Nonaligned faith and practice in the present
So difficult to sit doing nothing
unless enforced by the presence of others.
Alone, I want to be busy every moment.
What makes me uneasy with stillness?
Uneasiness itself?
I’m not doing anything!
You are breathing, pumping blood.
Holding down the chair.
Filling space.
Dying.
No. That word
came from elsewhere than cleverness.
That word is
closer to the bones.
I’ve not tried before to retrace in memory how my poems come into being. Yesterday a close friend’s response to “Fixed” move me to do so.
This poem came to me, as most of them do, in much the same way that spoken ministry messages come to me during Quaker waiting worship. I am inspired by something, perhaps something very minor, that crosses my awareness, and suddenly there is an image or word or phrase.
My usual morning practice
…I feel stalled
and confounded.
Snow
not yet fallen
chills me and
gets in my way.
I do not want to slow down,
let go,
wait.
Yet I must,
either restlessly
or willingly.
Nothing seems fixed.
Are modern Friends still driven
by the nineteenth century’s social
gospel, that
worthy yet material world
oriented political drive,
standing in for waiting
worship and
seasoned
leadings?
There is a grave error in the penitential notion of “mortifying the body.”
It replicates the false dualism of “spirit versus matter ” that crept into and overwhelmed the Jewish faith and practice of Jesus as his followers spread out through the Greco-Roman world.
A truer practice is to “affirm the body,” to affirm it as a mortal yet sacred part of the divine whole.
When I allow myself to suffer the large or small sufferings of my body,
Today I am greatly conflicted about the Quake peace testimony. Not giving it up, but struggling with the horrendous cost in lives entailed in staying true to it.
As of March 7, 2022, the Russian military is surrounding Kyiv, Ukraine, and it continues its deliberate targeting residential neighborhoods and blocking of escape by war refugees. The suffering, death, and destruction are escalating rapidly.
I long to see something done at once to save the people of Ukraine from Russia’s violence.
…
“Waiting for Queer Theology,” Mark D. Jordan’s review of Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics, by Linn Marie Tonstad (Wipf and Stock, 2018), in Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Autumn/Winter 2021.
Queer theologies as processes, not products
The key concern for Mark D.
…![The Tetragrammaton in Paleo-Hebrew (10th century BCE to 135 CE), by Manuela Ideacrea. [Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)]](https://emptypath.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Tetragrammaton_Paleo-Hebrew-940x400.jpg)
“YHWH is the bearer of consequence, not punishment or rewards.”
Excerpts from Dancing in God’s Earthquake: The Coming Transformation of Religion, by Rabbi Arthur Ocean Waskow (Orbis Books, 2020)
Opening the doors
I see
that the landscape
is
ever-changing.
One moment becomes
another,
not
in a sequence or
progression,
…
Excerpts from “A Jewel in the Lotus: Buddhist chaplaincy includes compassion and ‘skillful means,'” by Chris Berlin, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Autumn/Winter 2020
Chris Berlin, is an instructor in ministry and spiritual counseling and the denominational counselor to Buddhist students at Harvard Divinity School. With his colleague Cheryl Giles, he teaches the course Compassionate Care of the Dying: Buddhist Trainings and Techniques.
…The course interweaves teachings in the Buddhist view of impermanence and death with
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