Making a Fist
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For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past
the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.
From Your Minister
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I began attending the Quaker Meeting close to my apartment on Sunday mornings. Week after week I sat with them. Nope, no awakening for me there. Probably a good thing, too, because I wouldn’t have had a clue what to do with it. But at one of those Meetings I heard about a daylong workshop on Indian Treaties.
REsources for Living
What if you had x-ray vision like Superman? What would you use it for? Of course, real x-rays let you see through skin and muscle to the bones underneath, but they wouldn’t let you look through the walls of buildings to see what the villains were up to inside. But never mind. It’s our game of pretend, and we set the rules.
REsources for Living
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What does it take to become enlightened? What is required in order to awaken to the truth of the universe? How do you go from your ordinary “I wonder if we’re out of milk?” frame of mind into a higher consciousness? The world’s most famous story of awakening is the story of how Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha.
Everything We Need
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We already have everything we need. There is no need for self-improvement. All these trips that we lay on ourselves—the heavy-duty fearing that we’re bad and hoping that we’re good, the identities that we so dearly cling to, the rage, the jealousy and the addictions of all kinds—never touch our basic wealth. Read more →
Freedom Is a Funny Word
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I doubt that any concept has greater currency among Americans than “freedom” and its synonym, “liberty.” It is prominent in the Pledge of Allegiance, which ensures justice and liberty for all; in the Star Spangled Banner, which characterizes the United States as a “land of the free and home of the brave”; and in the words of practically every politician, as they pay lip service to the concept while vying for public office or promoting legislation.
Laughing into New Life (Excerpt)
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Being in the tomb doesn’t mean there is an absence of life, but, rather, the dominance of death.
I see the tomb present in so many of our lives all the time. The longing to be partnered and have children as a still single 35 year old can consume us, suck all the air out of the room. And we are obsessed, all other lights are shut out, we are, in other words, “entombed.”
The Flying Trapeze and the Fine Art of Freedom (Excerpt)
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I’ve attended the circus exactly three times in my life—twice as a child and once as an adult. The first two were the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey circus (under the big-top, the “Greatest Show on Earth”) and the third was Cirque de Soleil, held in an auditorium theater.
Carrying the Language of Freedom
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This year what has taken hold of me about Passover is not so much the story itself, but the very fact that the story is reliably told and retold, generation after generation, at the family Seder. The story is a fundamental part of the language of a people. It provides the basis for religious identity, and helps to preserve the community, sustaining an enduring culture and tradition.
From Your Minister
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In the early 1990s I interned in the Church of the United Community, a tiny storefront congregation in the Marcus Garvey Center in Roxbury, Massachusetts, triple yoked between the United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, and Unitarian Universalists.
Many in the congregation had been through drug treatment. More had been to jail, at a time when crack cocaine was plentiful and arrests of young black men more plentiful still. Many had contracted “the virus,” as AIDS was called there.
