Finding Your Soul by David Anderson
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My Many Birthday Selves
Today is my 58th birthday. This morning I received a note from an old friend—someone one month younger than I—who posed the question we all ask as the years mount: What am I doing in this old person’s body? I still feel like the person who played the sax in the marching band, the person…
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Raids on the Unspeakable
One of the gifts of vacation is to change up one’s prayer ritual. Normally, Pam and I sit for prayer in a corner of our bedroom. There are two chairs, a small table for an oil lamp, a few sacred books, and a timer that sounds a Tibetan prayer bell when our orison is over.…
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Those Empty Adirondack Chairs
You’ve seen them, no doubt. Down by a little pond in the front yard sit two Adirondack chairs, side by side. The perfect place for two people to relax, look out over the water, maybe notice a frog on the bank and a sparrow in the tree overhead. The settings for these two chairs are…
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Two Words and a Wedding
Tonight I will officiate at my second wedding in a week. I like weddings, but I always struggle with what to say. At baptisms, the parents in the front pews listen even though they’re often tussling with older siblings of the one in white. At funerals, people listen intently. Their stare—both skeptical and desperate—says:…
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For All The Robin Williams’s in My Life
I was startled, then saddened this morning to read of Robin Williams’ death. “. . .suicide by asphyxia.” “ . . . battling severe depression.” “ . . . addiction to alcohol.” “. . . an admitted abuser of cocaine — which he also referred to as ‘Peruvian marching power’ and ‘the devil’s dandruff’.” I…
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Wrestling a Blessing (With a Limp to Prove it)
“What kind of God is this who wrestles with us, Dad?” The voice on the phone was my daughter Sharon. A candidate for ordination, she had preached on the story of Jacob wrestling with God. Now, walking home from church in downtown Atlanta, she was calling me, in a state of holy agitation. “A God…
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Alone With My Thoughts? Just Shock Me.
All mankind’s troubles are caused by one single thing, which is their inability to sit quietly in a room. -Blaise Pascal When I leave on vacation later in August, I am leaving my smart phone at home. There should probably be some version of methadone for those who stop doodling with their phones…
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Famous Little You
In his intriguing article, “Love People, Not Pleasure,” Arthur C. Brooks considers the three classic aspirations that fuel our quest for happiness: fame, wealth and pleasure. Not surprisingly, Brooks concludes that none of the big three brings happiness. The whole article is worth reading (http://nyti.ms/1rnCr3I), but I was taken by this reflection on fame. Most…
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A Gardener’s Theology of Weeds
When I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands. -Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo would…