Last week I heard Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, the writer and scholar of the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, interviewed on the radio. He told a story that I haven’t forgotten. Rabbi Kushner was invited to a dinner for a class of young people preparing for their bar or bat mitzvah. Classes completed, they had come […]
Faith/Trust
You Don’t Have to Be Good
The things people tell a minister after church. . . . Yesterday a woman I did not know spoke to me after church—she was there for a baptism. I heard about the church of her childhood, where “salvation” was attained by refraining from smoking and drinking and dancing and cursing. It was a rigid theology […]
Trust Yourself
Why is it so hard to trust yourself? Yesterday we heard the story of the two forlorn disciples on the Emmaus Road—who had a vivid, astonishing experience of the risen Christ, only to lose it the next moment. In Luke’s account, as soon as they recognize Christ, he “vanished from their sight.” That vanishing reminds […]
Atheists Doubt Too
Sometimes we imagine—those of us who try each day to believe—that it must be nice to be an atheist and be so sure. It must be easy, we think with some rue and a little envy, not to have to prove anything because you swear there’s nothing real beyond what you can prove. C.S. Lewis, […]
How Celia Dispelled My Fear of Falling
“Never fall within sight of the lodge.” That was my friend Bob’s good advice when I was learning to ski more than twenty years ago. He meant, of course—you can fall all you want on the mountain, but when you come shushing down that gentle slope to the base, you have an audience. People are […]
Star-Crazed Days
I love the story of the family driving to grandpa and grandma’s for a Christmas get-together. As they passed the Episcopal church where a manger scene was in the yard, the five-year old boy asked about the meaning. “That is Mary, Joseph and the Baby Jesus, there in the manger,” the mother explained. A few […]