A brief meditation for Lent—three times a week. Want to receive an email notification each time David posts?
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Praying for Victory
There’s been a good bit of praying in advance of this Super Bowl. In the play-off’s, Tim Tebow dropped to one knee and thanked God, dramatically, for every touchdown. Still, he didn’t make it to the big game. Then there is Tom Brady’s wife, Gisele Bundchen, the Brazilian supermodel who emailed family and friends this […]
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“It’s Groundhog Day!”
(We’ll get to Gobbler’s Knob in a moment.) Today—February 2nd—is a big turning point. It’s a great cross-quarter day, midway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. In ancient, agricultural societies it was regarded as the beginning of spring—the time for first turning the soil in preparation for March planting. There were prayers and […]
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To Love Your Dandelions
This morning before Centering Prayer, Pam and I read from The Gospel of Thomas, a book of the sayings of Jesus discovered in 1945 in a small desert cave near Nag Hammadi, Egypt. Some sound word-for-word like other sayings in the canonical Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Some sound totally different, and some sound, […]
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The Invisible Gorilla
The essence of spirituality is seeing. The beginning assumption is: human beings are blind (read that dramatic story in John 9 of Jesus’ healing the man born blind!). We fail to see what’s right in front of us, which is why we keep making such deadly choices. It makes sense if you think, “Well […]
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God is a Verb
In matters of faith, nouns rule. People talk about what they believe in, and you get a limp procession of nouns: peace, justice, love, the Bible, heaven, salvation. All powerful things, but not in the nominative form. To get at the power inherent in those things we have to find the verb. We’ve got to […]
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The Platinum Rule
We all know the Golden Rule, but do you know the Platinum Rule? Golden is: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Platinum is: Do unto others as they would have you do unto them. My brother told me the other day he had left his briefcase in a London taxi—with […]
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The Echo of Life
Perhaps the most pernicious assumption about life is that we can attain some ideal by the practice of its opposite. We can see this plainly in world leaders who are certain that one more war will finally bring us peace. We remember the famous line from the U.S. Army officer who said of the Vietnamese […]
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Letting the Moonlight Go
This morning when I set out on my run, I put on my orange reflector vest. It was dark. I ran down the road, scudded across Rings End Bridge and turned to follow the Goodwives River as it pours brackish into Long Island Sound. The moon was high above the black silhouetted trees, its gauzy […]
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The Bull Rider’s Prayer
I had no cowboy boots. No ten gallon hat. I was invited to the Pro Bull Riding championship at Madison Square Garden, and my son-in-law suggested I wear something Western. He would be, and so would the throngs at the Garden, he said. It’s odd that my English son-in-law who grew up outside London should […]