We are all so closed in and we don't even know it: by our language, by our cultures, by our religions, by our sex, by our age. So how can we possibly expect that we know God? I feel as if my life has been spent straining to see through a knothole the size of a pinhead...
Society called the blind sinful, a female child useless, a menstruating woman unclean, all of them marginal to the system, condemned to the fringes of life, excluded from the center of the synagogue, barred from the heart of the temple. But Jesus takes each of them to...
Life is about learning to quit complaining about everything. Or as Jack Benny said, "I don't deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don't deserve that either." When we come to realize that life is a series of events--good, bad, and indifferent--we will learn...
Being spiritual means that we become more than pursuers and purveyors of a system. It requires a total change of heart, a total concentration of mind..... It is the seeking that counts. It's so easy to forget that simple truth in a capitalistic society that teaches us...
Everybody needs to dream the dream of a better life, a better world. But there is such a thing as failing to accept life as it is to the point that we miss what is good about it, too. "The greatest part of our happiness," Martha Washington wrote, "depends on our...
Jesus shows us, when women lack jurisdiction, church commissions lack women, and even altar girls are barred in a Christian community that says they are permitted, the invisibility of women in the church threatens the very nature of the church. from In the Heart of...
The sense of being stranded in the midst of life . . . is enough to drain a person’s very personality until there is little left to recognize. Where did the joy go all of a sudden? Where did the feeling of self-confidence disappear to in the midst of this emptiness?...
To say that we believe that God loves the poor, judges in their behalf, wills their deliverance but do nothing ourselves to free the poor, to hear their pleas, to lift their burdens, to act in their behalf is an empty faith indeed. To say that God is love and not...
…until we are quiet and listen, we can never know what is really going on—even in ourselves. Especially in ourselves. Silence frightens us because it is silence that brings us face-to-face with ourselves. It tells us what we’re obsessing about. it reminds us of what...
The awareness that we are yet meant to do more than we are signals where God lies in wait for us to become what we are meant to be. Then the spiritual life, the awareness of a driving energy within that is greater than ourselves, greater than anything around us,...