Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divinings, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has...
Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphe...
Like boats, we human beings need anchors, no matter how tenuously those links may hold us, or else we drift forever through uncharted oceans, scanning every horizon for a hint of hope. And with the chances of being picked up and rescued so small, we ...
Privacy, self-reliance, choice -- all these can and must remina core American values. Yet so too must we remember that other core American value, the value of community. And we must redefine community more broadly to include not just our street or ou...
For Americans, Acts 16:9 is the high-fructose corn syrup of Bible verses--an all-purpose ingredient we'll stir into everything from the ink on the Marshall Plan to canisters of Agent Orange. Our greatest goodness and our worst impulses come out of th...
As participants in a mobile culture, our default is to move. God embraces our broken world, and I have no doubt that God can use our movement for good. But I am convinced that we lose something essential to our existence as creatures if we do not rec...
If we worship another, then we remain in duality. We have not fully entered the path within. Through awareness, we learn to worship the essence of our nature and the truth of existence within the temple of our own consciousness. Our worship is a real...
Do any of us, except in our dreams, truly expect to be reunited with our hearts' deepest loves, even when they leave us only for minutes, and on the most mundane of errands? No, not at all. Each time they go from our sight we in our secret hearts cou...
Dolmens constantly remind us to live in harmony with nature, to live within our needs and not in our greed. It reminds us that we should keep on helping everyone in need; not only those who are right in front of our eyes, but everyone and everything ...
Missing Home Sometimes when we may experience a feeling of nostalgia, and a longing for our Home, it does not really mean that our Home is somewhere out there in the stars. It means that we start remembering our own divine Self. We miss, it and we wa...
When we understand who we are, and how our realities work, we can choose more consciously to shape our lives in an optimal way. Knowledge of oneself is the very key to a happy life. Happiness is not something outside of our own consciousness that nee...
We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we ...
how wearisom Eternity so spent in worship paid To whom we hate. Let us not then pursue By force impossible, by leave obtain'd Unacceptable, though in Heav'n, our state Of splendid vassalage, but rather seek Our own good from our selves, and from our ...
Blame is the lie by which we convince ourselves that we are victims. It is the lie that robs us of our serenity, our generosity, our confidence, an our delight in life . . . For it is the act of blaming that can't co-exist with self-responsibility --...
We can't worry away our problems, but we can worry anxiety into our mind and body. Thought energy is powerful. It's not easy to do, but we serve our well-being best, when we face our struggles head on and accept difficulties that are beyond our contr...
We are social beings who make communities with an urgency, and it is a stern charge to make us take refuge in the lonely world of oneself. ...Racism attempts to occlude our cosmopolitanism (of the songs in and out of our bones), and it often appropri...
I have told the story I was asked to tell. I have closed it, as so many stories close, with a joining of two people. What is one man's and one woman's love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hop...
I want to remind pastors and leaders that we do not own the church—God does. We aren't called to serve the church from a place of fear with our primary focus on protecting our boundaries. We are called to fling wide the doors, to invite to the banq...
In religion our only hope is to live a life good enough to require God to bless us, so every instance of sin and repentance is therefore traumatic, unnatural and threatening. Only under great duress do religious people admit they have sinned, because...
I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. One by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and a...
It is slow, gradual pressure that is the formula for both genius and earthquakes. Life tells us our secrets in these cracks, the way events conspire with each other in hidden grottos. This movement is at times very subtle, over a long time, like plat...
