Deviation

 Progress is not possible without deviation.

-- Frank Zappa

Legacy Issues & Need for Admiration

I've noticed...I tend to struggle with people who seem pre-occupied with their legacy or their need to be admired, especially those who operate with dogmatism or imposing personalities.

Mystery of Poverty

The mystery of poverty is that by sharing in it, making ourselves poor in giving to others, we increase our knowledge of and belief in love.

-- Dorothy Day

For Those That Need To See It Again

Falling Leaves

How beautifully they go to their graves! How gently lay themselves down and turn to mould! — painted of a thousand hues, and fit to make the beds of us living. So they troop to their last resting-place, light and frisky. They put on no weeds, but merrily they go scampering over the earth, selecting the spot, choosing a lot, ordering no iron fence, whispering all through the woods about it — some choosing the spot where the bodies of men are mouldering beneath, and meeting them half-way. How many flutterings before they rest quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to dust and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die. One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully and as ripe — with such an Indian-summer serenity will shed their bodies, as they do their hair and nails. 

-- Henry David Thoreau

Thanks

'Poem for the week' -- "Thanks":

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

-- W. S. Merwin - 1927-2019

Our Abundance

Not what we have, but what we enjoy constitutes our abundance.

-- Jean Antoine Petit-Senn

A while back, this thought captured my imagination:

Gratitude turns what we have into enough.

-- Melody Beattie

There is a deception in maintaining our perception that abundance is primarily about more.  The reality is, it isn't.  It is about acknowledging what we have, rather than striving for what we don't have.  Abundance isn’t about quantity — it is about our understanding of enough.

As we meet people, we can tell who has learned this truth.  This Thanksgiving, I want to be increasingly one of those people who has learned about and is grateful for enough.

What I have been given is all that matters.  Feeling a need to get more seems only to diminish my ability to be thankful.  I really have everything I need, not to mention so much of what I also want.  The shift from needing more to acknowledging what I already have changes much of my perspective.

What we have is enough.  It is from there that we are able to truly appreciate and enjoy both it and life — this is true abundance.

Thankfulness Is Like A Muscle

The practice of gratitude teaches us, as the theologian Christine D. Pohl put it, “the giftedness of our total existence.” This posture of receptiveness — living as the thankful beneficiary of gifts — is the path of joy because it reminds us that we do not have to be the makers and sustainers of our life. Gratitude is how we embrace beauty without clutching it so tightly that we strangle it.  Most of the best things in life can only be received and held with open hands. 

“Even in these lowly lovelinesses,” says the title character Thomas Wingfield in George MacDonald’s novel, “there is a something that has its root deeper than your pain; that, all about us, in earth and air, wherever eye or ear can reach, there is a power ever breathing itself forth in signs, now in a daisy, now in a wind waft, a cloud, a sunset, a power that holds constant and sweetest relation with the dark and silent world within us.”

Feeling grateful does not always happen naturally. Thankfulness is something like a muscle we can exercise. Just as we can cultivate ingratitude, entitlement, bitterness or cynicism, we can foster gratitude, appreciative humility, delight and joy.

-- Tish Harrison Warren, NY Times Newsletters

Together

In the US, Thanksgiving is right around the corner. Despite what you might see around you, it’s not a holiday that exists to mark the beginning of shopping season. It celebrates the harvest, and in the original glossed-over telling, celebrates the connections between people from different backgrounds and cultures.

And each year, we get another chance to make that version true. Every day, in fact.

Two thoughts as you begin to plan your celebration (wherever you are, and whatever day you have it.)

First, I hope you’ll consider the free Thanksgiving Reader. It’s a PDF you can print and share at the event. For years, people have been using it to go around the table and give friends and family a chance to speak and connect. I’m thrilled that it’s already touched more than a million people.

 -- Seth Godin, Together

As I read this recently, it struck me that perhaps this is the only way out of what we might term things like cultural-divides.  Until we can we see what we are grateful for again in each other, we may not be able to move on towards something constructive about what it means to maintain a society.  Obviously, the first Thanksgiving was about the connections between people from different backgrounds and cultures — a reality that persists even to today.

What does it take for us (me) to see others as something we are grateful for?  And, to get beyond just the merits of the concept, perhaps I need to ask myself who in my life do I not see through a lens of gratitude?

Kind of Energy

Ever noticed...that gratitude is a kind of energy — both tapping into it and creating it?

Make Space...To Recognize

All that we are looking for in life—all the happiness, contentment, and peace of mind—is right here in the present moment. Our very own awareness is itself fundamentally pure and good. The only problem is that we get so caught up in the ups and downs of life that we don’t take the time to pause and notice what we already have.

Don’t forget to make space in your life to recognize the richness of your basic nature, to see the purity of your being and let its innate qualities of love, compassion, and wisdom naturally emerge. Nurture this recognition as you would a small seedling. Allow it to grow and flourish. . . .

-- Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

Isn't this the heart of what we are doing when we give thanks?

Randoms...

Self-righteous people, in general, don’t seem very happy…or enjoyable.

We spend so much time trying to be what we think we need to be, in order to be loved.

It is imagination that changes things, that changes us.

Though it may occasionally happen, the purpose of art is not commercial success — to the degree that is true, wouldn't that apply as well to the purpose of human existence? 

Prior Randoms...

Wealth

AXIOS

The Morning

Visual: Mirror

Visual - "Mirror"

Winona Lake, IN

Remove A Layer

Once upon a time, there was a young girl named Ars whose family fell on hard times.

Desperate, Ars' parents betrothed her to a wealthy but hideous dragon to secure her dowry.

Ars despaired. "How can I spend the rest of my life with such a horrid creature?" she cried.

With nowhere else to turn, Ars went to her elderly grandmother to seek her advice.

Her grandmother, with a kind and knowing smile, told her:

"My dear, here's what you must do. Before you consummate the marriage, secretly put on ten wedding gowns and make a deal with your new husband.

Tell him that for each dress you remove, he has to remove a layer of his scales."

Bewildered but faced with no other choice, Ars decided to follow her grandmother's instructions.

When she made her request of the dragon on their wedding night, he was confused but agreed. He peeled off the first layer of his scaly skin, and though it felt uncomfortable, he didn't experience much discomfort.

But with each layer the dragon removed, the pain increased until he roared and wept.

Finally, after he removed the tenth and last layer of his scaly skin, Ars was astonished. Lo and behold! There, before her, stood a handsome prince!

I love this story. It reveals a fundamental truth about the spiritual path and the uncovering of our hidden goodness.

It hurts!

It's painful to remove the darker aspects of our personality that hide our essential beauty. But if we're brave and stay the course, the reward is great. We will uncover our true nature that was there all along!

Wherever you might be in this process, I pray you have the strength to press on and to accept that pain is part of the journey of growth and healing.

The road toward becoming the highest expression of who we are is both glorious and painful. But don't give up! It's worth it!

-- Ian Morgan Cron

Curiosity > Certainty

Instagram: aaronieq

Many of my regrets are from jumping to certainty about that which I was only beginning to understand. 

Curiosity > Certainty 

-- Aaron Niequest

LT: Being Positive

Being positive in a negative situation is not naive, it is leadership.

-- Ralph Marston

Religion, Faith, and Spirituality

I’m wondering...how religion, faith, and spirituality are unique, even as they also overlap or inter-relate.  

I probably used to assume that these were all just different words for a fairly common thing.  Now I'm not so sure.

I think I can see each distinctly now, each with the possibility of contributing to the other, but not necessarily doing so.

While the theory involved may be captivating (it is to me, at least), I suspect my experience with each is more personal (as most things are).

Faith for me has probably been more religion than I had realized.  But, once I saw the religion of it, I wanted to distance myself from it.  Spirituality, then, became the outlet, the alternative...the way for me to retain something deeply embedded within me about faith.  But, it too began to feel like, though a necessary reality-check, something that in and of itself was not enough.  

To be honest, I am still exploring some of the range of spirituality, as awareness seems to strike much closer to the center of what all this is about.  

But, faith stills feels like it, in some ways, stands alone.  There is likely a partnership in all three, but there is also a center and that center has something to do with the deepest sense of trust that we have (or need to have).  It is, in that way, a faith that there is something to be trusted.  Something that I need to trust; something that is greater than even my capacity to do it.

So, the question emerges for me is, what is it that I have faith in?  Especially, if it is no longer a given that it is something represented (at least exclusively) by religion.  If faith is the substance of what is,  spirituality is perhaps the means of accessing that it — the substance of what I trust in.  

At the end of day, it comes down to what I believe, not because of what someone says I should believe in, but because of what the spirit of existence, and my own existence, leaves me with.  And that is a sense of what is true about reality and my particular co-existence with it.  Essentially, we believe what we're trusting in.  That, to me, feels like what faith is — what my faith is and how that faith is compatible with the faith of others, who trust something bigger than what may be believed at any given moment.

Religion, it seems to me, is what brought me to my faith.  And, I suspect that as my faith continues to evolve and grow, through my experience with the spiritual nature of all things, I will in some unexpected way contribute to a better and more wholistic kind of religion.  

For People Who Do Not Know The Way

In Christ, we see an image of a God who is not armed with lightning bolts but with basin and towel, who spewed not threats but good news for all, who rode not a warhorse but a donkey, weeping in compassion for people who do not know the way of peace. 

-- Brian McLaren

Randoms...

Sometimes it looks like nearly everything about life involves negotiation.

There's nothing quite like threat to create...attention, focus, etc.

Truth doesn't seem particularly interested in our approval.

Divisiveness sells — why is that so hard to remember?

Prior Randoms...

Schools Health & Safety Priorities

AXIOS

But, at some cost:  Teacher burnout leaves schools scrambling

Venetian Siesta

Poetry, like nothing else, can grasp the spirit of something we all resonate with before it gets away.

'Poem for the week' -- "Venetian Siesta":

I know I’m getting away with a crime

stretched out on the couch

and listening to rain

making a hole in the afternoon

through which I can drift slowly away

for sleep is sometimes

just as delicious

as white polenta and grilled angle fish.

So I give up my hands,

my tears and my face,

the smells of tar,

damp rope and mud,

the late slanted light of November

rippling below on the gondola wood

and then I count backwards from 27

trying to pretend I’m Wallace Stevens

he of the freakish intellect

and the taste of a ruthless

wandering gourmet

who rummages in the mystical kitchen

in search of oranges and café espresso

or a blown glass peacock

or a Byzantine horse

cast in some delicate metal.

He speaks of the world,

how it’s changed by art

and bread you can’t eat

powdered with light

where someone is toasting

their mother’s health

and someone is writing a letter to death

which makes things beautiful

in its way

and also makes everyone the same

as laughter does

or the late autumn rain.

-- Joseph Millar

On Veterans Day

Our Veterans Day falls on what used to be called Armistice Day. On that day in 1918, the major fighting of World War I ended.

My grandfather fought in France in WWI, but when I think of that horrific, interminable conflict, and all that it says about war, I think not of him, but of George Lawrence Price.

In 1918, Price was a private serving with Company A of the 28th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in Belgium. Along with all the other exhausted soldiers, Price had heard that their leaders had negotiated for the guns in Europe to fall silent once and for all on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The soldiers hardly dared to hope the peace would really come to pass.

As the moment of the armistice approached, a few soldiers continued to skirmish, and Price's company set out to take control of the small town of Havre. As they crossed a canal to their target, a German gunner hidden in a row of houses tried to stop them. Once safely across, just ten minutes before the armistice, the Canadian patrol began to look for the German soldier who had harassed them. They found no one but civilians in the first two homes they searched. And then, as they stepped back into the street, a single shot hit Price in the chest. He fell into the arms of his comrade, who pulled him back into the house they had just left. As Price died, German soldiers cleared their guns in a last burst of machine-gun fire that greeted the armistice.

Price’s life ended just two minutes before the Great War was over.

Even at the time, Price’s death seemed to symbolize the pointless slaughter of WWI. When an irony of history put Price in the same cemetery as the first Allied soldier to die in the conflict, disgusted observers commented that the war had apparently been fought over a half-mile of land. In the years after the war ended, much was made of George Price, the last soldier to die in the Great War.

But ever since I learned Price’s story, I have been haunted by the unknown story of the German sniper who killed him. What made that man take that one last life, two minutes before the war ended? Was it rage? Fear? Had the war numbed him into a machine that simply did its job? Or was it a final, deadly act of revenge against a world that had changed beyond his reckoning?

And what did the knowledge that he had stolen another man’s future—legally, but surely immorally—do to the man who pulled that trigger? He went back to civilian life and blended into postwar society, although the publicity given to Price's death meant that he must have known he was the one who had taken that last, famous life in the international conflagration. The shooter never acknowledged what he had done, or why.

Price became for the world a heartbreaking symbol of hatred’s sheer waste. But the shooter? He simply faded into anonymity, becoming the evil that men do

-- Heather Cox Richardson

Don't Care

Another lingering reflection, from a recent Randoms...:

When people don’t pay attention to us, why is it so easy to believe that they don’t care? 

Has this ever happened to you?

Perhaps you had to sneak into it by catching yourself claiming something like no one cares about me.  Why is it easier to portray something as extreme, than it is to simply acknowledge that you want something — something as simple as a little attention (maybe you want way more than...a little — which may be another issue)?

More often than not, isn't it just true that most people are simply more focused on their own concerns?

In spite of not wanting to admit it, truth be told, I am...more focused on my life (than on yours).  I'm even sorry about that (sometimes).

Sure, people should pay more attention to others (than to themselves, given our propensity to self-obsess ).  But, they just don't.  We just don't.

In some cases at least, if that secret were to actually still get out somehow, people would actually see their transgression and ask you a question, about your life (or, anything, for that matter).  They would actually feel bad, that such an accusation could possibly be true.  They would want to make it right (even if they didn't need to, or shouldn't...).

That's probably not the biggest issue here.  The bigger one probably is closer to what I do with it — with why I reach the conclusions I do...about others.  Especially one like that — that they don't care.

It really isn't as personal as we are tempted to believe it is.  But, we can make it seem like more than it is.  We might even twist it up a bit further with a version of no one cares about me...in order to increase the chances of getting something what we want — in this case, just some attention once in a while.

For some reason, it's often not easy to simply be vulnerable and express our need or desire.  But, look at what happens (the conclusions we can reach) when we don't.  Perhaps, more beautifully, consider what happens when we do.

Never Tasted It

The only ones who fear failure are those who have never tasted it.

-- Simon Sinek

Short-Term

I've noticed...recently, how short-term my sense of vision is — in other words how quickly I tend to lose it...often in just a matter of days (sometimes, hours).

Maybe that hasn't really changed or maybe it has....

Compassion Changes Everything

Compassion changes everything. Compassion heals. Compassion mends the broken and restores what has been lost. Compassion draws together those who have been estranged or never even dreamed they were connected. Compassion pulls us out of ourselves and into the heart of another, placing us on holy ground where we instinctively take off our shoes and walk in reverence. Compassion springs out of vulnerability and triumphs in unity.

-- Judy Cannato

Only people at home in such a spacious place can take on the social illnesses of their time, and even the betrayal of friends, and not be destroyed by cynicism or bitterness.

-- Richard Rohr

We're Going To Hear A Lot More Of This

AXIOS

Randoms...from Others

We cannot be empathetic only to our allies. We cannot allow fear of law enforcement excess to deprive fellow citizens of the protection they need. And we have to recognize both that threats and harassment are always wrong and that in our present moment they’re especially dangerous. Our nation is playing with fire. It’s imperative that it stop now, or the angry and the cruel will ignite a blaze that we cannot contain.

-- David French

The beauty is that through disappointment you can gain clarity, and with clarity comes conviction and true originality. 

 -- Conan O'Brien

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. Grace is the glue.

-- Eugene O’Neill

When I grow up, I’m gonna look up from my phone and see my life.

-- Phoebe Bridgers

...find the thread? (Prior Randoms...from Others).

Visual: Fire of Fall

Visual - "Fire of Fall" 

Pierceton, IN

From a photo essay of sorts I ended up with one recent Saturday morning.

People Are Waiting

Comparison is a thief of creativity. Somehow we judge ourselves by the best in others and the worst in us when, in fact, people are waiting on what we have to offer.

-- Danté Stewart

Don't wait. The time will never be just right.

-- Napoleon Hill

Digestible

How does information impact us?

How has that changed?

It seems to me that information, in the end, has to be digestible; otherwise, it is mostly simply discarded.  Perhaps there was a time when digestion (of information) was something that the course of things allowed to be done slowly — like working with your hands, you learned something in time, through practice.  The information was repeatable and also divergent and you learned the difference and when it was happening, in part, because the pace allowed you to digest it.

Now, it seems, if it can't hold our attention, information is rather quickly discarded.  On to the next data-point please.  While this shift has been under way for a while now, social media has really accelerated it.  "I don't have time to read this whole thing..." we might hear someone thinking.  I've thought that.

But truth is a bit more nuanced and not easily reducible to sound-bites — at least when its substance is more seriously engaged.

I feel aware that what I post here on Saturday Mornings (for whoever the audience may be) needs to be accessible or it won't have opportunity for digestion (and, therefore, impact).  I feel conscious of what might be too long...or too short.  If people won't eat it, no possibility for digestion occurs.

Like it or not, I am playing in the information game.  As always, some information gets through; what, why, and perhaps more importantly how is the key to digestion (perhaps, it always has been).  

And, this may be why we seem to have more indigestion these days — information isn't impacting us in the same way and, as a result, truth isn't either.

LT: Your Ego Goes With It

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

Don’t take counsel of your fears or naysayers.

-- Colin Powell, What Colin Powell Taught Me About War and Optimism

All Saints’ Day: How God makes good out of our haphazard lives

Most major Christian holidays focus on an event in the life of Jesus, but All Saints’ Day, which falls on Nov. 1, is fixed on stories of his people.

Though the day is understood and celebrated differently in different traditions, most people in my denomination, Anglicanism, understand the term “saint” to include both canonized heroes and average Christians.

For a religious holiday, All Saints' Day is surprisingly earthy. It reminds me that for all of us — so-called religious or non-religious people alike — faith and spirituality are shaped in profoundly relational ways. No one is a “freethinker.” None of us come to what we believe on our own.

For good or for ill, we believe what we believe because of our particular encounters with people and human communities. All systems of belief and practice are handed down in ordinary ways by people with particular names, faces, languages, traditions, limitations and longings.

In popular imagination, a saint is someone who is perfect and selfless, who dwells in holy ecstasy and impeccable goodness. “Don’t call me a saint,” Dorothy Day said. “I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.”

But saints are imperfect people. And this is what draws me to this day. Christians don’t remember these men and women because they were perfect. We remember them because, like us, they were broken, selfish and fearful, yet God wrought beauty and light through their lives.

At the first Anglican church I attended, over a decade ago, we didn’t have a sermon on All Saints’ Sunday. Instead, congregants were invited to tell stories about people who had changed their life and faith. Some told stories of well-known saints — Teresa of Ávila or Francis of Assisi. But they also told of friends bringing casseroles after the death of a spouse, of people showing up when life was falling apart, of professors, parents and neighbors. It was like a less polished version of “The Moth Radio Hour,” but in church. I loved it.

The story of how I came to know God is one about chance encounters and long friendships, honest conversations and books I’ve read, people who have left the Christian faith and those who haven’t, communities who’ve loved me and dismayed me.

Though I grew up going to church, for most of my childhood, church history was a hazy and irrelevant idea. My imagination started with Jesus and his followers, then skipped across two millenniums and landed at my own congregation in a small town in central Texas. As an adult, I began learning about church history and it felt like an almost miraculous discovery. This broader global and ancient family expanded my vision of what Christianity is beyond the small confines of my culture, race and moment in time.

I learned about how Christians created orphanages and hospitals. I encountered Ephrem the Syrian, a poet and musician, who began women’s choirs and composed some of the earliest hymns for female voices, spreading literacy among women in the fourth century. He died tending the sick in a plague.

I read about Felicity, an enslaved woman who was martyred in the third century while offering forgiveness to her executioners. I learned about Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Catholic priest who hid thousands of refugees during the Nazi regime. Kolbe died in Auschwitz after volunteering to take the place of another prisoner who was to be executed.

But learning church history was also deeply disillusioning as I discovered how parts of the church have been complicit in white supremacy, colonialism, abuse, misogyny and astonishing evil. All faith stories are shaped by human communities, and these human communities often disappoint us.

In a cultural moment where want to divide all people and institutions neatly into “good guys” and “bad guys,” those on the right side of history and those who aren’t, the righteous and the damned, this day reminds us of the checkered and complicated truth of each human heart. Martin Luther gave us the helpful phrase “simul justus et peccator” — simultaneously saint and sinner. It names how we are holy and wayward at once. It proclaims a paradox that we are redeemed yet in need of redemption.

All Saints’ Day reminds me that God meets us, saints and sinners, despite our contradictions, and makes good out of haphazard lives. It tells me that all of us, even the best of us, are in need of unimaginable mercy and forgiveness. The church is “first and foremost, a community of forgiven sinners,” writes the theologian Gilbert Meilaender. It is not “a community that embodies the practices of perfection” but instead “a body of believers who still live ‘in the flesh,’ who are still part of the world, suffering the transformations effected by God’s grace on its pilgrim way.” Recalling the stories of saints is, in the end, a celebration not of perfection but of grace.

-- Tish Harrison Warren, NY Times Newsletters