“The Seven Blessings That Come With Aging" by Sister Joan Chittister, OSB
The one certain dimension of US demographics these days is that the fastest growing segment of the American population is comprised of people above the age of 65. We, and all our institutions, as a result, are a greying breed. At the same time, we are, in fact, the healthiest, longest lived, most educated, most active body of elders the world has ever known. The only real problem with that is that we are doing it in the face of a youth culture left to drive a capitalist economy that thrives on sales.
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"Get Thee to a Nunnery: Relating and the Sanctuary of Being" by Jeannie Zandi
Below the mind there is a beautiful, inarguable, direct experience that you are. I invite you to notice this fact: the felt sense of presence and all the flavors of what it is like to be, right now, going nowhere. When we are invited here, when we land in this moment, we find the simplicity and nourishment that emanate from the core of our being as we rest from the outer world. To the extent we can drop our attention away from the content of thought and open ourselves to this holy dimension of life, to presence, we are fed. We are zeroed and soothed in this stillness, resting from all of the things we've created, all the messes we've made and the victories we've had. For a time, we can just rest in a dimension deeper than thought, below the particulars, and drop into raw being.
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"Jesus and the Tao" by Francis Ritchie
If you have an aversion to Eastern philosophy (even though Christianity is, by origin, an Eastern religion), bear with me, I think you’ll find this interesting anyway. I’ve been trying to find a cohesive way of expressing what I believe the person of Jesus calls us towards that steps into something much deeper than just a conversion to a codified religion and its accompanying world-view (Christianity). The Tao (Dao) offers something into this space. With that in mind, here I want to explore Jesus and the Tao.
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"LISTENING: Two Ways Of Listening: John and Peter" by J. Philip Newell
The stream of Celtic spirituality, from Pelagius in the fourth century to George MacLeod in the twentieth, is characterized by the expectation of finding God within, of hearing the living voice of God speaking from the very heart of life, within creation and within ourselves. It is a spirituality that recognizes the authority of Saint John and reflects his way of looking and listening for God. At the decisive Synod of Whitby in 664, where two distinct ways of seeing, represented by the Celtic and Roman missions, came into conflict, the former allied itself to John. Coleman of Lindisfarne argued that the Celtic tradition originated from Saint John, the disciple who was, he said, “especially loved by our Lord.” Wilfrid, on the other hand, argued for the Roman mission, which, he claimed, was based on the authority of Saint Peter, whom he called “the most blessed Prince of the Apostles.” The tragic outcome of the synod was not that it chose the Roman mission but that it neither made room within the church for both ways of seeing or declared that both were firmly rooted in the gospel tradition.
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“Why Are Men Like That?" by Jeannie Zandi
I have heard this question asked in many different tones lately, but rarely with curiosity, concern and a sincere desire to understand. As an ally to men since the beginning of the Men's Movement of the late 80s, I would like to share, humbly as a woman, a bit of what I have gleaned over the past thirty years for anyone with a desire to understand those guys -- our brothers, fathers, sons, friends, and lovers, or anyone who grew up with men’s conditioning.
The first phrase I learned to say as a toddler was “Bad boy!” It was my weapon to get my mother’s attention when my older brother was doing something I didn’t like. It was the lens through which my mother, a product of her culture, related to children who had inconvenient feelings or uncooperative or unsavory behavior. From a very early age, I learned to relate to boys as their victim (and sometimes I was!), their boyish energy often seen as inherently oppressive to others. In turn, they learned to see themselves as bad boys and to try very, very hard to be good ones.
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Rob Bell Interviews John Philip Newell
In February, Rob Bell and John Philip Newell got together again for a riveting night of conversation, contemplation, and, when Rob Bell is involved, of course laughter. Recorded live at Largo – a stalwart and intimate music and comedy club in Los Angeles – their conversation was then converted into an episode of Rob Bell’s podcast, The RobCast. When these two teachers get talking, it’s electric. And it doesn’t hurt that they enjoy being together!
This interview uses John Philip’s book Christ of the Celts as an anchoring point, but covers a wide range of topics – original sin, the true meaning of being “born again”, the diaspora of the Christian household, grace, and more. Trust us – you don’t want to miss this stimulating, thought provoking, and at times delightfully glib and cheerful conversation.
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"A Reply To Richard Rohr On The Cosmic Christ" by Ilia Delio
Richard Rohr is one of the great vernacular theologians of our age. He has the gift of taking complex theological ideas and translating the core insights into the language of the people. In doing so, he has helped thousands of people around the globe come to a new appreciation of the mystery of God and the need for renewed spirituality today.
In his newest work, Richard takes up the mystery of the cosmic Christ and, as a Franciscan, does so with passion. The notion that Christ is the firstborn of creation, the head of the whole shebang from the beginning, was supplanted in the early Church by the emphasis on sin and salvation. St. Augustine, in particular, felt the need to formulate a doctrine of original sin in order to highlight the saving grace of God. By the eleventh century, the need to explain the damage due to the sin of Adam and Eve became the principal reason for Jesus Christ. If Adam had not sinned, Christ would not have come. No sin, no Jesus. The reason for the Incarnation (God assuming flesh), therefore, found merit in sinful humanity, rendering generations of people focused on their faults and failings. Salvation through Christ meant being rescued from a fallen world.
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"The Beauty of Beginner’s Mind" by Jack Kornfield
The wisdom of uncertainty frees us from what Buddhist psychology calls the thicket of views and opinions. “Seeing misery in those who cling to views, a wise person should not adopt any of them. A wise person does not by opinions become arrogant. How could anyone bother those who are free, who do not grasp at any views? But those who grasp after views and opinions wander about the world annoying people.” I like to think that the Buddha said this last sentence with a laugh. Ajahn Chah used to shake his head and smile, “You have so many opinions. And you suffer so much from them. Why not let them go?”
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“Life is like a Jigsaw Puzzle” by Father Seán ÓLaoire
…“Life is like a Jigsaw Puzzle”. If you were to scatter all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle on a table, the first thing you would do is identify the four corner pieces and put those in place. Next you would identify the straight lines and put those in place. Then you have three clues for the rest of the pieces: contours, colors and the picture on the box.
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"The Realization of Beauty" Chapter 7 - Sadhana - A Book on Spirituality by Rabindranath Tagore (PART 7)
The greater part of this world is to us as if it were nothing. But we cannot allow it to remain so, for thus it belittles our own self. The entire world is given to us, and all our powers have their final meaning in the faith that by their help we are to take possession of our patrimony.
But what is the function of our sense of beauty in this process of the extension of our consciousness? Is it there to separate truth into strong lights and shadows, and bring it before us in its uncompromising distinction of beauty and ugliness? If that were so, then we would have had to admit that this sense of beauty creates a dissension in our universe and sets up a wall of hindrance across the highway of communication that leads from everything to all things.
But that cannot be true. As long as our realization is incomplete a division necessarily remains between things known and unknown, pleasant and unpleasant. But in spite of the dictum of some philosophers man does not accept any arbitrary and absolute limit to his knowable world. Every day his science is penetrating into the region formerly marked in his map as unexplored or inexplorable. Our sense of beauty is similarly engaged in ever pushing on its conquests. Truth is everywhere, therefore everything is the object of our knowledge. Beauty is omnipresent, therefore everything is capable of giving us joy.
"The Relation of the Individual to the Universe" - (chapter 1) Sadhana – The Realization of Life - A Book on Spirituality by Rabindranath Tagore PART 1 (of 8 part series)
The civilization of ancient Greece was nurtured within city walls. In fact, all the modern civilizations have their cradles of brick and mortar.
These walls leave their mark deep in the minds of men. They set up a principle of "divide and rule" in our mental outlook, which begets in us a habit of securing all our conquests by fortifying them and separating them from one another. We divide nation and nation, knowledge and knowledge, man and nature. It breeds in us a strong suspicion of whatever is beyond the barriers we have built, and everything has to fight hard for its entrance into our recognition.
When the first Aryan invaders appeared in India it was a vast land of forests, and the new-comers rapidly took advantage of them. These forests afforded them shelter from the fierce heat of the sun and the ravages of tropical storms, pastures for cattle, fuel for sacrificial fire, and materials for building cottages. And the different Aryan clans with their patriarchal heads settled in the different forest tracts which had some special advantage of natural protection, and food and water in plenty.
"I am the Way, the Truth and the Life" by Father Seán ÓLaoire
In early 1995, I was invited to give a series of seven lectures at the Presbyterian Church in Palo Alto. I titled the series, “Will the real Jesus please stand up?” During the preparation period for the series, while I was meditating one day, I had a very powerful vision of Jesus. Before the meditation began, I had been reading the famous passage in John’s Gospel where Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life. Nobody comes to the father except through me.” So, now that I had him “in person”, I asked him, “Did you really say that?” He replied, “Yes, I did. Because the only way is love; the deepest truth is love; and the whole point of life is love. Anybody who wants to find the father needs to walk only in love.” And then, without any prompting from me, he went on to say, “And the Buddha is the way, the truth and the life. Nobody comes to the father except through the Buddha. Because the only way is compassion; the deepest truth is compassion; and the whole point of life is compassion. Anybody who wants to find the father needs to walk only in compassion.”
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"Tasting Teilhard" by Brie Stoner
After a million years of reflection, there is a dynamic meeting in the consciousness of man between heaven and earth at last endowed with motion, and from it there emerges not simply a world that manages to survive but a world that kindles into fire! ~ Teilhard de Chardin, Activation of Energy, 280
I remember first coming across the name Teilhard de Chardin five years ago in a Foundations of Christian Mysticism course that the Dominican Center hosted in Grand Rapids, MI. His name sounded mystical in and of itself, like an exotic French 50 year old bottle of wine, the subtleties of which my un-refined Bota-Box palate would never differentiate. Like all things French, I immediately assumed I wouldn’t “get it,” and so a couple of his works sat untouched collecting dust in my study for several years. However, during my first year in the Living School at the Center for Action and Contemplation, I experienced Teilhard as the critical key that unlocked all that was theologically tangled and seemingly unresolvable for me between Christianity and its relevance to my peers and future generations.
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Tao Te Ching – Chapter 64 (Part 1 and 2) by Galen Pearl
This uncharacteristically long chapter comprises several parts that may at one time have been separate. It reminds me of the book of Proverbs in the Bible, which contains many pearls of wisdom that can be considered as stand alone verses. Because of its length, I’m going to break discussion of this chapter into two posts.
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The Bodhisattva’s Path by Jack Kornfield
Bodhisattva is the Sanskrit word for a being who is devoted to awakening and to acting for the benefit of all that lives. The way of the bodhisattva is one of the most radical and powerful of all Buddhist forms of practice. It is radical because it states that the deep fulfillment of happiness comes from serving the welfare of others as well as ourself. Our highest happiness is connected with the wellbeing of others.
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“10 Spiritual Lessons for a New World” by Amoda Maa Jeevan
Amidst intensely turbulent times, so many of us today are feeling the urgent call to make changes that will create a brighter future for us all. Yet, however much we may want to save the world or fix what’s wrong, the truth remains that we can only change the world by changing ourselves. Inner transformation is the key to outer change.
Only by having the courage to walk through the darkness of fear, doubt and uncertainty towards the light of our true inner radiance can we transform our lives from suffering to joy and can we transform our world from terror to peace. The activation of this inner light is a radical shift in consciousness that awakens us to the miracle of our own power. It’s a shift from seeing through the myopic lens of ego to seeing through the unbounded clarity of an open heart.