Faith & Life Inspirational Message

I enjoy finding pithy or great summary statements.   I just found one in my favorite Quaker book.   Thomas Kelly wrote the popular Quaker book, A Testament of Devotion , which actually is a series of lectures.   Some of these come out of his experience of WWII.   Kelly spent some time in Germany watching Hitler come to power.   He returned to this country.   One of the chapters is entitled, “The Eternal Now and Social Concern.”   The core ideas were originally a lecture delivered to a gathering of German Quakers.             The summary statement embodies so much of what I have been taught when growing up as a Quaker.   Kelly writes that the central Quaker message affirms “The possibility of this experience of Divine Presence, as a repeatedly realized and present fact, and its transforming and transfiguring effect upon all life…”   If I can unpack this amazing sentence and understand i...

The words in my title come from a little online meditation piece I read from one of my favorite authors, Richard Rohr.   Rohr is a Franciscan who founded and runs a Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, NM.   I have been reading Rohr for a long time and still use a couple of his books in my classes.   He is a Catholic who has taught this Quaker a great deal over time.             Rohr always has a fresh way of putting things, even if I have thought about those things in my own way.   He makes me twist my head---symbolic of twisting my mind---and pondering something in a different way.   In a way the title of this little piece is evidence of that.   I never thought about God as a Divine Ambusher!   I don’t know that I would find that image for God in the Christian Bible, but I think the sense of the way God sometimes acts resonates with the title.   Let’s look at how Rohr puts ...

Some days can be frustrating.   On second thought, I don’t think the days themselves are frustrating.   They are what they are.   It is we who decide to be frustrated.   Frustration is an interpretation of what’s going on.   I suppose frustration is, in most cases, a reaction.   Usually frustration boils to the emotional surface when things don’t go our way.   I try not to spend much time in that emotional state.   It changes nothing and it uses up valuable energy to no good end. Nevertheless, recently I had one of those frustrating days.   It all started with a water meter.   Now I have no idea how to make a water meter into a spiritual lesson, so I won’t try that one.   But the water meter precipitated what would turn out to be a spiritual lesson for me.   For that I am grateful, in spite of some frustration in the process.   The story began a long time ago, it seems.   Apparently I have a meter inside my h...

I have no idea where the image came from; I have never thought about this before this time.   Suddenly there popped into my head the curious question, what if I were a drop of water?   It was not raining outside.   I was nowhere near running water.   Perhaps it was God’s gift to me or I really am going crazy!   I prefer to think it was the former.   God gave me a question---albeit a curious question.   What if I were a drop of water?            There are always a couple ways of looking at something: being and doing.   If I were water, that takes care of the being aspect.   If I were water, then I am (be) water.   The “doing” aspect is more intriguing in this case.   If I were water, what would I do?   Of course, the obvious answer is I would get things wet!   So the question is, if I am a single drop of water, what do I want to get wet?   A single drop is not much w...

I prepared innocently to listen to a short PBS interview with my monk-friend, Brother Paul.   Brother Paul has been a long-time monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where I have taken students who were studying another monk of that monastery, Thomas Merton.   As regular readers of this inspirational reflection know, Merton is one of my favorites, even though he has been dead since 1968.   To give perspective, Brother Paul entered Gethsemani before Merton’s death and was even mentored by Merton in the early 1960s. During the short interview Brother Paul used a phrase that profoundly struck me the moment he uttered it.   He talked about the “chemistry of gratitude.”   I loved that phrase!   Gratitude is thanks; thanks is another word for grace.   Gratitude---grace---is the response to a gift.   Gratitude is a wonderful combination of science and theology; chemistry and grace.   It instantly gave me a new way to imagine grace and how...