A month's worth of practices to explore the many moods and meanings of winter, including its pristine beauty and its many opportunities for playfulness.
The great Christian monk Thomas Merton once compared the spiritual life to the search for a path in a field of untrodden snow: "Walk across the snow and there is your path."
Home is more than a house. It is a sacred location, a place of aspirations and dreams, of learning and habit, of relationships and heart. Home is the geography of our souls.
"Love is what God is, love is why Jesus came, and love is why he continues to come, year after year to person after person... May you experience this vast, expansive, infinity indestructible love that has been yours all along. May you discover that this love is as wide as the sky and as small as the cracks in your heart no one else knows about, and may you know, deep in your bones, that love wins."
And this is it. This is the life we get here on earth. We get to give away what we receive. We get to believe in each other. We get to forgive and be forgiven. We get to love imperfectly. And we never know what effect it will have for years to come. And all of it…all of it is completely worth it.
Spirituality emerged as a fundamental guidepost in Wholeheartedness. Not religiosity but the deeply held belief that we are inextricably connected to one another by a force greater than ourselves--a force grounded in love and compassion. For some of us that's God, for others it's nature, art, or even human soulfulness.
"I do not believe that just because you're opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-lief. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don't? Because you don't want any tax money to go there. That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is."
"Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstances whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else."
“The Christian life is not about pleasing God the finger-shaker and judge. It is not about believing now or being good now for the sake of heaven later. It is about entering a relationship in the present that begins to change everything now. Spirituality is about this process: the opening of the heart to the God who is already here.”
If there is any one message the Bible delivers, it is the message that God loves outcasts and that Jesus was born into the world an outcast to rescue and renew outcasts from religion gone bad. He was born poor and died poor, yet the legacy of love he left us, the legacy of inclusion and acceptance and understanding, will endure forever.
God's grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and others and even the planet, and God's grace to me is that my brokenness is not the final word ... it's that God makes beautiful things out of even my own shit.
When John accuses "evildoers" of leading gullible people into sin, what troubles him is what troubled the Essenes: whether—or how much—to accommodate pagan culture.
Christianity did not begin with a confession. It began with an invitation into friendship, into creating a new community, into forming relationships based on love and service.
“If God is the source of life, I worship God by living. If God is the source of love I worship God by loving. If God is the ground of being, I worship God by having the courage to be more fully human; the embodiment of the divine.”
“Baptize these others in the name of the “Father.” That word must not be thought of as the name of some external deity, but rather as the name of the Source of Life that inhabits the universe, calling us all to live fully.
The task of religion is not to turn us into proper believers; it is to deepen the personal within us, to embrace the power of life, to expand our consciousness, in order that we might see things that eyes do not normally see.
"If we stop consuming, they will stop producing. Only collective awakening can create enough determination for action." Thich Nhat Hanh
"I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality...I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word." ~Martin Luther King Jr.
Rather, the way of Jesus is the way of death and resurrection — the path of transition and transformation from an old way of being to a new way of being.
Mystic, poet, philosopher, and theologian Howard Thurman’s reminds of the true meaning of Christmas in his poem, "The Work of Christmas.”
"The way you become divine is to become wholly human" - Bishop John Shelby Spong
"You may call God love, you may call God goodness, but the best name for God is compassion." ~ Meister Eckhart
"It's not enough to LOVE, people have to feel that they are LOVED." ~Saint John Bosco
At any moment you can feel frustration, anger, fear, jealousy, insecurity, or embarrassment. If you watch, you will see that the heart is trying to push it all away. If you want to be free, you have to learn to stop fighting these human feelings.
"We are not diminished when we ensure basic needs and human rights are extended to all; rather, we are ennobled." ~Gretta Vosper
It’s vitally important to challenge views of God and religion that are leading to so much division and violence in today’s world. This demands courage and creativity. ~ Joanna Manning
The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays. ~ Søren Kierkegaard
Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other. ~ C.G. Jung
(I'm working now on a project called SEEDS, LEAVES, ROOTS: Faithful Rhetoric and Reflection for Progressive Social Action. It's an initiative of Progressive