Another Kind of Knowledge (Excerpt)
To surrender oneself willingly to truth,
to earn it,
in every sense, to allow
a voice to the great unbegotten
mystery and, beyond that,
to listen,
is asking for trouble.
A Pattern So Vast
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I still use the copy of The Joy of Cooking I got for Christmas in 1969. This now-fragile cookbook has memories stained into many of its pages (especially the peanut-butter cookie page).
I’ve always loved how the “Fish” chapter ends. The authors give many dozens of fish recipes, arranged alphabetically by fish—from fried catfish, scalloped cod and marinated herring through casseroled octopus, glazed salmon, broiled swordfish, and so on. Then the final fish recipe, on page 362, just says: “Whale. Last, but vast.”
Finding Our Place in the World
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It was the third summer of my seminary training, and I was completing the required “Clinical Pastoral Education” by serving as a student chaplain in a women’s prison near Tacoma, Washington.
There were a half-dozen of us seminarians there, each from a different faith tradition; I was the only Unitarian Universalist.
The stories we tell…
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…of heaven and hell are not about how we die, but about how we live.
Two summers ago, [two of my children,] Woolie and Zach were badly burned when the gasoline my cousin George was using to ignite a pile of backyard brush essentially exploded in their faces. Being burned in a fire is one of the classic images of hell, and it’s a pretty powerful one. Being burned hurts a lot.
From Your Minister
REsources for Living
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I’ve been thinking about the Days of Turning, the ten days between Rosh Hashana (September 28th this year) and Yom Kippur. Rosh Hashana is the Jewish New Year, and like any New Year celebration it marks the opening of new possibilities, of the chance that we and the world around us will be better than last year.
Indian Boy Love Song #1
Money, Anxiety and Abundance
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Ongoing political controversies about homosexuality and abortion rights could give you the impression that the Bible is bursting with guidance about same-sex relationships and family planning, but actually it says less about sexual morality than it does about financial morality.
The Stretcher and the Swan
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I drove by an accident the other day. Emergency services people were putting a woman on a stretcher. They were tender, attentive, capable. She was being taken care of. Traffic was directed competently around the wreck. Read more →
Summer
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Where I live, summer’s keynote is abundance. The forests fill with undergrowth, the trees with fruit, the meadows with wild flowers and grasses, the fields with wheat and corn, the gardens with zucchini, and the yards with weeds. In contrast to the sensationalism of spring, summer is a steady state of plenty, a green and amber muchness that feeds us on more levels than we know. Read more →
