiah, from Mary to John the Baptist, from Peter to Paul, we have prime examples of those men and women who heard the voice of God and followed it as best […]

  This spring I’ve been reading a number of biographies and autobiographies of Christian men and women  mostly from the mid-nineteenth to the later twentieth centuries; they have taught me a lot about what it means to depend only on God in every circumstance. From John G. Paton, a Scottish missionary, who stood up to […]