Finding Your Soul by David Anderson
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We Came. We Sat. They Sang
After a run of hot days and nights, a cool spell descended. It was early morning, an almost chilly breeze in the air, and Pam and I decided to sit for meditation out on the deck. After the morning reading, we sat in silence—or so we thought. The surrounding trees seemed to teem with birds,…
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The Power of Pause
Did you open the fridge this morning? She asks.No, I reply.Well, then it was sort of open all night.What!I put that pan of peaches on the bottom shelf, she says, because they’re about to go bad—and…But you can see [Here I demonstrate] the door doesn’t close.Yes, but [Here she elbows me out of the way]…
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The Power To Fall
I remember the day Pam got off the train, from her increasingly miserable daily commute into New York City, and said, “I am done with this.” We had two little girls and I wasn’t earning much in my first job out of seminary. She made more than I did. How were we going to survive?…
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The Return of Innocence: A Week With Two Children
Our grandchildren, ages eight and four, are with us for a week. All day every day. By about day four an adult reaches a saturation point and becomes, in some sense, a child too. After days and nights participating in play, story, physical and imaginative games, make-believe, general silliness, and the deep need for security…
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Family Estrangement
Cleaning out a basement closet today, I find, stuffed in a box of old sermons and random papers, a twenty-year-old photocopy of an obituary for Robert Foster Anderson. There’s a grainy picture of a man in a white cap. He looks like my Dad, but I never met him. The obit said he had a…
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The Big Fix
We tend to approach whatever’s wrong in our lives with a discrete “fix,” even though what’s mostly called for is something wholistic, systemic. I was reminded of that mistaken tendency when I read an article by the Surgeon General, who has made loneliness a major focus of his work. Loneliness, I thought? With all the…
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Rescue Me
Five people are trapped in a titanium tube on the floor of the Atlantic ocean, and I can’t get them off my mind. I am constantly checking my news feed. Sonar is picking up tapping sounds. Hope surges, then I read how unlikely it is that help could arrive in time. In some real way…
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Last Will and Testament
Don’t stop thinking about tomorrowDon’t stop, it’ll soon be here-Fleetwood Mac Prince died without a will. So did Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jimi Hendrix, Pablo Picasso, Howard Hughes. Something like 64% of Americans don’t have a will, and for good reason, as I found out when we updated our wills from 29 years…
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Seven Thousand Miracles
Vincent Donovan, a missionary in Africa, wrote of working with the Masai many years ago. He said the people were all sitting very respectfully listening to him as the priest, and he was teaching them about the Seven Sacraments of the Church. He described a sacrament as a physical encounter or event in which you…