About the Author: James Burklo
I thoroughly enjoyed the Sunday Assembly. Clearly it addresses a felt need of many people for a community without religious content. I sensed that some folks were there in reaction against religion, but it looked like most were just looking for a wholesome community with which to connect.
(This is the speech I gave at a commemoration of the birthday of Swami Vivekananda at the Vedanta Society in Hollywood on 1-11-15.)
Out of this house where there is no room For the little ones that to him belong (He is weak but he is God)
The day after the first Shabbat in Advent, Mary and Joseph took Jesus, who was eight years old, To the Great Mall of
Musings
What will be the unifying principle behind this community? Is love and mutual support enough to hang it together? Will some distinctive message or activity or ritual be necessary to give the group an identity and a reason to continue gathering? The experiment is just getting started. The evidence and the conclusions are not in. Meanwhile, Bart's experiment has the attention of secular humanists nationwide. He's not a theist any more, but he's not a normal atheist, either.
Quickened by my attention to what surrounded me As I sat on one of the pale yellow rounded boulders in the creekbed.
American-born Muslim young people, growing up post 9/11, are more marked as just-plain-Muslims than they are as Ismaili or Sunni or Shia or Ahmadjyya or Sufi Muslims. Or Turkish or Syrian or Jordanian or Saudi Muslims. They've been thrust into a wide realm of choice by historical circumstance. There's no one way to do their faith, and for some this opens the door to creative expressions of their religion.
Mindful Christianity is mysticism: the experience of a human being in spiritual union with the divine, seeing each other with the same eye. The observer within you, when you are deep in mindfulness meditation, is God. God is lovingly attentive toward your every experience, every feeling, urge, and thought. In mindfulness practice, God notices all of that is going on inside of you, with deep compassion and without judgment.
The Supreme Court has declared corporations to be people, according to its Citizens United decision. And, likewise, in its Hobby Lobby decision, it
As public speakers, you can reverse this history and bring life back to language. You can breathe vitality into words and send them forth to change the world. With the spoken word you can reach into the souls of other people and stir them to new visions and actions.
Today, over 2,000,000 Americans are in jail or in prison. We've got 5% of the world's population, but 25% of its prisoners. More black men are under the control of the criminal justice system in America today than were enslaved before the Civil War began. Our prison-industrial complex has become the latest of a long series of forms of systematic oppression against people of color. Lawyer and activist Michelle Alexander rightly calls it "The New Jim Crow" in her recent book.
We come to the desert at least as much for what is not here as much as for what is. Monastics of every religion are drawn to it. Moses encountered God in a bush on a desert mountain. The first theologians of Christianity were known as the Desert Fathers. In wilderness they prayed, meditated, contemplated – uncluttering their hearts and minds in an uncluttered space. Mohammed went to a desert cave and there he waited until the Angel Gabriel dictated the Koran to him. Around the same time, Buddhist monks retreated to the mountainous deserts of Central Asia to meditate.
In the name of the Father, in the name of the Mother, source of life, from whom water flows, to whom water returns,
For Cameron
We are here to praise God for the life of Cameron, our young friend, who in such a short time has brought us so much joy. Through Cameron we have experienced birth again in a new and more conscious way; in him, God has created the world again, opening us to wonder and possibility that we had forgotten.
Michael Brown should not have been shot dead by police in Ferguson, Missouri. His hands were up. He was unarmed. It doesn't make any difference whether or not he had stolen earlier something that day. If he had committed such a crime, he should have been given appropriate justice, not a volley of bullets. At the time he was shot, there was simply no excuse for what happened to him. Somebody else had his life stolen from him, too: a man named Jesus, killed for no good reason. Jesus also died with his hands up. He had been ethnically profiled by the Roman occupying army in Jerusalem, and was brutally murdered on a cross.
Thunder lags behind lightning beyond an outcrop of stone slabs framed by clusters of Joshua trees with spikes shivering in the wind. A dark gauzy curtain descends from a boiling mass of cloud. Scattered spits of rain puff dust out of tiny craters they form on impact in the fine dirt. The cooling air fills with the overwhelming scent of wet creosote.
This body knows what it is like to have a nice house and a good job It knows what it is like to feel uneasy about being wealthy
“Bread for me is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one," wrote Nikolai Berdyaev, a 19th-20th c. Russian philosopher and theologian. Is there a more important spiritual question than this one? Today may be a particularly good time to ask it in America.
Oh Dear One, may these scraps of paper and bits of metal serve as symbols of our deep desire for your Love to transform our time, effort, and substance into works of creative compassion for each other,
This past Sunday morning in Los Angeles was bright with strong wind blowing clear air over the mountains from the high desert. The palm trees swayed along Highway 10 west into Santa Monica. Two right turns at the Cloverfield exit took me past the garbage company and into the chain-link gate of Bergamot Station, a former warehouse complex turned into dozens of art studios. In the back corner, in a galvanized iron building, is the "Writer's Bootcamp", a complex with offices and meeting spaces, where I found Thad's.
The "sixth sense" in popular culture is a reference to paranormal powers of perception. But I sense it's something deeper than clairvoyance. It's not some kind of superpower. It is our ability and propensity to have a relationship with the underlying essence of all reality. There's a subtle way in which we can know what we cannot know, touch what we cannot touch.
By the caves of San Satorio We hold hands and gaze at the quiet rush of the Duero As once did Leonor Machado and her husband Antonio, The poet of the two Spains - upstream and down in time - Through this same place where hermit monks of old Contemplated the flow that ever is here and now And drew close to the subtle power moving the silent river Imperceptibly carving the hill of Soria, steep and stark.
