Nonaligned faith and practice in the present
The name “Jesus” scares people off, since our sound bite- and meme-driven culture automatically ties that name with what I call the “Christianists,” those abusive people who misuse the sacred tradition of Jesus’ friends as a political ideology, the way Islamists do the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad (“Peace be upon him”).
I’ll say more about this in a future post, but meanwhile….
10Afterward, when he was alone, his followers and the Twelve asked him about his parables, 11and he said, “To you the secret of the realm of God has been imparted; but to those who are outside everything takes the form of parables so that 12‘though they have eyes, they may see without perceiving; and though they have ears, they may hear without understanding; some day they might turn and be forgiven.'”
– Mark
…On May 27, 2007, I began publishing The Empty Path through the free blogging service of WordPress.com. I have now migrated that blog to a domain I own, EmptyPath.net.
The blog’s first post was called “Where to Start” and concluded with the following words:
The day-to-day reality of faith and practice, what
…“I believe God loves those moments when we do without him. He thinks, ‘At last, they’re going to stop walking around with their nose up in the air awaiting some supernatural magic; they’re going to watch the snow and the trees and start to think a bit. They’re doing the job without me, inventing utopias that don’t have me as their essence; they are finding within themselves there reason for all things. In fact, without realizing it, they are understanding
…Samaritans
In 2015, writing about “Christian Universalisms,” I explained that Jesus
was from Galilee in northern Palestine, child of Aramaic-speaking peasants, not of the “proper” Hebrew-speaking Jews from Judea in the south. His [initial] concern was that his own Galilean people not feel excluded from God’s blessing because of their not being part of the Jerusalem-centered Temple cult.
As we find in teaching stories like “the woman at the well” ( …
Many of us are chronically distressed by the suffering we see around us. It confronts us in the 24/7 news cycle, in social media, in what we pass on the street every day. We live with a longing to be rid of the pain and guilt that we experience in witnessing all of this suffering.
That longing drives us to cast about for things to do that would “fix the problem.” We try and we urge others to try political
…Originally published on Quaker Universalist Conversations (1/1/17).
I had a dream a few days ago, one of those rare wholly unambiguous dreams. It was a flying dream, but that’s not the relevant feature, just a plot device.
I was returning home to an upper floor of a six-story apartment building. Flying over the roof, I saw that the whole surface was filled with sleeping
You don’t know what will happen if you go down that road. That’s why you should go there.
Why do what you have already done?
The world never changes, and it is never the same. Each step opens a new door to the same old life. Infinite variations on the same thing.
Remember Bill Murray’s movie Groundhog Day? Only weatherman Phil Connors knows that each day
…Waiting for Quaker meeting
with a fence of white jasmine
behind me
and the
sun
a bit too warm
I hear from across
another wooden fence
opposite
the shout of the
morning-sobered plumber
stumbling from his
trailer:
“Alright! The first lily
has bloomed!
Fuckin’ yes!”
Nothing new.
Except perhaps that the the circumstances are more extreme than they have been since I lost my counseling career.
There is this.
…The fixed idea that we have about ourselves as solid and separate from each other is painfully limiting. (35)
Bodhichitta is our heart—our wounded, softened heart…. The more you look, the more you find just a feeling of tenderness tinged with some kind of sadness. This sadness is not about somebody mistreating us. This is inherent
…