There are activist churches and spiritual churches, activist Christians and spiritual Christians, activist sometimes to the exclusion of the spiritual or spiritual to the exclusion of any action. I think we misunderstand faith when we specialize in one or the other. Faith is belief in action. Faith is a dynamic state which seeks to include, […]
As I look at how we Americans live in the 21st century, I am not sure that we have any idea of why we are here, what our lives are to be, of who we are to become in the larger sense. We seem to live in two worlds, our own selves and in the […]
I only know what I have lived. Anything else, beliefs, creeds, thoughts, proposals, talk– is just talk. If I haven’t lived it, it’s just theory. Theory is just a way of positing what I think is true, but until I really test it out in the laboratory of my life, it remains a theory, something […]
Resonance. Fullness. Vibration. Vibrancy. Consonance. Sonorous(deep and full). A deep, rich reflection of who we are. It resonates with who we are. It calls out from a deep place. It’s an inner bell that rings out our own song. Soul. Spirit. Essence. Resonance is the one word that for me captures what happens when God […]
I am just about at the end of preparing for a move from Charlotte to Baltimore. Now when I think of the word attachment, I just laugh. A move does that to you –it points out clearly everywhere you are attached. I am attached to my house here. In fact I love it. I am […]
I am sitting on the back porch this morning listening to the “clicks” of the cicadas’ song rising and falling in a sort of communal slow rhythm and to my neighbor’s water-feature gurgling. I could breathe to the cicada’s rhythm, meditate to its rising and falling just like my breath, now the volume grows, now […]
A friend or relative’s name comes to mind. When you call you find out that they needed to talk to you right then. Someone is almost annoyingly insistent that you read this book or see that movie. You feel that you should take a different route home without knowing why. Words drop into your mind […]
The story in Exodus of the Hebrew people enslaved by the Egyptians, oppressed by the work of building monuments, pyramids, to the glory of the oppressor, Pharaoh, moves us today. Every part of the story resonates in us—the oppression, the plagues, escaping from the Egyptian army, wandering for years in the wilderness and finally the […]
The riches of the Christian tradition are revealed often in the writings of the saints, for instance Catherine of Siena who lived in 14th C. Italy. Many of her letters exist to this day. A force of nature in her own day, she convinced Pope Gregory XI to return the papacy to Rome from Avignon […]