The Art of Walking
The art of Walking…sauntering: which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander.
Prophesy from the Hopi Nation
You have been telling the people
That this is the eleventh hour.
Now, you must go and tell the people
That THIS is the hour,
And there are things to be considered.
Prodigal Songs
Because your story is forever changing, you must sing forever.
Because you are not who you were, and because you shall not be who you are now, you must sing forever.
Because your voice is like no other voice,
Because your voice and your voice and your voice and your voice and my voice comprise the uncompromising strength that is our voice,
And because with your singing, our singing is miles wider…
You must sing forever.
From Your Minister
It is possible that the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community—a community practicing understanding and loving kindness, a community practicing mindful living. This may be the most important thing we can do for the survival of the earth. —Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist teacher
REsources for Living
What comes to mind when you hear the word “quest”? Knights of the Round Table riding off in search of the Holy Grail? King Pellinore on his eternal search for the Questing Beast? An ongoing search for perfection, like my lifelong quest for the world’s best lemon bar?
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.
