Faith & Life Inspirational Message

Grace and love are two key concepts for Christianity and many other major religions as well.  I can say that I am for both concepts.  I want both to be involved in my living---indeed, my daily living.  I am sure I have experienced both.  I hope I have given both to people.  That certainly would be my desire.  I suspect that authentic life and meaning are impossible without both love and grace.  And yet, many folks probably would be hard-pressed to come up with good definitions of both words and an explanation of how they work together.     That was my mindset as I was re-reading Gerald May’s book, The Awakened Heart .  I have read the book before and parts of it I have read many times.  It is one of those books I always know will give me help and challenge me, too.  I value all of May’s books and appreciate how much help he was to so many of us in the “spirituality business.”  May was a psychiatrist and long-time as...

Recently, I was writing a paper on becoming a contemplative.  Sometimes I smile when I type that word, contemplative, or even say it.  As far as I know, I never heard the word while I was growing up a Quaker.  No doubt, I heard people say something like, “Let me contemplate that.”  I know that phrase meant nothing more than “let me think this thing over.”  To contemplate meant to think hard about something or be careful when you think something over.  I suspect I was in graduate school when I began to hear about it in the sense in which I use it today.     Thomas Merton is probably the most well-known contemplative with which I deal.  In fact, the group of monks he joined in Kentucky are known as a contemplative group of monks.  Their whole goal is to learn to be with God as contemplatives.  Without getting technical, let me use three short sentences from Merton to indicate what being contemplative means.  Merton says, c...

Recently I read a fascinating essay about resurrection.  Actually, it was more about getting ready for death and resurrection.  The story comes to us from Donna Shaper, but she was doing nothing more than sharing the sentiments of E.B. White who began his thoughts about his soon-to-die wife, Katherine.  “There she was, calmly plotting the resurrection.”  White is the author of the famous children’s book, Charlotte’s Web.  This I knew, since my two girls loved that book. What I would not have known is White’s wife, Katherine, was also a writer---the fiction editor for The New Yorker Magazine.  Apparently, she was quite the formal woman.  I enjoyed learning about her and letting her become my teacher.  Shaper’s words described her, “She had a stately calm, a formality, a belief in the future, even if she herself was not going to be alive in it.” I began to picture a spunky woman who, indeed, could teach all of us. I almost laughed out loud when I re...

Recently, I had read to the end of Krista Tippett’s wonderful book, Becoming Wise .  Because the nature of the book is a series of interviews and encounters with people of all walks of life, Tippett’s book is a great opportunity to read a little and ponder a lot.  I have worked very slowly through the entire book.  And I am tempted to turn around and begin reading it again.  It is one of those books I feel I could get even more by reading it a second time.      Her last chapter is on “Hope.”  Since I also have written a couple books that deal with the virtues, I have thought about and written about hope.  Reading her longish chapter makes me wish I had her book before I wrote my own chapters on hope.  Again part of the power of her work is the interview process, which elicits some amazing thoughts from her friends and contacts.  To these gems Tippett adds her own reflection based on her own interesting life.  And to that...

One of the best things about teaching over the years has been the chance to read some of my favorite books many times.  One of those books for me has been Gerald May’s Will and Spirit .  I have often commented on how significant May has been for my own journey.  I am sorry I never met him in person.  He was one of the founders of Shalem, the spirituality institute in Washington, DC.  He was trained as a psychiatrist.  He brought that scientific perspective to his work, but never was captured by that perspective.  He also was a deep spiritual searcher and this came out in so many of his books. The subtitle for the book just mentioned is A Contemplative Psychology .  The book attempts to chart the human search for identity, meaning and belonging.  He deals with basic issues in this search like love and fear.  He pays particular attention to human emotion.  He charts the interesting journey from what he calls the birth of an emotion to...

In a recent essay New York Times columnist, David Brooks, offers some telling points about our contemporary culture.  For quite a few years, I have been interested in culture.  In fact, my most recent book with a couple colleagues---a business guy and a physician, addresses the importance of culture in good businesses and organizations.  In fact, we argue it is virtually impossible to have a healthy culture and high performing teams without character or, what we call, virtues.  Essentially, Brooks agrees with us---or we agree with him. And so I am fascinated to watch him, a very smart, insightful thinker---analyze contemporary culture.  His recent essay is entitled, “Five Lies our Culture Tells.”  He sets the table with these comments.  “College mental health facilities are swamped, suicide rates are spiking, the president’s repulsive behavior is tolerated or even celebrated by tens of millions of Americans.  At the root of it all is the following...

May this day bring you a taste of grace---grace without which everything in life begins to dull or maybe even become overwhelming.  Life and grace is what the whole Easter season has been about.  I emphasize life and grace. If we look at the calendar, we know that Easter is over.  Spiritually the challenge now is not to get over Easter!  In saying this, I have in mind more than just the Christians in our world.  I want to include all humans.  Chronologically, Easter is history, but this should not mean we lose its mystery.  Not to lose its mystery is to continue asking God to touch those parts of our lives, which have become deadened.  It means realizing some days we feel like we have been deposited in the tomb.  We may feel deadened.  We require that angelic visit to proclaim life again. We need to keep our eyes open to the awe, wonder and meaning daily around us.  We can put our hands to the task of creating meaning to these l...

This year the Jewish sacred time, Passover, coincides with Easter.  Because Passover is so important to Christians, too, let’s talk about Passover a couple days before it begins on Friday.  I want to take cognizance of that as the day unfolds.  Obviously, it is a special day for the Jew.  It is a day of deliverance.  It is a day when the Jew knows God is for them.  Passover is the story of God’s deliverance of the Jew from the bondage of Egypt to the ultimate freedom of their own place---their own land. Of course, that history is itself riddled with controversy.  The struggle over the land is a continuing saga to this day.  But that is not the story for this Passover day.  Rather, we need to focus on the essential theme of bondage/freedom.  Perhaps that is one of the most basic human situations.  Passover is the assurance that bondage is not the ultimate fate of being human. Even if I am a Christian, I should take ...

I don’t know how old I was when I learned the word, remember.  I suspect it is learned fairly early---at least early in the stage when you are learning bigger words.  My guess is this word is used with some frequency in households.  I also think it is a word that all normal people use.  It is not a sophisticated word that only highly educated folks have in their vocabulary.  It is a word we would hear at home.  And certainly, it would be a word heard at school.  No doubt, all of us were cajoled to remember the things we were learning.     I am confident the word first is associated with the things we learn and are not supposed to forget.  We learn math and sentence structure.  We are supposed to remember this stuff so we can go on to bigger learnings.  If we forget, then we have to be re-taught in order to remember.  As I think about it, to remember something is a present activity based on a past activity.  To ...

No one has ever asked me who my favorite Jewish spiritual writer is, but if I were asked, one reply would be Abraham Joshua Heschel.  Heschel was born in 1907 in Poland.  His father was a rabbi.  He studied for his doctoral degree at the University of Berlin.  In 1938 he was living and teaching in Frankfort, Germany, where he was arrested by the Nazi Gestapo.  They sent him back to his home country, Poland.  He could see the clouds of Nazism blowing over Poland, as well as Germany.  Right before the Nazi invasion of Poland, Heschel escaped to London and, then, in 1940 onto the United States.     Heschel spent some years teaching at Hebrew Union College, the Reformed Jewish seminary in Cincinnati, OH.  And then he moved to New York to teach at the famous Conservative Jewish seminary, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.  There he made his mark as scholar and spiritual writer.  He died in 1972.  But during his ...

My heart dropped when I saw the first images of the world famous Notre Dame de Paris on fire.  It was unbelievable and, yet, the images on the computer screen were stark.  Flames were coming out of the roof.  The tall spire was ablaze and cameras soon caught the spire in its free fall to earth.  My mind went back to a September day in 2001 when I first heard and then saw the World Trade Twin Towers also on fire.  But even those images did not move me the same way as watching arguably the most famous Catholic Cathedral in the world being destroyed.  Words are not sufficient to describe what we should feel and think. I have been to Paris a few times and every time I have gone there, I visited Notre Dame.  Situated in the island in the Seine River, the Church occupied the center on the glorious city, which is Paris.  If you were to see Notre Dame, you would understand French Gothic architecture.  The architecture is meant to convey the majesty a...

Recently, I was on an interfaith panel with a Jewish rabbi and a Muslim scholar.  To be with the two of them was a privilege.  It made me realize again how much of our time we spend with people we know and who typically are just like us.  That is not bad, but it can lead to a more limited view of the world.  And I also know that we are much less likely to be creative or innovative if we only hang out with people like ourselves.     Another awareness that came over me during the evening of the panel was how friendships like this can develop that leads to working together to make the world a better place.  For example, during the evening of the panel, it was clear that all three of us had a commitment to working for peace.  Indeed, I do think all three major religious traditions---Judaism, Christianity and Islam---have a peace component.  But it is also easy to see how each of the three traditions have yielded some people who would rather ...

One of the very best things that happened to me when I went to college decades ago was the fact I began to broaden my experience.  When you grow up on a farm in rural Indiana, as I did, your world is pretty small.  Of course, at the time I did not realize how provincial I was.  I assumed the entire world was just like my little world!     In that world there were a lot of Quakers around the place.  And in that tiny world there were many Quakers.  What I did not realize was that particular place in Indiana was where Quakers migrated to before the Civil War in order to avoid the slavery issues.  Fortunately, Quakers were ahead of their times on that issue.  But in college I began to get the sense Quakers were a pretty small group.  This was true.  Compared to Baptists, Catholics and a host of other Christian traditions, we were pretty small fish.     In college I began to get a taste of the religious world beyo...

Often I am the one pushing students to define things.  Defining something is necessary to learn and understand it.  When I think about how I expanded my vocabulary through high school and college, as well as through graduate studies, it mostly was learning how to define words.  Regardless of which major folks choose to do in college, typically there is a specific vocabulary that goes with it.  In physics and religion and all the other majors, you have to learn certain basic words.  In my case it was even helpful to learn Greek and Latin because they helped me sharpen my vocabulary.     I realized how important this was as I moved from the church context to the university context.  As I grew up in the church, hearing religious words was normal.  However, seldom did anyone asked me to define something.  My learning was quite passive.  Of course, I usually had some kind of vague notion of what a word or concept meant, but if you...

One of the people I routinely turn to for my own inspiration is Richard Rohr.  I have a number of his books and have enjoyed reading all of them.  I suppose I have read enough of him that I can pretty much figure out where he is going.  But I am fine with that.  I have never thought the only reason to read is to learn new things.  Of course, that is a good reason to read, but it is not the only reason.     Most of us probably have favorite books.  For many of us one of those books would be the Christian Bible.  And even within that Bible, we might have our favorites.  When I think about the gospels, I confess I prefer John’s Gospel.  When I was growing up, I heard people say that John was the Quaker Gospel.  I had no idea what this meant, but surely it suggested it should be my favorite.  It is my favorite and maybe that is true because some older women in my Quaker meeting told me it was the Quaker Gospel.  Wh...

One of the things I try to do in order to maintain some discipline in my spiritual journey is to follow the lectionary of the church.  The lectionary is a set of daily readings.  I choose to follow the lectionary that I know the Benedictine monks follow.  This is a group to which I have some affiliation, so I enjoy knowing that I am doing what they are doing.  Of course, I know they are much more diligent in their discipline.  So I figure there are times their diligence is covering for my lack of diligence!     In fact, they are so disciplined, they set aside a number of different periods during the day when they stop whatever they are doing and join together in community for worship.  I cannot do all these, so I try to pay attention to the morning and evening sessions that they do.  I like the fact that every one of these gatherings include some readings from the Psalms.  I never had much to do with the Psalms as I was growing up...

Recently I have had the pleasure of returning to one of my favorite books of all time, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  This Pulitzer Prize winning work was initially published in 1974, so it is getting some age on it.  By now it probably can be called a classic.  The first time I read it, I was captivated.  And I experience that every time I read it.  Dillard has an amazing facility with words to express and elaborate a world of nature she sees so much more intricately than I ever have seen.     Dillard’s classic is a great example of what I might call, subtle spirituality.  You read her book and God seldom appears clearly and without obstruction.  Rather God dances on the margins of her narrative about experiencing God.  God is behind the scenes.  It seems that God does not reveal as much as peek and peer into our reading of the text.  Dillard teases us with hints of the Divine.  She wants us to read, pau...

There is a poignant story that gives rise to the strange title of this inspirational piece.  The story and these title words come from the first chapter of Ann Voskamp’s best selling book, One Thousand Gifts .  Voskamp is a Mennonite, Canadian farmer’s wife.  She is a keen observer of human experience and an articulate writer interpreting that experience.  The book was a gift to me.  And Voskamp’s words are profound gifts that are so welcome in my life of the Spirit.     Voskamp gives her first chapter an intriguing title: “an emptier, fuller life.”  It is a paradoxical tease into the profundity of the spiritual journey she invites us to travel.  The second half of the chapter centers around the death experience of the five-month old nephew of hers.  The brother of her husband appears in her doorway and announces that Dietrich’s lungs are failing.  Dietrich was doomed to follow into death an earlier brother’s death, Austin, a...

“Miracles happen.”  Those are the first two words of a poignant essay I read by Michael Leach, who is the emeritus editor of Orbis Books.  The story is really about his wife who has dealt with Alzheimer’s for fifteen years.  The miracle came in the form of Maria who hailed from the Dominican Republic.  Maria was the caretaker and also the miracle maker.  I enjoyed this story.  Miracles are not an easy topic for me. I have thought about them for a long time.  I have read stuff about miracles---biblical studies, healing accounts and contemporary spirituality narratives.  Usually the question we are asked is whether we “believe in miracles?”  It seems like such a simple yes or no answer.  And whichever way you answer that question puts you in a particular camp.  Those of us who believe in miracles can feel like we are one up on those poor folks who don’t.  And those who don’t believe in miracles can be a bit smug about their scien...