As we enter Holy Week, we remember the holy work of Jesus in order to take up that work in our own lives and for our own time.

Compassionate, Intelligent, Inter-Spiritual, Non-Dogmatic

Compassionate, Intelligent, Inter-Spiritual, Non-Dogmatic

Compassionate, Intelligent, Inter-Spiritual, Non-Dogmatic

Throughout Holy Week, two competing approaches to peacemaking collide. What if we've embraced the wrong one?

This week is Canada Day and July 4, two celebrations of national life in North America. Both holidays are particularly complicated - even painful - this year as citizens in both Canada and the United States struggle with legacies of colonialism and racism in history and our political lives.

What forms do your communion elements take during this time of Shelter In Place?  See mine, below this entry... from Palm Sunday.  Mt Hollywood Church is urging people to take pix of their home-made communion elements - whether wine and bread, milk and cookies, juice and cereal - and posting them on social media

Compassionate, Intelligent, Inter-Spiritual, Non-Dogmatic

Progressive Christian Spiritual Curriculum that is Compassionate, Intelligent, Inter-Spiritual, and Non-Dogmatic. This is Year One of our A Joyful Path curriculum for ages 6-10. 38 Lessons.

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Every Sunday I stand at the altar and preside over a mystery. A mystery that has its roots in the events we remember this Holy Thursday. On Maundy Thursday, we gather together to contemplate MYSTERY. We know what will happen tomorrow as Good Friday plunges us into darkness. So is it any wonder that we cannot fully comprehend this MYSTERY.

When there is an absence of conscious symbolic ritual, what happens with such a lack of awareness about the power that signs and symbols play in our lives, and the depth or richness of value and meaning they provide? How can we otherwise express what is ultimately inexpressible?

The psychologist and genius Otto Rank, author of the classic work Art and Artist, said that if you want to know the soul of a nation go to its architecture first.  Notre Dame de Paris and the entire gothic revolution of the 12th century Renaissance that it encapsules (along with Chartres Cathedral 30 miles beyond Paris), tells us much about the soul of France.  And our own souls.

The Christian tradition is now in the midst of Holy Week, the high holy days of our religion, concluding the season of Lent, the six-week period of repentance, prayer, fasting, and reflection in preparation for Easter.  The language and tone of Lent address the ego, known in traditional language as our ‘sinful nature.’  According to traditional Christian theology, Jesus died to ‘save’ us from our inherently depraved nature inherited from Adam & Eve, because we can’t do it for ourselves.  For the sake of biblical and religious literacy, we need to acknowledge a disclaimer.

The wise and teaching Jesus proclaimed an egalitarian ethic of loving and serving others, even our enemies, as ourselves. The compassionate and practicing Jesus worked and advocated for equality, justice, and mercy for the despised, poor, sinful, and oppressed. The judicious and brave Jesus decried the hypocrisy and illuminated the spiritual perils of the wealthy, powerful, haughty, judgemental, and privileged. The betrayed and arrested Jesus commanded the nonviolent laying down of swords and the restoration of severed ears to hear. The tortured and dying Jesus exhibited forgiveness to those who persecuted him. The resurrected and empowered Jesus encouraged and gave the gift of peace to all who would follow his example and go forth to revolutionize relationships with all humanity and creation.

I am indebted to Amy-Jill Levine's book "Short Stories by Jesus" and Bernard Brandon Scott's book "Hear Then the Parable" for challenging me to look beyond the Christian bias of interpreting Jesus' parables through the lens of the repentance and forgiveness and attempting to hear this story in ways more in keeping with Judaism.

  Darkness envelops our world and our lives. Shadows enshroud our spirits. We come to pay homage to one who tried to bring

O God, who grace feels abundant in our sunshine, but far removed in our shadows: We have come today to bear witness to Jesus’ suffering and death upon a cross. We are appalled at the injustice and inhumanity — not only of his last day, but of days in our lives when we hear about greed, corruption, discrimination, hatred, violence, and death.

We seek to showcase the power and diversity of voices in our community. By encouraging and broadcasting the best and brightest performance poets of today, we hope to broaden poetry's audience, to expand its reach and develop a greater level of cultural appreciation for the art form.

“Mindfulness is "paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally." ... It could have been at the mouth of one of the shallow caves carved by Nature out of the limestone cliffs of Mount Quarantania, facing Jericho on the Jordan River and the Dead Sea to the southeast, that Jesus sat to gaze at forty dawns in the wilderness before he began his ministry. This 40-day season of Lent invites us to join Jesus in practicing mindfulness as he did in the desert.

O God, our Divine Parent, may your presence be ever revered. May your peace and justice dwell among us. May your love and compassion live within and between us. Nourish us daily with the necessities of life; sustenance for our bodies, and inspiration for our spirits.

This service is appropriate for a small congregation of 20-60 people. The service is conducted in two settings:

The practice of creating Stations of the Cross for meditative reflection on the final hours of Jesus' life is a very old one. To this day, many Catholic and other churches have gardens or sanctuaries in which the stations are situated.

In the brilliant sunshine, in the city street, Hear the bright hosannas, hear the marching feet;

Look at Jesus; hear the story; Probe the purpose of his life; See the struggle and the glory, All the conflict, all the strife.

Liberty and Freedom: People – especially politicians, it seems – frequently use the two terms interchangeably, as if they were the same thing. But while civil liberties can be legislated and personal freedoms can be infringed upon, there is something autonomous about personal choices and actions that can never ultimately be denied or encumbered. “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given,” the late author and civil rights activist, James Baldwin, once said. “Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.” An earlier commentary considered the two ideas of conscience and consciousness as a spiritual component and practice of human experience. These comments are written as we approach our nation’s annual observance of the Independence Day holiday; exploring what might constitute a progressive Christian perspective of a kind of liberating “freedom” that is comprised of loosing the bonds of all the little deaths we die, and binding oneself to that which can irrepressibly spring once more to life.

Astonished, with the pain of Good Friday lingering in our consciousness, we awake to a new day of hopes and miracles.

This Easter, progressives will once again preach sermons and write articles in order to do their best to re-frame the Jesus story in a positive light. This isn't one of those articles.

In his native New Zealand Bryan Bruce writes, directs and hosts the internationally successful crime show THE INVESTIGATOR in which he re- examines unsolved crimes In 2010 he decided to apply his criminal investigative methods to the ultimate cold case : Who Killed Jesus and Why?

There is no Easter without making one’s peace with the dead and with the forces of destruction that lurk within the human psyche.