Finding Your Soul by David Anderson
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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,…
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Walk on Water? No Thanks.
It is easy to allow our spiritual quest to lead us into self-gratification. It has always been the perennial problem associated with “spiritual growth.” This story is told of the sage Ramakrishna. Once a man came to Ramakrishna, sitting on the banks of the Ganges. “Master,” he called to Ramakrishna, “Look! After fourteen years of…
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Breathing with Brother Ronald
Poosh goes the little oxygen tank. Every three seconds, a little burst of air forced through the clear plastic tubes running around his ears and under his nose. I am sitting in the chapel of Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, New York. After the long chanting of Psalms we rest in silence. That’s when…
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Thinking Big Enough
“If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.” -Wes Jackson Those words gave me pause—a big pause. I read them in an article about sustainable agriculture (as a South Dakota native it’s sad to see the systematic poisoning of the earth as the basis for our agri-business). Wes…
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Abba Moses and the Leaky Jug
Yesterday I sat in the second pew at St. Stephen’s church in Richmond, Virginia. There to speak later in the morning, I was worshiping at the 9 o’clock Eucharist. My friend Gary Jones preached—masterfully—on that well-known parable from Luke. Two men go up to the temple to pray, a Pharisee and a tax collector. The…
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Helen Keller and F-a-l-l
Where I live, the trees are in beautiful death swoons, immolating in falling flames of red and gold, orange and brown. Last week, after I finished my morning run I walked the rest of the way home. A few feet from the front door I noticed—the glory all around me! How had I run through…
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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…
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Unexpected Messenger
Often God uses someone—or something—as an unexpected messenger. On Wednesday morning I came into the office and started working—fast. Sunday we had forty stewardship visitors coming to pick up their packets and . . . the “packet” was mostly a figment. I walked into my assistant’s office and started ticking off the critical components we…