Nonaligned faith and practice in the present
There is nothing in this moment
that stays.
Nothing to guide me,
Nothing to hinder me.
Those are all thoughts and feelings
that rise and fall.
They come from nowhere
except from
previous thoughts and feelings.
Yes, there is sensation and emotion,
the brain’s tools for
sifting through
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
…There ain’t no good guys, there ain’t no bad guys.
There’s only you and me and we just disagree. — Dave Mason
What is it we all fear? We fear what our culture—or, rather, whatever part of our culture we pay attention to—tells us to fear.
At the moment we are all afraid. All of us. On whatever part of the spectrum of belief we stand, there is nothing else in the pubic conversation right now except
…Part I: Languages of belief
Part II: Survival faith and practice
Part III: “Someone should start laughing”
“Someone should start laughing”
I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:
How are you?
I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:
What is God?
If you think that Truth can be known
From words,
If you think that the Sun and the Ocean
One of my Friendly correspondents has reminded me that, back in February, I addressed some of the concerns of the previous post from the perspective of my alter-ego Walhydra’s hopeful skepticism.
In “The Virgin of Hollywood, Florida,” Walhydra groused at length about the gullibility of “the masses,” who blithely toss their belief after every tabloid headline, urban legend, or political sound bite.
Yet she found herself wondering: “How does one move from scorn for the credulous to a working, sustaining
…In my previous post, I mentioned my wariness of both orthodoxies and gnosticisms, and I affirmed the primacy of an individual’s immediate experience of Divine Presence in daily faith and practice. A number of challenges complicate the effort to live by such an affirmation.
Over the past three decades, I have taken refuge in the paradoxical religious life of a solitaire.
My faith and practice are rooted in the Christ-centeredness of my Lutheran upbringing and
…
