“…without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political visions and our radical aspirations, we are often seduced, in one way or another, into continued allegiance to systems of domination - imperialism, sexism, racism, classism.” bel hooks In these times of daily, hourly, lawlessness and cruelty, I feel battered, sad, and breaking. I believe in my deepest soul that the only answer is love…the only answer is love in its abundant and various forms of kindness, mercy, patience, charity, generosity, empathy, etc. And yet, I cannot help but feel no matter how convicted I am that seduction of greed and abusive power are winning.   They are not!   The global canvas may be cluttered with cruelty and irrational behavior but there are gentle strokes which abide and I choose to focus on blessing them and learning from them.   bel hooks’ quote jumped off the canvas and while I admit I am not sure what an “ethic of love” actually looks like, I believe in the power of...

  In Father Greg Boyle’s new book Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times, he reminds me of a Zen story as follows: A Zen master asked about the highest Teaching wrote the word “Attention” on the board. The student asked is there anything else? Yes, there is…and the master wrote the word “Attention” on the board. The student once again said there must be something more and a third and silent time the Zen master wrote “Attention” on the board. the board now read: Attention Attention Attention. That is all there is… Attention brings us to the present moment.  I am thinking now of Mary Oliver’s instruction to “pay attention”: to the iris, the grasshopper, the bear, …the lessons of an ordinary day, which become in that attention quite extraordinary. Some describe attention as the essence of prayer and hence the essence of relationship. It certainly connotes kind of respect for the dignity of another or of a situation.  Attention makes a good witness an...

  Often when I awaken and am immediately arrested by anxious thoughts and cannot seem to move toward a calmer contemplative state, I remember the Wendell Berry poem and metaphorically “lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.” The Peace of Wild Things              by Wendell Berry When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. But lately that poem has not provided the solace it once did as though my anxiety broke through a vaccinated immunity anyway. I ne...

  “…he marries heaven and earth in the church of ordinary life, here where we all are, with the sacrament of the imagination.” Roger Housden The quote above was written by Roger Housden about a poem describing an ecstatic experience, albeit in ordinary life, in fact on a cold, snowy day sitting in an old chair by a stove. The phrase “sacrament of the imagination” caught me up short. It seemed so full of possibility and hope. Perhaps grace invisible and eternally gifted can be glimpsed, caught, construed in a moment of imagination.  What is actual or real in a physical sense becomes less inspiring than what is felt and discerned. What is factual and reportable becomes fodder for what might be as our imaginations transport us from chaos to peace, from disease to ease.  These are Velveteen Rabbit like thoughts, of true reality versus socially constructed acceptability. I find it quite reassuring to sit with grace and invite my imagination to sing. In that singing imagination...

  “And a little child shall lead them…”Isaiah 11:6 When I think of Epiphany and the dawning of a new light, which I believe is an awareness of something almost miraculous and certainly sacred, I think of Owen. This beautiful, imaginative, autistic 5 year old looks at artificial canvases depicting jungles or deserts or forests, and calls them “maps”. Let’s find a way into the forest today! He shouts with glee. I look and at first all is see are flat green trees and shiny brown painted underbrush. Then I notice the figure in his hand. Is that a dog I ask? No! Ok no more silly questions on my part. I decide to simply observe and go with the flow of some extraordinary way of seeing the world. A few minutes of tapping the “not a dog” on the plastic canvas later he exclaims, as though to make sure his dull grandmother can awaken to a brilliant reality, we are in the forest now! And I think we, he, it, and I have arrived. Something like blinders fall away. It is as though a new way of bei...

  “When the song of the angel is still, when the star in the sky is gone, when kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their sheep, the work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among people, to make music in the heart.” Howard Thurman Every year in that fragile time between Christmas and New Year’s, or for that matter until Epiphany, I try to hold onto something which I thought I had captured on Christmas Eve, some sense of light and love and peace. I water the tree excessively ignoring the falling needles. I stare extra deeply into the angels strewn about the shelves. I replace those tiny window candle lights even if for a day. I am fighting off a sadness and inevitability until I realize in my aging that these desperate acts have little to do with the heart of Christmas; and the heart of Christmas is not confined to one day or twelve.   Howard Thurm...

  Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.   —Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History   I offer bookends of wisdom to brace me and hold me in a place of hope no matter the disorientation. May we remember this notion of time and salvation that we not feel resigned to accept defeat or fear; rather may we rekindle that hope which does not disappoint. I am trying to hold an orientation not measured by winning and losing but by sparks of love and grace.  So let me become attuned to Niebuhr...

  I was walking the property with our contractor when a beautiful monarch butterfly flitted between us, around us, then through us. I felt something amazing inside and stopped our conversation that we both might pause and notice.   Something so small and random had awakened two lives and caused us both to pay attention. He spoke of memories of a butterfly bush which his wife had tended. I heard affection. I remembered my three children’s enacting the butterfly migration in kindergarten. I remembered affection as well.   Both of us were called to wonder. About an hour later on the other side of the house as I walked the precious dog, the monarch showed up again. I observed the same dance and almost flitted myself but self consciousness took over. I was consoled however by the possibility that I might be participating in some kind of cosmic dance by being fully present, more fully awakened. To what?   I suppose the simplest way of concluding is to say I felt blessed, I...

  Call To Worship The possibility that the zero gave birth to the universe, that all our somethings come from nothing, the fear of being alone like that, children of chance, orphans down to our atoms, is mother to the idea of god. God is a dress we slip over solitude, a mask for oblivion to wear, a rule-giver in a world where no flower or bear cares that we are here or what we do. I prefer a theology of silence, the eschatology of the shrug, a religion of holding my wife’s hand for now. But, if the industry of the church is what it took to give me bells ringing Sunday mornings, to which crows sometimes rise and deer turn, I’m grateful for a sound that pulls me out of myself, lifts my head toward sun and clouds, into the up and all, the blue, the on and on of it, when I bend the only knee I have to bend, feel happily small, contingent, and held, by what I can’t say, short of everything. Bob Hicok This poem reminds me of a day many years ago when I sat in a pew waiting for our son’s ...