From Your Minister
Podcast: Download (5.7MB)
Subscribe: More
Lately, as my Labrador retriever has been reaching the final days of a long, happy life, I have felt moved to sit with her and share, sometimes aloud and sometimes in my mind, memories of our 14 years together. Read more →
REsources for Living
Podcast: Download (5.0MB)
Subscribe: More
What’s your favorite Thanksgiving memory? I think about being a kid, and watching the Thanksgiving Day parade while the house filled with delicious smells, followed by making “turkeys” that had an apple for a body, and tail feathers constructed of raisins threaded onto toothpicks.
More recently, I remember the Thanksgiving that the whole family gathered at my brother’s house, how we all crowded into his kitchen to make four kinds of pie and five kinds of cranberry sauce as well as the turkey and sundry other fixings.
Remember
Sustainable Empathy
Podcast: Download (9.1MB)
Subscribe: More
Traveling home at the end of a really hot day, I got to Grand Central Terminal and made my way down to the 7 train like I always do. There was obviously a problem with the train because the platform was packed solid with commuters waiting, tight like sardines, sweating in the intense heat.
I could barely get onto the platform there were so many people. I asked around and nobody knew what was going on and there were no announcements forthcoming and no station agents in sight. So we all just waited uncomfortably, absorbed in our smartphones.
Do You Remember When?
Podcast: Download (9.4MB)
Subscribe: More
The whole time between Thanksgiving and Kwanzaa is filled with days of remembrance.
In the weeks around the winter solstice those of us in the Northern Hemisphere remind ourselves that we live in a universe where light will push aside the dark, where seedlings will sprout after their long cold sleep, where hope springs into the world unexpectedly, unlooked-for. It is a season of gathering for many, and a season of memories.
On the Mend: Brokenness and Healing
Podcast: Download (14.4MB)
Subscribe: More
A friend of mine slipped on the ice and broke her ankle one winter and was laid up for weeks and weeks. As I expressed my sympathy for her misfortune and suffering, a surprising phrase slipped out of my mouth. I said to her, “I didn’t realize you were breakable!”
But of course, we all are: our breakability comes with being human. Even the strong ones among us—the ones who, like my friend, are always there taking care of others—even the strong ones are breakable.
Vulnerability and Compassion
Podcast: Download (1.1KB)
Subscribe: More
The pragmatist philosopher-activist Jane Addams in her first book, Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), examined the great gap that she believed was then opening up between “old” and “new” ways of thinking about poverty.
Addams gave witness to the moral compassion within what she called “the neighborhood mind.” She attributed this compassion, in part, to the recognition among the poor of their common material precariousness.
Facing Vulnerability
Podcast: Download (3.0MB)
Subscribe: More
Why is it so hard to be vulnerable? Vulnerability is both necessary to create the real connections we crave as human beings, and it involves the risk of being rejected for the true and vulnerable selves that we might share with others.
In Daring Greatly author Brené Brown has an entire chapter on habits that we cultivate to avoid being vulnerable. Let me share a few of them and you can see if any of these patterns might appear in your own life.
From Your Minister
Podcast: Download (6.3MB)
Subscribe: More
Over ten million people have now watched online a 20-minute talk called “The Power of Vulnerability.” It’s a talk by Brené Brown, a researcher on the topic.
Brown’s book, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead is also a mega-bestseller. The huge number of us clamoring to learn from her indicates that she has hit a deep vein of longing, both for reliable data and for help with an unavoidable fact that we all figure out sooner or later: despite all our efforts to deny and ignore it, we are vulnerable.
REsources for Living
Podcast: Download (4.3MB)
Subscribe: More
Imagine that you are standing in front of a group of colleagues, or your entire class, about to give a presentation. There are people in the room who can make decisions about your job opportunities or your grade, but more than that there are a whole bunch of folks watching who will decide in their own minds whether you are smart, whether you are entertaining, whether you are the sort of person they admire.
How do you feel?
