We never know.
That morning
I kept my hand
on our ailing cat’s belly
as he purred.
In communion with him
even while
grief tore through me.
Some say not to borrow grief
before time
but to
stay in the moment.
Yet
Tag: presence
Stop wasting
time
being
consciousness.
“You”
does not
exist.
It is a path
of illusory
linear time
through the
sphere
of
Creation
which
is
all
at
In “Loss of shared space: the second pandemic” (4/17/2020), I wrote:
…Our brains are hardwired so that the mere sight of a face [online] in real time minimally satisfies the need for a sense of presence with each other. But, our brains are in bodies in the material world. And our bodies need more than that minimal sight on a screen in order to feel—to know in the blood—that we are really in the midst of other people.
Can you not see
that the hurricane
is not
about you
but
around you?
It is not
being done to you. You
simply happen to be
in the midst
of
Even as I was completing the final part of my “Am I a nontheist…?” series, I knew that the editorial constraints I had imposed to keep those posts focused might create a false impression.
They could be read as describing a hermit, or at least someone who relies solely upon what Liz Opp has called “spiritual individualism” (“The slippery nature of corporate faith“), rather than someone for whom worship and daily life with others are essential.
Granted, I
…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
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
…On Easter of 2006, I began making my way, chapter by chapter, through The Complete Gospels: Annotated Scholars Version, that 1994 publication of the Jesus Seminar which gathers together new translations of the canonical gospels, the reconstructed Signs Gospel and Sayings Gospel Q, the Gospel of Thomas, and fourteen others from the first three centuries of the Common Era.
It was as I began reading the second century gnostic Christian Secret Book of James, just this past week,
…