Shadow: grief and matri

Shadow the cat, on his couch ramp

This morning, our crippled elderly cat would not eat.

In recent years we’ve nursed this 16-year-old through one crisis after another, always watching him rebound to his usual, sweet, attention-demanding self.  Now he’s on shots for arthritis and extensive intervertebral disc degeneration.

He gets around with a hind end that stumbles and flops. The vet says the palliative shot keeps him from feeling pain, but I imagine that he is doing more physical damage every time he moves—especially when he

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On Good Friday: Affirming the body

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,

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The horrible cost of the peace testimony

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.

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Sustaining the real presence of community on Zoom

Meeting for worship on Zoom

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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