Instructions for Living a Life

by | Sep 7, 2011 | Uncategorized

“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it” (From Mary Oliver’s poem, “Sometimes”). I would only add: Love God. Love your neighbors. By so being and doing, you will also discover love for...

What I Keep Learning

by | Sep 6, 2011 | Uncategorized

Sometimes, the “right” thing—the thing we learned from custom, culture and tradition—conflicts with the loving thing, by which I mean, the “Jesus-thing.” Here’s what I keep learning: it isn’t loving, if it isn’t something we imagine Jesus would do or say, it isn’t...

We’re All Connected

by | Sep 2, 2011 | Uncategorized

We’re all connected. That means you affect me, I affect you, we affect them, and they affect us. In fact, in the truest sense, there is no them—only us. Late in his remarkable novel, All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren offers this compelling metaphor of our...

The Church and Shindig on the Green

by | Aug 16, 2011 | Uncategorized

Saturday night, when my work on Sunday’s sermon stalled-out and my mind had gotten stale, I walked from my office over to the city park, found a place to sit in the grass, and soaked up the sights and sounds of “Shindig on the Green.” I was pretty far back from the...

Truth for Love’s Sake

by | Aug 9, 2011 | Uncategorized

Canadian humorist and journalist Richard J. Needham once said: “People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty.” By contrast, the Apostle Paul said: “Speak the truth in love. . . . Say only what builds...

Practice

by | Aug 3, 2011 | Uncategorized

Artists of life and love need to practice. We learn by doing, hone our skills by repetition, and improve by training. Regular practice conditions us to become better—more competent and more effective—in the ways of authentic life and genuine love. In her book, Writing...

With the Eyes of an Elder

by | Jul 29, 2011 | Uncategorized

James Hillman suggested it’s the vocation of grandparents to search “for grander possibilities” in children (The Force of Character, p. 188). What if we cultivated the practice, whatever our age, of imagining how a wise and tender grandparent would see and hear others...

Like Children?

by | Jul 27, 2011 | Uncategorized

Maybe this all-too-common loss of wonder is why Jesus (and other wise spiritual guides) told us that we need to become like children to experience God and fullness of life: A young rabbi once said to his teacher that, in the evening, he could see the angel who rolls...

Myth Made Fact, Word Made Flesh: Art and Truth

by | Jul 24, 2011 | Uncategorized

I talked this morning about how closely connected are our capacities for imagination and for faith. I also gave thanks for how great art, of whatever medium or genre, helps us to imagine a different world than this one: to see, for instance, how good could triumph...

Seeing but lacking vision?

by | Jul 22, 2011 | Uncategorized

Toward the end of Helen Keller’s remarkable public career, after a speech at a Midwestern college, a student asked her: “Miss Keller, is there anything that could have been worse than losing your sight?” Helen Keller replied: “Yes, I could have lost my vision.” Not...