Month: October 2015

The Halloweeen inside us

I am getting too old to inhibit my speech.  It began in New Hampshire with truth-telling  and continues now at shockingly accelerating rates. If we do not name Evil, it reigns.  I am telling the truth. It will get you killed, but it also is the only way to live...

serenity

 The etymological root of "serenity" is from a Latin root word which is best translated as clarity.  To experience serenity is to have a clarity which makes a home for the serenity.  It is like the home for rising bread dough which is made by a wood stove nearby.  I...

recollection

  We have this life to live in state of molten creativity. Heidegger said that man is a shepherd of being.  We are given many gifts and our work is to notice them and curate them, not for Facebook or for colleagues or for resumes but rather, for God. Sometimes...

fire

“What do you want me to do for you?” Fighting through the bush, aware, by their feet, of scorpions and snakes – aware at the sightline – the particular rustle of grass made by a saber tooth tiger, early humans made their way from fire to fire. Building small towns...

What would Jesus think? Really.

This morning in the predawn the only lamp in the oratory was the one on the sideboard under an icon of Jesus.  It is the simplest icon I own and one of the most gorgeous for its simplicity.  “Just Jesus.” as my friend likes to say when looking at it. ...

yellow

Friends at the lunch table recently asked me why the bees were dive-bombing the honey at the Campaign Kick-off in September. We had laid out hot croissants with butter, chocolate, raspberry jam and honey from our bees with big chunks of honey comb.  The bees, as they flew over the...

reflecting

Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful. Margaret J. Wheatley The past weekend the cathedral community met to reflect.  We gathered more than a quarter of our attending congregation and we reflected together.  We listened to our stories. For...

presentmomentness

My Dog “Kai” seems always to have a wonderful countenance combination of expectation and presentmomentness. I expect that “presentmomentness” is not a word, but I think it should be. And not a hyphenated word. I mean a real,new word. When my Dad worked in the aerospace industry as a writer...

behold

“Behold!” The word appears over and over again in our scriptures. In the Greek and Hebrew it occurs more than 1,300 times. And yet in English translations the word is translated less than 30 times as “Behold.”  Instead it is given other rather dull translations. To see with the eyes...

please help us

What I love about a garden is the diversity. My mother was British and from an old, if narrow family.  She loved the English Garden and passed that form on to me.  The wild and crazy look of an english garden is hiding the reality that everything is carefully chosen...