Where is your life taking you? That’s the question I heard Parker Palmer asking. The Quaker wise man was being interviewed. “I had to ask myself,” he said, “where my life was taking me, rather than just where I was trying to take my life.” It’s important to try to take your life somewhere. Without […]
Choice
‘Prophylactic’ Suicide
Many of us who are still in good health have decided . . . that at some point we will not wish to cope with the diminishment of our lives, the narrowing choices, the prospect of both physical and intellectual decay. When that point comes, we’ll go out. Deciding just when should be the choice […]
Narrow Your Options
Creativity is kin to spirituality. As a writer and a pastor, I am always intrigued by how the creative process—for any artist—tracks so closely the movement of the Spirit. The key to creativity, I find, also fits the lock and opens the door of the soul. And that key is: limits. Everything about our world […]
The Cat Who Sat on a Hot Stove Lid
I don’t know if it’s true, but someone once told me that domesticated birds can be trained to sit by an open window—and not fly away. You put their perch next to an open window, but you tie one foot to the perch, so that when the bird attempts to fly out the window, it […]
Dead or Alive?
Are you dead or alive? Alive people are awake and aware—they’re open to the whole of human life. They’re open to receive all the gifts and joys and exquisite delights of human life—and they’re just as open to receive the suffering and the disappointment and the sadness. They can sit with that, too, and […]
God is Not Urgent
I was asked to speak to a group this week on New Year’s Resolutions, and I decided instead to speak on new priorities. I don’t care much for resolutions, since they are mostly attempts to arm-wrestle small problems into submission without having to look plainly at one’s life. As soon as I focused on priorities […]
God Allows U-Turns
I live on a road with limited possibility. If you take the turn after crossing Ring’sEndBridge, you’ll be led to a few other streets and lanes, but otherwise it’s a beautiful circle that leads you down one side of a peninsula to Long Island Sound and back out the other. The name says it all, […]
A Teaspoon of Sand
Ted Ryan, a friend of mine, told me about an experience that goes under the category of “the things a child can imagine.” He was giving his four year-old son breakfast before he went off to work, but the boy was just sitting there. He wasn’t touching his cereal. So Ted says to his son, […]