Faith & Life Inspirational Message

One of my favorite authors, the late monk, Thomas Merton, had a great answer to the person who asked him what he wanted to be?   Merton responded, “I want to be a saint.”   The first time I read that line, I sat back with the exclamation, “Whoa!”   That is an audacious aspiration.   I can’t imagine telling someone I want to be a saint.   Perhaps, the real reason I would never tell someone that I want to be a saint is the fact that I really don’t want to be a saint!             It is probably true that Merton and I don’t really mean the same thing when we say, “saint.”   Since I did not grow up Roman Catholic, I never had anything to do with saints.   Occasionally, the authors of the New Testament were called saints.   Reference would be made to St. John or St. Paul.   Since these guys wrote what we now call “Scripture,” there was no way I would have aspirations equal to them. ...

Recently I have been doing some background research for a paper that I have agreed to write.   The paper offers a comparative look at my favorite monk, Thomas Merton, and the Quaker perspective on contemplative spirituality.   Certainly, Merton thought and wrote quite a bit about contemplation.   In fact, his monastery in Kentucky is rightly called a contemplative monastery.   Without going into a full explanation of contemplation, let it simply be understood here as a way of trying to live life in the Presence of God.             Quakers historically have not used the language of contemplation.   That meant that I would not have know much about the topic and would probably have answered negatively, if I had been asked whether Quakers were contemplative.   Now I would say that Quakers share much of what contemplation means without using the term or the normal contemplative language.   I had j...

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...

I am working my way through a book now that is quite challenging and very rewarding.  Fortunately, I am reading it along with a group that I lead.  The folks in the group are great troupers.  They are plugging along with me.  They are not complaining---no whining!  I fear if I were using it in a normal college class, there would be some grumpiness about how “hard” it is.  The book is by Christian Wiman and is entitled, My Bright Abyss .  The subtitle is revealing: Meditation of a Modern Believer .             I don’t know Wiman and have to confess that I had not even heard of him.  He is a poet.  He also is a lecturer in religion and literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.  He has been editor of Poetry magazine, which one publication calls “the oldest and most esteemed poetry monthly in the world.”  Wiman was born in 1966 and as a relatively young man of thirty-n...

The title of this spiritual reflection is a direct theft!   It is the title of a wildly popular class at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA.   Stanford is one of the highest quality colleges in the world---an elite school which sometimes must seem like that for the elite.   It is one of those places which almost never elicits the response, “Where’s that?”   And if you went there, you would never be asked, “Is that a good school!”                I found out about the course at Stanford from a tweet on some site I follow on Twitter.   The article that described the course was fairly long---certainly for a tweet.   Some of the material covered was interesting to me, but not really pertinent to this inspirational reflection.   But one focus I found fascinating and, in some ways, see it to be suggestive of the spiritual journey.   I would like deal with that focus.    ...

When I find a phrase or sentence in a book that arrests my attention, I feel like I just found a diamond.   Of course, it is not materially valuable, but a great phrase or sentence adds value to my life and the way I understand life.   In fact, I wish I had started collecting these “diamonds” early in my life---maybe from college to today.   I wonder how many of these I would have in my treasury?              I am sure if I were to cull the various things I have written, I would have a minimal list of these phrases and sentences.   They would fill many pages in a notebook and would be a wonderful reservoir of inspiring thoughts.   Even though I don’t have that notebook, I still go in search of the phrase or sentence that stops me in my tracks and lets me exclaim, “Yes!”             I found one of these sentences recently when I was re-reading ...

Most of the time I am absolutely convinced spirituality is about learning the simple lessons the complexity of life has to teach us.   I am also persuaded that our level of education has an indirect correlation to our capacity as students to learn these spiritual lessons.   Since by worldly standards, I am pretty highly educated, I probably am the worst kind of student of life and spirituality.   I am a slow learner, but I am trying.   For the most part, I still find being in the school of life interesting and thought-provoking.             Since I have advanced degrees and am a professor, I usually don’t think about finding teachers to teach me things.   That is my job!   And that’s how my problems begin.   I see myself as a teacher and in many ways I don’t know anything.   Perhaps the first step in growing is to realize and accept truth as it is revealed to you.   I had a little less...

Sometimes when I am outside, it hits me how majestic and wonderful nature can be.   Since I grew up in rural Indiana, I have always known this to be the case.   However, we live much more insulated lives than people did when I was a little boy.   We live in controlled environments much of the time.   We use air conditioning to keep it cooler in the summer and, then, turn on the heat to keep the rooms warm during the winter months.   I am not complaining and am not suggesting we go back to the good old days! But I do think living life in an insulated way leads more of us to live more unaware.   Because our environments are controlled, we shape our reality as much as it shapes us.   This does not make us crazy, but it does allow us to live in a kind of illusion.   When it is nearly one hundred degrees on a summer day, it probably is a comfortable seventy-two degrees inside.   We have little awareness of the reality of nature.   And we n...

It was a beautiful sky, as I looked backward from the window of the plane.   I was flying from the West coast heading east.   The plane left the ground of the West coast and climbed into a sky bathed in bright sunshine.   There was not a cloud to be seen.   I knew, however, that the plane would be chasing the impending darkness of the East coast.   That gives a person the surreal sense of the day rushing by.             Normally, when we watch the coming of dusk, it is slow and subtle.   If we pay attention, we can sense the late afternoon sun begin to give way to softer light.   And then the colors of dusk come and, finally, the darkness of night itself descends.   As a farm boy, I watched that transformation a thousand times.                But the recent plane ride was different.   And it was at a vastly different s...

It is obvious that the title of this inspirational message is not in English.   For many of us who do not know any other language, this can be very frustrating.   Suddenly we can feel like the outsider.   It might even bring back memories of being a little kid and being left out of a conversation.   Exclusion is typically not a fun experience.            However, if you know French, you immediately knew the phrase used in the title was a pretty familiar phrase.   In fact, in educated, academic circles, it often is used in an English text and left untranslated.   Again if I am not educated, i.e., if I do not know French in this case, I still feel left out.   I might have a doctoral degree in physics and still not know what the phrase means.             The phrase, joie de vie, means “joy of life.”   Now that we all know what it means, we c...

I like working on a college campus.   Of course, it has some drawbacks, but for me personally the advantages far outweigh those drawbacks.   Part of what I like so much is the range of things that go on.   There is a huge range of things that students study.   Some things I know quite a bit about and other things, I barely know what the subject means.   And when you have this many people united in one enterprise called a college, there is an amazing diversity of abilities and talents.   Music, art, clubs, work and so much more make the array of possible involvement feel almost limitless.             One thing I did not mention in the list was sports.   I like sports.   I played sports and I still like to watch sports.   I would be the first to admit that sports in America are probably out of whack.   There may well be too much time and money spent on a variety of games.   Thi...

When some people see this title, they probably assume I am going to talk about some special call to the ministry.   For sure, this is often the language of priests and others who do feel a special call into some form of ministry.   I don’t minimize that, but I have a different kind of call in mind.   I have in mind something as simple as a phone call.            Although people may not talk on the phone as much as a few years ago, there is still a great deal of conversation that goes over the phone waves.   Email and texting have not totally replaced actually hearing a human voice on the other end of the phone call.   As I pondered the matter, I quickly realized not all phone calls are equal.   And I have created a little way to distinguish between two different kinds of phone calls.             In order to distinguish two different kinds, I appeal...