Faith & Life Inspirational Message

I have paid more attention to the issue of climate change.  Regardless of the critics of climate change, I believe the majority of scientists who tell us that humans are endangering the earth.  There is enough evidence through storms, fires, droughts and so forth to convince me.  Of course, all of these natural maladies can be dismissed, I do believe cumulatively they can make a case for the danger we face.  Combined this is some prevalent pessimism that humans are motivated enough to do anything and we do have a recipe for disaster. I certainly believe in the capacity of humans for sin.  I am a living example of that capacity.  However, I also believe that humans can become motivated to act and to become lovers of our universe rather than simply plunderers. Humans have a track record of working together when facing serious events.  We can think of the American response to 9-11 as an example.   It is with this perspective that I read a fascinating article focused on degrowth.  I am onl

I am not sure how many people have heard of Greta Thunberg, but all of us should know about her and about her cause.  Because her cause is our cause and the cause of all our kids and yet to be born kids in this world.  Greta is the teen-age young woman from Sweden who is speaking about climate change.  She has received immense press.  Recently she made it to this country and has been traveling around speaking about her cause.  In a dramatic way, she wants to save the world---literally.   I am amazed and thrilled to watch her in action.  She is speaking about something that I am convinced is very real and, yet, not popular.  Any of us who have thought for five minutes about climate change has to feel a twinge of guilt.  I know I do.  There seems little scientific doubt that humans have affected the global climate and probably harmed it in significant ways.  As I read the scientific material, it sounds like the ticking global clock is nearing midnight.  Can we make necessary changes to s

In a recent article for a national religious periodical Pat Marrin used the phrase, “holy ambiguity of grace.”  I found this charming phrase a new way to think about grace.  I know grace is a big theme in my own spirituality.  I have thought a great deal about grace and have written quite a bit.  I am sure grace comes as good news to most of us.  But Marrin found a novel way to look at grace and I appreciate it. In the classical languages like Greek, I know the word, grace, means literally a gift.  Grace is always a gift.  We are given grace; we don’t earn it.  We cannot talk about deserving grace.  Normally, what we deserve is justice and that typically is not going to be good news.  Justice tells us we have blown it and there will be consequences.  We can’t complain about justice.  When we blow it, there are consequences.  Every parent knows this drill.    A parent would not tell a little kid “no” and not mean it.  And if we tell the kid no and she keeps on doing it, we have to move

Doubtlessly all of us deal with failure from our early days.  We don’t always use the word, failure, to describe one-year olds who try to walk.  But I have recently watched my grandkids negotiate that momentous step in human growth.  They look like tiny drunks lurching through the living room.  They crash with frequency.  It is funny that all of us bystanders keep encouraging the young one, who has barely mastered standing up, now to take those first steps.  And then, they try.  Inevitably they fail.  And they fail often.  But they keep trying and, soon enough, to begin to walk.  We don’t think about their earlier wobbly efforts as failures, but that’s what they are.  This proves the first point we all should register when we think about failure.  Failure is not always final.  Often it is part of the process.  It is part of the process of growth.  It is part of the process of development.  If the one-year old is not willing to risk, they won’t fail.  But they would never learn to walk.

As someone who has been involved with religion in a variety of ways for more than a half century, I am familiar with the various themes that religions of all traditions must address.  Invariably these themes emerge from basic human questions.  Early on kids learn to ask these kinds of questions.  They will ask where they came from!  Fairly quickly, they will ask about God.  They might have questions surrounding death.  This death interest seems to emerge about the time they head to school.  These are not easy questions to answer.  Even for me, having a Ph.D. in religion, they are not easy questions.  Of course, I know enough book knowledge to offer answers, but often they don’t seem like real answers to those asking the questions.  I find offering doctrinal answers are even less relevant.  People with real life questions don’t need or want a lecture.  And they are suspicious of official church pronouncement, standard answers from some book of doctrine or some superficial answer like, “

Recently I had occasion to speak about contemplation and living the contemplative life.  Since I teach a class that focuses on that kind of topic, people assume I am an expert.  That is hardly the case.  The main reason I don’t feel like an expert is the fact that contemplative living is not that much about ideas and concepts.  It is not like theology in that sense, although it is related to theology.  Contemplative living is as much about practices and how to live life as it is how to think about life.   Contemplative living certainly does contain concepts.  This is true for Christianity, but it is just as true for Buddhism and all the rest.  For example, I can think of the Buddhist Eight-fold Path.  Of course, there are eight points to this.  But finally the Eight-fold path is about a way of life more than it is about concepts to think about Buddhism.    One of the eight aspects of the path is right speech.  Right speech sounds pretty simplistic.  And it most ways, it is simple.  It

Kristi Tippett has a regular program which is basically an interview with somebody who is quite interesting.  Normally, I listen to these as podcasts.  Often I do not know the person she is interviewing, but it almost always turns out to be someone who has something important to tell me.  Tippett is a fascinating woman in her own right.  Relatively young in her career, she experienced what I would call a meaning crisis in her own life.  She headed off to seminary at Yale.  Her quest for wisdom in the world and finding meaning is behind the interviews she conducts.  This resonates with my own intrigue about life. A few years ago, she interviewed Christian Wiman.  At that point I had never heard of him.  He is a poet and deep thinker.  He now teaches at Yale Divinity School.  His background is not unusual.  He grew up in Texas in a religiously conservative context.  After school, he became an agnostic.  But through the process of marrying, getting cancer and other adventures in life, he

If we pay attention to the news at all, we should be aware of how much the weather has changed over the past few years.  I do think it is related to climate change and that it does not portend well for our home---the earth.  I am fully aware there are many naysayers who make fun of this claim, see it as a left-wing political ploy or some other way of writing off the human threat to our planet.  I have no interest in making that into a fight.  If we are going to fight, we need to fight our indifference to the damage being done.   This is such a huge issue, it is too easy to throw up our hands and feel like there is nothing we can do.  We resort to denial---it really isn’t a problem…or, at least, that big of a problem.  We rely on theology---God will step in and do some kind of miracle to save us and our world from ourselves.  Or finally, we turn to blame---we blame the Chinese or some other foreign group of culprits and push for Washington to do something about it.  Send the military or

I ran across an interesting piece by John A. Ostenburg, which is really a journal entry of his.  Ostenburg retired recently as mayor of Park Forest, IL, which is a suburb outside of Chicago.  He and I have in common an appreciation of Thomas Merton, 20th century monk and spirituality teacher of so many.  The piece by Ostenburg is some pages from a journal he kept on a visit to Gethsemani in 1992.  Although he had been reading Merton for quite some time, it was his first trip to Merton’s Kentucky monastery.  Merton had long been dead, having been tragically killed when he was in Bangkok, Thailand in 1968. Ostenburg is not a monk; he is married and very much a man of the world compared to the monks at Gethsemani.  But he wanted to make a retreat at that hallowed place that Merton called home for twenty-seven years.  We can see that in Ostenburg’s first entry on July 14, 1992.  He exclaims, “After 30 years of desiring to do so, I finally find myself residing within the walls of Gethsemani

As a Quaker, I never grew up hearing about saints.  The only exception would be to call some of the authors of the New Testament saints.  For example, folks often talked about St. Paul or one of the evangelists, such as St. John.  Since I never went to Catholic colleges, it was not often I would even hear about luminaries in church history referred to as saints.  For example, it would be Augustine, instead of St. Augustine.  Of course, if someone else called him St. Augustine or referred to St. Thomas Aquinas, I knew exactly whom they were talking about.    As I become more concentrated in the study of Christian history, I learned more about saints.  I understand some why the Catholic Church engaged the process of declaring some people to be saints.  Even though the Apostle Paul in the first verses of his letter to the Romans tells us we are all called to be saints, I know what the Catholic Church was doing was singling out a few people who had extraordinary status as saints.  And I un

Leave it to Sister Joan Chittister to tell it like it is.  I have long admired this Benedictine Sister of the Benedictine monastery in Erie, PA, where I once had the privilege of speaking.  The only disappointing thing about that experience was Sr. Joan was out of town and did not show up.  I did not care whether she was there to listen to me, but I did want to greet her and maybe even spend a little bit of time chatting.  Joan Chittister has been a Benedictine nun for a long time now.  She is a prolific writer and commentator on the spiritual life and the Church---Catholic and otherwise.  She has been a modern day prophet in our midst.  Sr. Joan has one foot in the scriptural witness to the life and ministry of Jesus and the other foot in our contemporary world with all of its problems and promises. For those who think Jesus may not be speaking to our world, I would counter that perhaps Jesus speaks through people, such as Joan Chittister.  Perhaps she is the proper spokesperson and n

Even though I call these things I write “inspirational reflections,” I would never claim that what I think and write in these things are directly from God.  I don’t sit in my chair, plug my ears into the divine wavelength and start transcribing what God tells me in the moment.  In fact, I would not even want that if I could have it.  I don’t even want to make fun of that process.  Actually I can believe some folks are that immediately in touch with God, they do get something like direct messages.  I am ok with God working that way.  And I think I have known people who may well be so pure and connected with the Spirit, God does not need to mess around with indirect media to get the divine message across.  But I am not one of those folks.  I look for inspiration in all sorts of places.  I try to keep my eyes and ears open.  I stay as aware as I can.  Whatever I read qualifies as a possible divine resource.  People with whom I talk may turn out to be angels with a mission to give me a mes

I lived long enough and taught long enough, I recognize for myself, at least, there are some basic human truths.  I am not bold enough to claim I know these truths are truths for everyone, but I also know they are true for me.  And they are true for many of the people I spend time with---students, coaches and so forth.  What this means in some ways is life efficiency.  It seems funny to write that, because in many ways I am not very concerned about efficiency.  But by life efficiency I mean I don’t spend time anymore wondering if these things are true for me.    I can give you three examples of human truths for me.  These three come from the work of Gerald May, the late psychiatrist and long-time teacher at Shalem, the spirituality center in Washington, DC.  May says that humans aim for three things in life: identity, meaning and belonging.  I have thought about that quite a bit and I concur.  It is true for me personally and it seems true for many with whom I spend time.  There is not

Recently I shared some of Sister Joan Chittister’s reflection in an essay she wrote on the options for Benedictines in our world today.  She contrasts two books on that topic.  One book by Rod Dreher suggests that the Benedictine monastic tradition is a withdrawal from a crazy, often sinful, world.  Essentially, Chittister does not agree.  I think she is correct; I have read Dreher’s book.  It is an interesting take on the monastic tradition, but Chittister is a world-famous Benedictine, so I fully trust her.  The other book is a forthcoming work by Patrick Henry, whom I know and trust. Chittister’s essay is partly a review of the two books and partly reflections on her own experience of being Benedictine in the world.  One of the things I shared in my previous blog was her take on community.  She tells us that community “in Benedictine terms, is not a synonym for conformity, not a recipe for perfection, but a lifeline to the better.”  I liked this so much that I entitled my piece, “Li

Whenever Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister writes or says something, I pay attention.  Chittister has been a spiritual witness and prophet in our midst for decades.  A member of the Benedictine community in Erie, she has lived the life.  St Benedict lived in the sixth century, so his founding of monasteries began a fifteen-century experiment.  But Chittister has never been stuck in a little monastery in the countryside oblivious to what is going on in the world.  Benedictine monks aren’t like that.  Other kinds of monks do tend to withdraw from the world and get on with their agenda with God. I have spent a little time at her monastery.  I even spoke there one time to a nice crowd, but I don’t think the good Sister bothered to come that night!  She probably was doing something more important to make the world a better place.  It did not matter to me.  I love being with the Benedictines and experiencing their hospitality.  It was evident in my stay there that the Spirit of God also res

Recently, I read a line from Harvard’s President, Larry Bacow.  At the moment it seemed profound and worth sharing.  He said, “A leader can plan…but not predict.”  (27)  My immediate response was to agree, but I realized I needed some time to sit with that and ponder it. I would like to do that here.  I may well take the short sentence in directions Bacow would not have considered, but that’s what good quotations are supposed to elicit.  Clearly, Bacow is talking about leaders.  It is also clear he has himself in mind, but he is smart enough to know all the other leaders are in the same boat.  Surely, it is the responsibility of leaders to plan.  In most cases they are running businesses or non-profit organizations---all of whom want to survive and thrive in the years and decades ahead.  Because virtually all my adult life I have worked for non-profit organizations, I think even better planning is typically in order.  Most non-profits are scrambling to make it a few more months or year

I have been doing quite a bit of reading for the work my co-authors are engaged with writing a new book.  Writing a book is a dual process of bringing together some of the things I already know along with reading and researching to learn new things to add to the mix.  It is an interesting process and provokes me to think about the learning process itself.   I think there are two forms of things we know---hence have learned.  Some things we know are simply good to know---for no other reason.  An example of this is the fact that we are loved.  For me this is theologically true---God loves all of us without qualification.  There is no ulterior reason for this.  It is just simply true for me.  I cannot prove it, but I have learned it is true.  The other form of learning is the things we know in order to be able to do something.  This includes all sorts of practical things. And it includes things like the skills we have learned in order to do our jobs. We know we send our kids to school so

There are many reasons I still enjoy teaching.  It is not normal for people my age to have so many friends in their late teens and early twenties.  If they knew how old I was, they would walk out of the classroom!  I think I have learned a few things over the years.  Mostly what I have learned is things I should not do.  For example, don’t give advice unless you are asked.  Even though I think I know some important things they should know and I should tell them, they don’t want to hear it.  It is ok to share some points if they ask.  But don’t sit around waiting for them to ask!  Other things I have learned include not talking about what it was like when I was their age.  Again, they simply don’t care.  Or worse, they really don’t want to know what it was like when you were their age.  I can appreciate for many of them now, they were born in the twenty-first century.  More and more were not even born when 9-11 happened.  Of course, all of us older folks can’t believe that, but that is