Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.
Thursday, October 17, 2024
Not Only Compatible
Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.
Wednesday, October 16, 2024
Don’t be so trashy.
Don’t be so trashy.
What I mean is, we have to stop creating so much trash.
Single-use items, among other things, just have to go. We're drowning in all our containers (now from the inside out — see micro-plastics).
Of course, the real issue, is the degree of our consumption in the first place. I know that's getting into pretty sacred territory for many Americans — who might almost immediately react with something like, "What am I supposed to do...if I can't go shopping?".
Like with many other things, we just don't see things we don't want to see. It’s almost like if we won't look at a consequence, it is easier to avoid the cause.
But, recognize it or not, we have a trash problem that land-fills can't really keep covering up. And, that's largely because we have a consumption problem.
In the end, it's an identity issue — for too many of us, we just don't seem to know who we are if we can't constantly be buying stuff.
That's actually pretty trashy...on a number of levels.
Tuesday, October 15, 2024
Monday, October 14, 2024
Distraction
I’m wondering…about distraction.
In a world of so much distraction, it’s very hard to get on track sometimes (not to mention stay on track).
Perhaps, we need to consider not only what we're looking at, but also the direction we're looking.
How much we miss when we’re always looking down (especially at our phones), rather than looking around (not to mention up) — how much is there already for us to observe and learn from in those directions?
Sunday, October 13, 2024
Controlling People
Saturday, October 12, 2024
3 Observations & A Question
When you are closer to a mode of inquiry (genuine curiosity), let me know — I’d enjoy talking more then.
Most of the time there’s a story involved.
There is almost nothing that is not in motion.
What do you feel when people throw trash out the window of their car onto your lawn? — How is that fundamentally different from what we do with our trash on planet earth?
Friday, October 11, 2024
Mankind & Power
Mankind seems to have an endless propensity to destroy things (even good things), not to mention each other.
We have so much power; we don’t even need to use it to protect ourselves.
But, for some reason, we are prone to misunderstanding what the nature of that power is. And, so, rather than use it for the benefit of others, we use it against people who are a little different (from us) by trying to gather people around us who just look a little more like us.
How much of our power do we forfeit because of how small our view of it is? Power is exponentially greater when it is used to include and expand (love) than when it is used to exclude and protect (fear).
Thursday, October 10, 2024
Wednesday, October 09, 2024
Not A Virtue
Given our times, it might actually surprise us to know that being critical, for the sake of being critical, is not a virtue.
The steady diet of our endless critique of the world (or other people) ends up taking on addictive qualities, not to mention the unsightliness of looking like an overly developed bicep in just one arm. Should we really be this convinced that we hold the cards on everything that is wrong, especially when we simultaneously seem quite under-developed in seeing how we ourselves contribute to it?
We seem to think that calling out something that doesn't work well gets us off some kind of hook. And, the gap between seeing something and doing something about it seems to only be growing.
To be sure there, is a lot to be critical of. But, shouldn't we get better at what we're doing about it than simply perfecting our articulation of what they aren't doing about it?
One (perhaps) unintended consequence of this propensity seems to be our declining ability to admire, to appreciate, much of anything at all.
We must equally (if not more) be able to stop the inertia of these inclinations and observe the many wonderful and beautiful things about the world (and, yes, other albeit imperfect people).
Without that kind of balance, we simply end up so deformed in our thinking that we are unable to provide any kind of care at all for what is needed. As has been said before, we should be more defined by what we are for than simply by what we are against.
Besides, it really isn’t that hard. We just need to make ourselves more available to the timeless things that can teach us, like the simple instruction of a morning sunrise.
…willingness to be open and to learn might be closer to virtue.
Tuesday, October 08, 2024
Out of the Process
The advice I like to give anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to do an awful lot of work.
All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.
-- Chuck Close
Monday, October 07, 2024
Habits We've Formed
Ever noticed...how much we live out of the habits we form around our insecurities?
Sunday, October 06, 2024
Animated by Faith, Hope, and Love
Christians in the United States and around the world have seen their faith in Jesus Christ distorted and leveraged in defense of authoritarian leaders who seek to erode freedoms essential to a thriving democracy. Some Christians enthusiastically praise dictatorial leaders and regimes.
We will meet in a moment of crisis. Yet we do so as people of God animated by faith, hope, and love. It is in this spirit that we reaffirm Christian support for democracy and invite all Christians and people of moral conscience to do the same.
-- Test of Faith: A Summit to Defend Democracy, September 19-20, 2024
Saturday, October 05, 2024
4 Observations (from Others)
When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people becomes an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.
-- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death...four decades ago prophesied an apocalypse of moral idiocy in the age of mass media
Courage is knowing it might hurt, and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same. And that's why life is hard.
We usually think of resilience as the ability to recover from an adverse experience and pick up our lives where we left off…. But there are times when adversity permanently changes our reality and we can’t go back to the way things were…. Resilience then becomes the work of coming through the adversity. -- Alice Updike Scannell
People are always looking for happiness at some future time and in some new thing, or some new set of circumstances, in possession of which they some day expect to find themselves. But the fact is, if happiness is not found now, where we are, and as we are, there is little chance of it ever being found. There is a great deal more happiness around us day by day than we have the sense or the power to seek and find.
-- Thomas Mitchell
Prior 4 Observations (from Others).
Friday, October 04, 2024
Young men and women are moving in opposite directions
Data of all kinds reveals a little-discussed, future-defining trend: Men and women are going separate ways.
Thursday, October 03, 2024
And Own It
Wednesday, October 02, 2024
Live & Die, But…
The question is not whether we will die, but how we will live.
-- Joan Borysenko
We live for a little while and then we die.
...but, how we do the living part, can extend the frame of our existence in dramatic ways.
If we were to live in complete isolation, that might not be (though terribly reductionist) an inaccurate summary statement. But we don’t live in isolation. We live in utter inter-dependence with everything around us, and it’s in those dimensions that the possibilities of living beyond the short frame of our particular life become realizable. What other people do around me, like it or not, has so much impact on me. And the same is true for me to them.
This is rather obvious in the sphere of having children. But even having children is done in an inter-dependent context in the world. How they see me interacting with what is around me, with those who are around me, sets in motion, almost irrevocably, their capacity to do the same in their lives.
If that is done in increasing ways, then the range of this dynamic never ends. If that is done in diminishing and isolating ways, then that dynamic is thwarted.
This reality is not confined to parents and children. What I do in any given day is in the context of everything else and thereby has an impact on everything else. What I spend my time on, what I spend my money on, how I wrestle with challenging or painful things, what I allow myself to enjoy, what I point to in the world, physical and metaphysical, how I go about my daily existence in one way or another has an impact. I can either extend the reach and glory of the virtues of living or minimize them.
The problem with the summary statement — we live and then we die — misses so much of the power and joy of everything that goes on in between.
Tuesday, October 01, 2024
LT: Service To Be Given
Leadership is not a rank or position to be attained. Leadership is a service to be given.
-- Simon Sinek
This contrast might not be any more evident than...here.
Monday, September 30, 2024
Sunday, September 29, 2024
George Will & 230 Others
We don't demonize immigrants. We don't single them out for attacks. We don't believe they're poisoning the blood of the country. We're a nation of immigrants, and that's why we're so damn strong.
-- Joe Biden
Speaker Johnson continues to suggest that undocumented immigrants vote in elections, but it is illegal for even documented noncitizens to do so, and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the nonprofit American Immigration Council notes that even the right-wing Heritage Foundation has found only 12 cases of such illegal voting in the past 40 years.
Conservative columnist George Will, more than 230 former officials for presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and 17 former staff members for Ronald Reagan have all recently added their names to the list of those supporting Harris. Today more than 100 Republican former members of Congress and national security officials who served in Republican administrations endorsed Harris, saying they “firmly oppose the election of Donald Trump.” They cited his chaotic governance, his praising of enemies and undermining allies, his politicizing the military and disparaging veterans, his susceptibility to manipulation by Russian president Vladimir Putin, and his attempt to overthrow democracy. They praised Harris for her consistent championing of “the rule of law, democracy, and our constitutional principles.”
-- Heather Cox Richardson
Saturday, September 28, 2024
3 Observations & A Question
AI can’t render the soul of something — at best, it can only simulate it, which is still quite detectable.
We all have strengths, either innately or from development — but, no one is strong in every way.
Though certainly more than just this, at one level, people are just creatures that are orienting to their environments.
"Nothing surprises me anymore" is both sad and cynical -- how much of surprise is willingness?
Prior 3 Observations & A Question….
Friday, September 27, 2024
Creative Joy
'Poem for the week' -- "Creative Joy":
God of cuttlefish and crystal caverns,
who formed the farthest reaches of the cosmos
and the yet-unreached depths of the sea,
whose creative joy is manifest in our ongoing discovery
of creatures and places and workings
in our own bodies, in our world and beyond it—
Help me to believe that patience isn’t torturous
but to be inhabited with delight,
knowing that you love to surprise
and that my future is threaded with the same playful love
that gave birth to axolotls and the grand canyon and the DNA double-helix.
When you ask or otherwise expect me to wait,
may I do so like a child on the eve of Christmas:
expecting nothing other than joy
and your heart brimming with the sight of your own patience fulfilled.
-- Emily Cash, Driftwood Prayers
Thursday, September 26, 2024
Cease To Love
The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
Wednesday, September 25, 2024
In A Position
Even though there are many predictable patterns to a lot of life, you never fully know what all the unexpecteds of it will actually be.
Invariably, there are huge disappointments and all kinds of pain. (I don't really want to rush past this either, because we too often do...).
But, there are also amazing twists and turns of grace and wonder. And, one doesn't cancel the other.
One small (perhaps) example. I noticed the other day that it is something on the order of comforting for me to step out on my back deck for my daily pre-dawn walk and look up to see the Orion star constellation there waiting for me. I know the attribution of "waiting for me" sounds a little self-interested. But, whatever the more correct version may be, it does something for my relationship with the world over which it presides.
The irony here, for me, is that while it has been there the whole time, it took me doing something to notice it.
A lot of nature is like this, indifferent to any particular noticing I would do; just going on its merry way. Sometimes, it feels like it smiles when I join in (but I'm not always sure that isn't just something I'm hoping for).
Stay open to such possibilities so that you don’t miss them, for they surely will occur. Life (God) will provide you with some substantial gifts, like grace and wonder. So, keep yourself in a position to recognize them…if not receive them.
Tuesday, September 24, 2024
Hurt vs Harm
The truth may sting, but silence can leave a scar.
We see the barriers holding back the people we work with, just as they see ours. But telling them is hard.
Telling the truth might hurt them, but not telling harms them.
-- Shane Parrish
Monday, September 23, 2024
Feel Better
I’m wondering…about why there are SO many options that claim to make us feel better.
What does that indicate regarding all the things that make us feel bad in the first place?
Sunday, September 22, 2024
Evangelical Narrative
Too often, the white evangelical narrative I encounter is driven more by fear and anxiety than by the hope and confidence of the gospel.
-- John Inazu
- To learn to recognize and respect “the sacred” in every person, including in ourselves, and in every piece of Creation....
- To accept oneself deeply, “who I am” with all my gifts and richness, with all my limitations, errors, failings and weaknesses, and to realize that I am accepted by God...
- To recognize that what I resent, and perhaps even detest, in another, comes from my difficulty in admitting that this same reality lives also in me....
- To renounce dualism, the “we-they” mentality (Manicheism). This divides us into “good people/bad people” and allows us to demonize the adversary. It is the root of authoritarian and exclusivist behavior. It generates racism and makes possible conflicts and wars.
- To face fear and to deal with it not mainly with courage but with love.
- To understand and accept that the New Creation, the building up of the Beloved Community is always carried forward with others. It is never a “solo act.”...
- To see ourselves as a part of the whole creation to which we foster a relationship of love, not of mastery, remembering that the destruction of our planet is a profoundly spiritual problem, not simply a scientific or technological one. We are one.
- To be ready to suffer, perhaps even with joy, if we believe this will help liberate the Divine in others. This includes the acceptance of our place and moment in history with its trauma, with its ambiguities.
- To be capable of celebration, of joy, when the presence of God has been accepted, and when it has not been to help discover and recognize this fact.
- To slow down, to be patient, planting the seeds of love and forgiveness in our own hearts and in the hearts of those around us. Slowly we will grow in love, compassion and the capacity to forgive.
Saturday, September 21, 2024
3 Observations & A Question
We bring so much of what happens to us upon ourselves.
How unaware we seem to be that our commitment to escape unhappiness is what perpetuates it the most.
So many things are about what we want to feel.
What does it mean when the best thing you did this week for someone else was to dress up for Sunday church?
Friday, September 20, 2024
Political Violence
I really believe that the rhetoric from the Democrats ... is making the bullets fly. And it's very dangerous. Dangerous for them. It's dangerous for both sides.
-- Donald Trump, the day after the second assassination attempt in 65 days
Trump is "both a seeming inspiration and an apparent target of the political violence that has increasingly come to shape American politics."
-- Peter Baker
Thursday, September 19, 2024
Wednesday, September 18, 2024
Indulgence
Most indulgence is self-serving.
I come from a tradition, which would then also say, assuming that is true, that all indulgence is, therefore, wrong.
But, we do love our over-simplifications, don't we?
For one thing, not everything that is self-serving is automatically wrong (mental health, for example). And, some self-indulgence actually seems to be recommended ("eat, drink, and be merry..." — Ecc 9).
In broad terms, I do think that general conservatism is better — for both personal benefit and the good of all. After all, we are not here, primarily, to simply consume things. We are here to help and support those around us, even as has been said…for the 'glory of God'. Abundance exists. Even if it does not seem to be fairly distributed (perhaps that is our job), it is especially well-used when it helps those who don't have what they need (which, by the way, could be any one of us at any given moment).
The problem with the never-indulgent view, however, is that it, more often than not, reflects a kind of attempt at control — a type of control that heads one away from something important...trust. You have to trust something, to appropriately reflect not only on how you are able to enjoy things, but also that such will be provided again. Put another way, scarcity and trust are often at odds. And, for many (particularly religious people), it seems that disparaging indulgence is really more about control than the virtues of being conservative anyway.
So, to me, it seems wise to both save for a rainy-day (yours, or your neighbor's) and be indulgent
…from time to time.
This Morning's Moon
This morning's moon seemed to nearly fill the sky down the road I was on.
It was as if it was saying, “I, too, am here and that is helpful for you to know.”
Tuesday, September 17, 2024
Monday, September 16, 2024
Lose Weight
Ever noticed...that (in most cases) if you want to lose weight, you have to eat (or drink) less?
And, if you want to lose more weight, you have to exercise?
And, if you want to lose even more weight, you have to eat better food?
In other words, to get what you want, it takes less of something AND more of something else.
Sunday, September 15, 2024
The Narrow Path
The narrow path is not about the number of people who will end up in heaven; it's about the number of people who will allow themselves to be formed by the subversive and, ultimately, redemptive way of Jesus.
Saturday, September 14, 2024
3 Observations & A Question
Having something and using it are not the same thing.
Almost every question we don’t really contemplate is left in a blunt-force (unrefined) condition — most answers to good questions are pretty nuanced.
There are some people who are naturally sensitive and have grown to be tougher and there are some people who are naturally tough who have grown to be more sensitive — the rest just seem to wander around...not growing at all.
When is the last time you had (or took) the opportunity to be outside at dawn — to hear all the sound going on in nature or to see the emerging sunlight sparkling through dew-drops adorning each blade of grass?
‘Everything you know about happiness is a lie.’ This is the secret to getting the ‘new happy’
When I was in my early twenties, I had everything that I thought would make me happy. I had a prestigious job, lived in New York City, and had complete freedom. Yet, I was absolutely miserable. At first, I ignored my emotions. Then, over time, I started to experience more challenges: getting physically ill, struggling with my mental health, and feeling lonely. One day, I found myself lying on my bedroom floor sobbing hysterically, wondering why I was so desperately unhappy.
Then, I had a moment of clarity. What if there wasn’t something wrong with me? What if I had been lied to by the world around me? Perhaps everything I had been told about what I needed to do to be happy was wrong. Continue here....
-- Stephanie Harrison
Friday, September 13, 2024
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
-- Wendell Berry
Thursday, September 12, 2024
Wednesday, September 11, 2024
Ideas & Energy
Ideas, like institutions, that cling to the past (to prior versions) become myopic, end up withering, and eventually disappear. They become devoid of the energy and relevance that not only sustains them, but also helps them to grow and flourish.
This doesn't mean that only new ideas are good. As Ecclesiastes points out, there is nothing new under the sun.
It's the clinging dynamic that is the problem. All ideas need to be, as it were, re-invented. Even reinvention is not necessarily as much about something new as much as it is about discovery.
It's the energy of relevance to current contexts that is key. Holding on to something that has simply passed on is not a constructive use of that energy. The application of energy to how an idea can work right now is what is needed.
Clinging is a closing off of energy. The power of an idea, new or old, is satisfying the request of the new beneficiary, the current generation, to provide the connection between what is and what is needed. That requires openness to creative energy.
Wash away your old opinions to let new ideas in.
This is largely why greatness isn't something to aspire to in historical terms. Greatness is always what is happening now that leads to something better in the future.
Don't cling (and protect). Reach out (and provide).
An example: Justice
Tuesday, September 10, 2024
Demeans Others
A grown man who demeans and disparages others is really just insecure and small.
A grown man who does so by using the power of leadership is cruel and incapable of the service of leadership.
Monday, September 09, 2024
Truly In Jeopardy?
I’ve noticed…that I rarely live in fear of physical threat — and yet, at times, fears can still abound within me.
Why, though?
At the end of things, given what we will know at that time, how much will we look back and say, "what were we so worried about?"
In spite of what we're told, so little of true substance is ever in real jeopardy.
Sunday, September 08, 2024
Everyday Activities
When our everyday activities aren't sacramental, they soon become flat and we unconsciously compensate for that by increasing the dosage.
-- Fr. Ron Rolheiser
Saturday, September 07, 2024
4 Observations (from Others)
Just because results are not visible doesn’t mean they are not accumulating.
-- Shane Parrish
You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We grow in generosity as we embrace simplicity. We are able to hold all things lightly and, if need be, let them go—our possessions, our money, our pretensions, even our anger, our prejudices, and our fears.
-- Margaret Guenther
Prior 4 Observations (from Others).
Friday, September 06, 2024
Thursday, September 05, 2024
Art of Life
The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us.
Wednesday, September 04, 2024
Why You Believe Something
Some people believe things that aren't true, no matter what new information is provided.
But why?
As scary as this is, it begs an important point. You really have to know why you believe what you believe — in other words, what has affected what you believe?
The content of our beliefs is one thing (and important, to be sure). But, how you've reached your conclusions about that content is equally impacting because it is too easily observable that many people believe things that are simply not true. Why would that even be?
Well, there are actually more things going on related to what we believe than we tend to think. For one thing, what we believe is highly influenced by how we believe. For example, a certain percentage of people believe something simply because it is repeated so often that they conclude it must be true. Whether in social dynamics, politics, or even religion, repetition is a powerful influence.
But, repetition, in and of itself, isn't what makes something true, is it?
So, you really have to ask why do we believe something? How does it happen? What things (often cultural and psychological) affect what we believe?
How you grew up, things that happen in your family, things that hurt you, things that helped you, and probably most significantly your social context are all among the many things that influence that powerful combination of what you think and what you feel — your beliefs.
Have you ever noticed that you wish you could still believe something that you no longer do? What is going on there? Believing is a function of something. And, without recognizing what that is — what those things are, we proceed with a certain kind of chosen blindness...sometimes to our peril.
Belief is often moored to some perception of truth. But, in reality, it may have less to do with a particular truth than we tend to think. This is why we often still believe something in spite of evidence to the contrary. In other words, we believe it anyway. But often without any really defendable reason; because what we believe is often not really based that much on reason. It is based on other needs we have as human-beings (many that we are often unaware of), like the way we want (or don’t want) to feel.
I have come to believe in my life that people, more than they fear death, they fear not belonging.
-- Adam Kinzinger
We laugh now, but many people used to believe the earth was flat. And, that it was the center of the universe. And, that...well, the list goes on and on. Silly? The point is, one needs to know how that could happen? And, if it could then, what are some of the same dynamics that are involved in what we believe today?
This is often why people seem afraid to question their beliefs, isn't it? That we would cease to believe altogether? But, often what really happens is that our beliefs evolve, as a function of our experience, as they should (see Nicodemus).
We really should know why...we believe what we believe.
Tuesday, September 03, 2024
Monday, September 02, 2024
Sunday, September 01, 2024
Stop Counting and Calculating
Saturday, August 31, 2024
3 Observations & A Question
It’s very hard (impossible?) to react and listen (at the same time).
Our most recent experience of something tends to overshadow our historically experienced one … but, never fully.
Your ego is your default control-mechanism — the more you feed it, though, the greater your illusion about that control becomes (not to mention the illusion it creates about yourself).
People often do things because of the way it makes them feel — what else would explain why would you wear a shirt like that?
Prior 3 Observations & A Question….