Finding Your Soul by David Anderson
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Deliberate Mistakes
I once worked with a stone mason who was repairing a great fireplace, with the chimney stoned all the way from the mantle to the cathedral ceiling peak. He stood back and surveyed the stone work. “What makes this artwork, what makes it beautiful is not a bunch of same-size stones all perfectly lined up…
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Holding Our Children, and Letting Them Go
This is the weekend to remember our fathers. Fathers struggle. We know this. Mothers hold onto their children, sometimes too closely, sometimes for too long, but once that wet, naked child is placed in their arms they know instinctively what to do. Fathers don’t. We have to learn this stuff. We’re not so comfortable holding…
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How to be Perfect
Life can seem awfully complicated. Ron Padgett, a wonderful writer, offers some simple, take-’em-to-the-bank insights. Get some sleep. Eat an orange every morning. Be friendly. It will help make you happy. Hope for everything. Expect nothing. Take care of things close to home first. Straighten up your room before you save the world. Then save the world. Be nice…
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Finding Your Self . . . At Last
We spend most of our time trying to be someone else, someone better, more successful. I think we spend the first thirty or forty or fifty years trying to be this other person. And most religion doesn’t help. In fact it makes our self-rejection divine—God is not happy with who you are and will only…
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The Gift of Obstruction
I spoke with three people on Sunday whose life-as-usual had dead-ended. For two it was a life-altering illness. For the other it was a lost job. It was a typical Sunday, really—I suppose I stopped and talked to twenty people between three services, a parish picnic and a hospital call. These days, world unsettled as…
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All Grace All the Time
“I was playing golf with a friend,” the man said to me yesterday. “And he said—it must’ve been at the 14th hole, I think—he said, ‘John, do you believe in hell?” He put the club down and asked why such a question. The friend explained that his daughter had been blessed with her first baby,…
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Change: Learning to Love What You Can’t Stop
The single challenge of life is change. We don’t like it, yet we know it is the only constant. Every day we get up and . . . things have changed. Nothing is where we left it last night. Not the kids, not the dog, not the roses in the garden. Everything we had just…
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A Proud Day
I am back at Yale Divinity School for commencement exercises. Today my daughter Sharon graduates with her Master of Divinity degree 23 years after I graduated in 1989. I feel deeply blessed today–would never have thought life would bring me full circle to this day. Sharon is a gift to the church and to the…
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Dropping Keys
We are living in a time when the standard versions of religion are losing their appeal. The spirituality offered by these traditions seems small and niggling. Whatever is intended, the message people are getting is mostly about who’s got the truth and who doesn’t, who belongs inside the circle and who doesn’t, who’s having the…