Faith & Life Inspirational Message

When I was growing up in rural Indiana, I was provincial.  I did not know I was provincial; in fact, I am not sure I would even have known what that word meant.  If you look up the word in a dictionary, you will find a couple of apt definitions.  A provincial person is someone of “local or restricted interests or outlooks.”  That described me!  Another definition of provincial is a “person lacking urban polish or refinement.”  Yep, that described me. There was very little diversity in my life experience…ethnically, racially, religiously…you name it.  No one I knew drove a non-American made car.  Career choices for boys and girls were pretty clear with little overlap.  When you are provincial, it does not occur to you to ask why.  For a provincial outlook, most of life is a given.  One could have hopes and aspirations, but most people I knew did not have hopes that were very big or expansive. In my experience there were only two ...

Some days I just need the solace of the readings that come from the lectionary---the daily regimen of biblical selections, prayers and meditations that the Benedictine monastic traditions provide.   I don’t think the monks have any advantage over any of us living in the world apart from the monastery.   But I do think the monks have a spiritual advantage because of their intentionality.   They are intentional about the spiritual life.   They weave the spiritual life around periods of worship and work.                That’s probably one of the main reasons I like to spend some time in the monastery.   I don’t think it necessarily makes me any more spiritual.   But it does make it easier for me to be spiritual.   Being in a monastery routinizes my day in a way that feels physically, emotionally and spiritually quite healthy.   On my own it is much more of a struggle.   It i...

It was just a lunch.   It was just a time to catch up, see what's been happening and what the future holds.   That was the plan for an encounter with a friend of mine who also happened to be a student from the past.   It was something I looked forward to doing.   I feel very lucky.   Often I have quipped, after my own kids, the students who have been part of my life are the best thing that has happened to me.   I have been richly blessed.             A chance to get together to have lunch and catch up was just another opportunity to be with someone I have watched grow, mature and begin to blossom.   We always hope that for our own kids.   And I have hoped it for so many students I have known through the decades.   That part never gets old.   It happened for me when I was younger.   It happened for my own kids.   And it happens for so many students whom I have known. ...

One of my favorite stories in the New Testament is a healing story.   In that story Jesus heals a blind man.   If you work some with New Testament scholarship, you soon will learn that healing blind people generally is an analogy to finding faith.   “Seeing” and “faith” make a good analogous pair.   If I can come to “see” something, then I can be said to have “faith.”   So in this healing story, the blind man comes to have “faith” in Jesus and who Jesus really is.   That’s fine, but that is not my focus for the day.   I am more intrigued with a little glitch in that healing story.   Jesus approaches the guy and touches his eyes.   Then when the man is asked if he can see, he basically says that he can see people, but they look like trees.   At that point, Jesus has to do a touch-up, so that people become people in the healed man’s eyes.   What I want to focus on in this inspirational reflection is not the healing story per...

The title of this meditative reflection occurred to me when I heard the news that a loved one of a friend of mine was not doing well.   Commit my spirit is a phrase I have often pondered.   I know it is sometimes used in prayers at the time of memorial services and funerals.   More frequently, it is used at the graveside when family and friends prepare to lower the body into the earth.   “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust” goes the line from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.      Clearly at the time of death, the body ceases to be a living thing.   Literally the body “expires.”   Spiro is the Latin word for “breath” or “spirit.”   When the breath---the final breath---is blown out---“ex”---the body is no longer living.   Many religious traditions hold that the spirit somehow continues…it lives on.   This is one way to understand that we commit our spirits.   We commit them back to God.  ...

I was in a situation yesterday that provoked my thinking about a variety of fortunes.   I understand most of us never use the word, fortune, in the plural.   We never talk about “fortunes.”   Instead we employ the singular word, “fortune.”   But when I thought about it, I realized there are a variety of fortunes.   Let me explain.            I think it is obvious there are two major ways the word, fortune, is normally used.   Probably the most obvious is to talk about monetary wealth as a fortune.   If I am a billionaire, like Warren Buffet, then appropriately they can be said, “to have a fortune.”   Some people really are stinking rich!   Some executives earn more in a year than most people earn in a lifetime. It does seem absurd to me to think that some people earn multi-millions of dollars annually.   It makes my salary look like chump change!   And I know I have earnings above...

“Friendship is an adventure and a journey that changes us over time.”  That is the first line of a group paper the folks in my class on Spiritual Friendship are writing.  It is an interesting project.  They have been a good group, they are working hard and I respect that effort.  So instead of the normal classroom assessment protocol, i.e. exams, we are in the process of writing together a paper defining and detailing what the students have learned about friendship.  The focus is on the nature of friendship.  This is the simple question, what is friendship.  Most people could offer an answer to that question, but I am confident the students could add some depth and breadth.  They have centuries’ worth of thinking from other luminaries of the past.  They can cite Aristotle and Augustine.  They have read people like Cicero and a medieval monk that virtually no one has ever heard of, namely, Aelred of Rievaulx.  Aelred wrote a magnif...