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 […]
Happiness
U.S. Marines are Meditating? That’s Right.
How strange is it that the U.S. military is spending millions to teach Marines how to meditate? Still within churches and religious institutions we find enormous reluctance or suspicion around meditation. It’s an “Eastern” thing. To many American Christians, the notion of sitting there and “doing nothing” seems almost dissolute (even though Jesus praised […]
Make Your Vessel Small
Thanksgiving is always about bounty, cornucopia, an overflowing with excess. Yet many of us are not feeling cornucopian these days. For some few at the top the bounty is flowing, but the rest of us are still struggling. We’re not feeling the Thanksgiving. In the gospels Jesus tells us, “Do not worry about your life, […]
GRATTITUDE (with two T’s)
This from a friend: I take the MetroNorth railroad from CT to NYC every day and have seen this billboard which just says, “GRATTITUDE” right above the Sin City Gentleman’s Club at 125th Street in Harlem for probably years now and have always wondered what it meant. Googled it this morning, and this is the […]
A Letter to Ernest Hemingway
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. -Ernest Hemingway Dear Ernest, You are quite right. Very often, intelligent people are very unhappy—especially if by intelligence you mean only that narrow band of knowing lodged in the brain. For about four hundred years now, at least in our Western culture, that kind of […]
Don’t Fall in Love with Pain
“Every email she writes, every conversation always begins with some trouble or difficulty, some illness that’s plaguing her, some suffering in her children, some pain wracking a relative or loved one.” The woman talking to me was describing a friend. “I think if I called her attention to it—if I showed her the emails, she […]
The Magic Word–Now!
I heard a darling—and revolutionary—story. A mother tells of her four year old at the dinner table, eating pizza. “Pass the cheese,” says the child. Looking to instill a sense of manners, the mother says, “What’s the magic word?” “NOW!” says the kid. That’s bad manners, but very good theology. Most of us are so […]
“To Accept the Things I Cannot Change…”
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 […]