Faith & Life Inspirational Message

One of the things I like to do in these inspirational pieces is share some stuff from literature I have read that many folks won’t have read.  That reinforces my assumption that the inspiration I share does not have to originate from my experience and be processed through my brain.  If I read something good from someone else, why not share it?  One such piece I recently found was a little essay by my Franciscan friend, Dan Horan.   I value my friendship with Dan.  He is a Franciscan and always reminds me that I consider Franciscan spirituality and Quaker spiritualities to be like-minded in multiple ways.  Dan is a Catholic priest and educated to be a theologian.  I respect that, but I admire that fact that he can relate to normal people.  People love him and turn to him for guidance and shaping the way they think about their lives and actions.  When he talks, I listen. I read a piece from him entitled, “Rediscovering awe and wonder in the miracles of everyday life.”  I appreciated that

One aspect of the art of spirituality is learning to pay attention.  As I learn to practice paying attention, I am amazed at how much stuff is going on all around me that generally I am unaware.  I realize that I am lucky to be around the kind of people with whom I pretty regularly interact.  A college community is a crucible of activity, of ideas, of dynamics that are not always present in other contexts.   Clearly, it is not always exciting.  There is complaining, grouching, and whining almost anytime you want to seek it out.  And sometimes it comes booming out of places in ways you can’t miss it.   But as I have been paying attention, one of the aspects of life around me that has become evident is eagerness.  I realize I have personally experienced my own eagerness.  If I begin to think about the times and the situations when I was eager for something, I am astounded.  I can push those memories all the way back to childhood.  There are predictable eager occasions, like the coming of

I can imagine some folks will be put off by this title of this inspirational piece.  Some may be cynical about any conference being intriguing, much less interesting or meaningful.  If you are a professional, more than likely you have been to a conference.  Sometimes they are even required.  They might have to do with compliance, continuing education or a variety of reasons.  I have been to my fair share of conferences.  I am a member of two or three professional organizations, all of which have annual conferences.  I must admit, I don’t always find them uplifting. One of the reasons for holding a conference is to bring people together who are interested in a topic---sometimes a broad topic.  I know my physician daughter is required to do regular continuing education experiences.  As a family medicine doc, she obviously wants to choose something that will help her in her practice.  She does not need to go to a bunch of sessions on surgery.  If she is with someone who needs surgery, my

I have the pleasure of convening a weekly group called “Soul Work.”  I decided to call it that after reading the wonderful book, Care of the Soul, by Thomas Moore, which appeared in the 1990s.  The idea behind the group is to be involved with a variety of people on my campus who want to think about what it means to live soulfully all the hours we are on campus working.  My concern was if I only attend to my soul on Sundays and when I have time off, I would never have the kind of life I aspire to live.  I do not think Jesus called us to live spiritually on the weekends and our days off! I know the word, soul, can be a loaded word.  I didn’t care, because I want to use it in the sense that psychiatrist, Gerald May, uses it to mean “the essence of who we are.”  Soul is your core self---the true self in the language of Thomas Merton and so many others.  Like so many folks, I know all too much about superficial living.  I know what it is to portray a self that is not really me.  In fact, to

I am privileged to be part of a few groups.  The focus of the groups varies rather widely, from an emphasis on leadership to ones dealing with spirituality and things that may seem more esoteric.  In some cases, I know quite a bit about what the group will discuss and in other cases, I am one who brings almost no background to the discussion.  Of course, that means I learn quite different things.  Some things I can put to use in what I teach or speak about.  Other things may be quite interesting to me, but I have no clue and no intent to try to make it useful in anything I do.   In one recent group conversation, a Catholic nun shared a favorite one-liner of hers.  She said she learned it from a Senegal teacher, but with a little sleuthing, I also see that it is often called an African proverb.  I like the version she shared with me.  It says that “when a person dies, a library is burned.”  I see alternative versions say the “library is lost,’ and a couple other takes.  I can’t believe

Recently I had a chance to visit my daughter who lives in a different city.  Luckily for me, where she lives is where one of my newer friends lives, namely, Ilia Delio.  Delio is a Franciscan Sister and Professor of Religion at Villanova.  She is a fascinating woman in many respects.  I always find Franciscans interesting.  She is also an intriguing person.  She almost vibrates with energy---which both of us would be fine calling the spirit.  She is better educated in the world of science than most of us and also has an advanced degree in theology.  She is very capable of working at the intersection of religion and science.   A few years ago, I had the pleasure of hosting her on our campus for a couple days.  Her presentations were a fresh challenge to all who were present.  While seeing herself within the Christian tradition, she also realizes she is a pioneer of sorts.  She demonstrates how one can be part of a tradition without being hampered by an old-fashioned traditionalism.  One

One of the many reasons I still like to be in the classroom with students is the chance to help the younger ones learn what I learned.  Of course, that is not to say everything I learned or know is worth someone else learning it.  Some things I know are useless or other things are irrelevant.  I grew up in a different time and place.  It would be virtually impossible to live as long as I have lived and still be the same.  In fact, I am still intentionally and, as rigorously as I can, learning new things and trying to grow as a person. Recently in class, we were reading The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris.  This is still one of my favorite books.  Norris recounts two different extended stays in a Benedictine monastery in Minnesota, St John’s.  While I never have been there, I know it fairly well.  And I have a rather long experience of being with Benedictines and actually am a Benedictine oblate.  In the discussion of a passage, a student innocently asked, “what is a hermit?”  I smiled

One of the lucky aspects of my job is the leisure to read.  Admittedly, there are times I do not perceive it to be a leisure.  It may well be a tendency to think that if something is part of the job, then it has to be “work.”  And if it is “work,” it must be done. This reminds me of one of Tom Sawyer’s one-liners in Mark Twain’s book.  Tom had just talked some of his buddies into “volunteering” to whitewash the fence.  However, it took some real attitude-changing for Tom to pull off this switch of perspective in his buddies.  As the story opened, it was a lovely Saturday morning on a fine spring day.  Tom had plans; his elders had other plans.  They won; he was condemned to whitewashing this fence. Soon his buddies came by the “workplace.”  They laughed at poor Tom as they announced plans to go off and have fun.  The cruelty of the world bit Tom very deeply!  But he was stuck.  There was no alternative to whitewashing.   He may have been stuck, but he was not helpless.  He had faith th

One of the things I always appreciate about being involved in the Spiritual Disciplines class is the fact that it puts me back into regular practicing of disciplines.  I know, as well as anyone, how important regular discipline is.  That does not matter if we talk about spiritual disciplines or physical disciplines, like walking, swimming, hiking, etc.  Of course, anyone who has ever tried to play the piano, violin, or any other musical instrument knows the necessity of discipline. But most of us know how easy it is to fail at our disciplines.  Often it is easy to begin---to have high aspirations.  But then, we soon fall prey to problems.  Usually, one temptation is that we simply don’t want to do the discipline some day.  Skipping one day is not a problem.  However, skipping one day makes it easy to miss the second day.  And this begins to form the habit of failure.  We can rationalize that it does not matter; we probably were not going to be concert hall pianists anyway! So being in

I am one of the vanishing breed of folks who still read newspapers.  My daughters and most students I know never touch the things.  They get all their news online.  I also am one of those people who always buy and read the local newspaper wherever I travel.  In fact, I really like landing in a little town somewhere and reading their local paper.  I read sports pages with names I never will know.  I read about church events, social occasions, and obituaries.  I can feel sad for someone’s tragic or unexpected death even though I have no connection. I like my local paper, too.  Even though it is not as good as it was even ten years ago when I moved to town, I hate missing a day’s news.  Very recently I came across something in the sports section of the paper.  It is well known that Cleveland is a fanatical city about football.  The beloved football team, the Browns, have been pretty terrible for years now…but the faithful remain faithful.  Apparently reality has no place in the mind of a

I was a bit stunned when I read a recent article that informed me the musical rock opera, “Jesus Christ Superstar,” is now fifty years old!  Of course, that should not surprise me, since one factor of getting older means that everything happened longer ago than I thought.  All that means is I am old enough to remember when it came out and made such a flash.  I appreciated the article giving me a rehash of some of the early history which made me remember those earliest days of the rock opera.  I also resolve to go see it again when I have that chance. What I am sure I did not know was the first production of Jesus Christ Superstar happened on a college campus.  Little Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania held an illegal production of the play on March 25, 1971.  The article by Kathryn Post tells us, “The stripped-down, oratorio-style show was an entirely student-led endeavor featuring a physics major as music director and faculty members donning doctoral robes playing high priests.”  Larr

This is a challenging question.  But it is not helpful until we have a context for the question.  In other words, where is “here?”  Unless we have that context, we cannot really answer the question, “why am I here?”  And if we do not have a context for the question, I am confident we will provide one. My focus on the question came with some reading in one of Thomas Merton’s Journals.  I am teaching a seminar on Merton’s spirituality the next few months, so I again am immersing myself in the writings of this twentieth century monk.  Merton died tragically in Thailand in 1968 when he returned to his hotel room after speaking to a gathering of Roman Catholic monks and Buddhist monks.  Throughout the 1960s Merton had become significantly involved in the interfaith dialogue that characterize that age.  It is amazing how much this monk who lived in the middle of nowhere in Kentucky with a vow of silence was saying to the entire world! Merton’s life is so fascinating because he engaged his se

I appreciate the phrase, “the art of encounter,” which according to Christopher White, is the heart of Pope Francis’ message as he opens the Synod of Bishops in Fall, 2021.  Since I like the Pope and think his words are important, I always pay attention.  After all, he is the spokesperson for some billion plus people around the world.  That is a big audience.  I am intrigued what so many of my Catholic friends think about this process and am eager to see what they expect from it.  And so, I want to lift up some themes that the Pope notes. In the first place I am curious what the Pope means by the art of encounter.  White gives us some insight.  White tells us the first stage of what really is a process of encountering is that we listen to one another.  Listening is the heart of the art of encounter.  That makes sense to me.  In a hierarchical structure, which the Catholic Church certainly is, it has been par for the course for the Church leaders simply to tell people what they should b

Reading and conversation are continual helps to keep mentally alive and engaged in the world.  Reading asks for active participation, unlike scrolling through some social media or watching tv.  These can be quite passive.  And good conversation both asks for something and gives something.  Good conversations are alive and often vibrant.  I value both of them highly. All this came to mind recently in a good conversation centered around a book we are reading in common.  Sophfronia Scott’s book, The Seeker and the Monk, is a rewarding account of a knowledgeable African American woman in an imaginary dialogue with the 20th century monk, Thomas Merton.  She never met Merton, who died in 1968.  I never met him either.  But I know him fairly well by reading extensively in his prolific works.  And clearly, Scott also has done much reading.  The group spent considerable time focused on one sentence from early in her book. In a section dealing with the question, “Are you ordained?” Scott answers

One of the things I hope I can always remember is to pay attention.  How many times we hear parents, teachers, bosses, and others tell someone to “pay attention now.”  The implication---and often it is true---is that we have not been paying attention.  Perhaps it even implies that seldom do we pay attention or that routinely we do not pay attention.  Again, this may be true for myself and, probably, for many others, too. If there is one thing the whole focus on spirituality has taught me, it is that paying attention usually is one of the factors in any spiritual growth.  Without this attention, we are left with little else than God’s grace or our own luck.  Either or both would be nice…but you cannot count on either one.  Paying attention is a good alternative. Now I do not think any of us can “pay attention” in an intense, focused way all the time.  It is not quite the same thing as concentration.  There are times concentration is a particular form of paying attention.  For example, i

One of the pleasant things I am afforded is to be part of some groups where routinely people who are smart and have very different experiences than I do share some of what they are doing.  One group has people from the sports world, including professional sports, from academia, the military, business world and more.  Of course, not everything shared is of interest to me or even relevant.  But I don’t know how you tell before sitting with a group and hearing what is being said.  Often, I get a tidbit and then have to figure out how it applies to my life and my work.  It keeps me thinking! Recently I was in a group where the presenter of the day offered some comments about two different kinds of systems, as he put it.  The two systems are complicated and complex.  I have heard of this distinction and even heard other folks differentiate them, but I have not paid enough attention to make that knowledge really functional.  That means I don’t have the information at the front of my brain an

When I saw the title of an article about communion of saints in a periodical I read, I was immediately drawn to it.  And then I saw the author of the article was my friend, Franciscan Dan Horan, so I knew it would be good.  I know a fair amount about the idea of the communion of saints, but some of my knowing is different than Dan’s.  Dan is a lifelong Catholic, a Franciscan brother whom I love to see in his brown robe, and he is a priest.  And yet, I think he feels reciprocally good about having me as a Quaker buddy!  I know the idea of communion of saints is part of the Catholic creed tradition.  Obviously, I don’t get my grounding there, since Quakers have not used creeds as part of our worship.  But that does not mean I don’t believe what the creeds say.  In fact, much of the affirmation of creeds seem quite fine to me.  This is one doctrine to which I can enthusiastically say yes.    I may have gotten my first whiff of the notion of communion of saints from reading the New Testame

There is a line in the book, The Seeker and the Monk, by Sophfronia Scott which jumped out at me.  Her book is a wonderfully fabricated dialogue with the 20th century monk, Thomas Merton.  Scott never met Merton; she is much too young.  He died in 1968.  In fact, she never heard of him until 2011, which one of her mentors quoted a line from Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.  It turns out, that is one of my favorite lines from Merton.  To put it briefly, Scott began to pursue Merton by reading voraciously all seven journals and much more.  But it is also true, that Merton began to pursue her.  And so, the result is her book. Very early in her book, Scott offers the stark comparison of her life with Merton’s life.  Rightly she tells us Merton is a “white Catholic monk who lived most of his life in a monastery in Kentucky and died over fifty years ago.” (2). Her life contrasts significantly with hers.  She shares, “I’m a Black woman, not Catholic but Episcopalian, with Baptist n

One of the many things I like about the Catholic tradition is its use of the lectionary.  The lectionary is a set of pre-selected readings---multiple readings per day if you want---for use in both daily life and the life of a community, if you are part of a monastery or church.  Additionally, there are specific days to honor the variety of saints.  One of my favorite spiritual giants from the past is St Francis of Assisi, 13th century and sometime soldier.  At some point, he realized he was being called to a different way of life, committed himself to poverty and to live the gospel as he understood it. Francis became associated with love of nature and of animals.  I like to see him as a gentle giant among the saints.  He is someone I really wish I could have met, although I think his life would be a real challenge to my own more superficial, dabbling in the spiritual journey.  Along with the challenge, I also think he would be inspirational.  In fact, I do find him and his life inspiri