Finding Your Soul by David Anderson
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Let’s Make a Deal
When I was young I loved to watch Let’s Make a Deal. You know how this game show works. Monty Hall chooses someone from the audience and you’re given some entry-level prize, a TV or a wad of cash. But then Monty offers you the opportunity to trade for another prize—for what’s behind door number…
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The Parable of the Raft
One of the Buddha’s most famous teachings is the Parable of the Raft. In it he likened his teachings to a raft for crossing a fast-flowing river. A man is trapped on one side of a river. On this side of the river, there is great danger and uncertainty; on the far side is safety.…
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God Allows U-Turns
I live on a road with limited possibility. If you take the turn after crossing Ring’sEndBridge, you’ll be led to a few other streets and lanes, but otherwise it’s a beautiful circle that leads you down one side of a peninsula to Long Island Sound and back out the other. The name says it all,…
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Where God Hides
A legend says that, at the beginning of time, God resolved to hide himself within his own creation. As God was considering how best to do this, the angels drew around him. “I want to hide myself in my own creation,” God said. “I need to find a place that is not too easily discovered,…
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Ninety in Ninety
Ninety in ninety. That’s what my friend—I’ll call him Gary—had just accomplished a week earlier. Ninety AA meetings in ninety days. We sat in a coffee shop last night and I heard his story. There are a thousand ways to be a drunk, but one outcome. You can’t stop drinking even though it’s killing you…
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Hurricane Prayer
After church on Sunday I went to visit a family whose home had been flooded in the hurricane. When I pulled up to the house it looked fine, frankly. Everywhere there was evidence that water had been here and gone. The street had a slick mud coating and the grass in the lawn was matted…
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Waiting for Sandy
We’ve been hearing about Sandy for a week, seen satellite images of this thing swirling across eight hundred miles, its tentacles swiping into land—where we happen to live, less than a half mile from Long Island Sound. But that is only a projection. For now it is still hundreds of miles off shore. Behemoths move slowly,…
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All My Children
The child had been wounded in a rocket attack in Syria. She lay, arms and legs splayed, on a hospital gurney too big for her. An oxygen mask cupped her nose and mouth. Tubes and lines grew like dark tendrils from her arms. I turn the newspaper page. Next article. I’m looking for stories…
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Inoculated Against Faith
In some ways, I had a traditional ‘old South’ upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an inoculum of the military ethic that is still with me today: honor, duty, loyalty. -E. O. Wilson I ran across those words this week and stopped. Inoculum is the substance used…