This is the time of day when
I almost always feel
aching
groundlessness
As if
nothing I have done this day
matters,
And I’ve left undone
everything
necessary.
Category: Uncategorized
… 
On waiting and squirming
“On waiting and squirming” was my fourth post when I began The Empty Path in 2007, nine years after I lost my South Carolina prison counseling career to right-wing politics, seven years
…
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
…
How should I
do this?
Nothing
is written
down.
Image: “Kitchen chair in sunlight,” Vihara at Little Duxmore,
…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)
… 
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
Sasha Bley-Vroman reviews Richard Rothstein’s 2017 The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America in the October 2021 issue of Western Friend.
Beginning with the statement, “The GI Bill was a White guy thing,” Bley-Vroman tells us:
…
