Finding Your Soul by David Anderson
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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…
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You Are Chosen
One of my least favorite childhood memories is playing baseball. The neighborhood kids would gather on Saturday morning to play baseball. And then the dreaded part. Choosing up sides. There would be two captains—and who chose these people? I guess we all knew who the best players were, and they couldn’t be on the same…
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Three Dollar’s Worth of God, Please
Yesterday was the commemoration of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was martyred for his opposition to the Nazis. He considered taking refuge in the United States, where he was teaching, but he returned to Germany to continue his work in the resistance. He was arrested April 5, 1943 and imprisoned in Berlin. Three days…
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The Life You Save Is Your Own
In 1988 Bill Moyers sat down with scholar Joseph Campbell to talk about mythology and religion. In one of the PBS interviews Campbell tells the story of two police officers in Hawaii. They were driving one afternoon near the Pali, a place where the trade winds from the north come rushing through a great ridge of…