You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been...
Music will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibilities, and in time of care and sorrow, will keep a fountain of joy alive in you.
In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy, sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.
I am sometimes amazed, even alarmed, at the extent to which people judge ministers by their preaching, and preaching by its rhetoric. To do so is to make the entirely spurious but nearly universal assumption that God is better served by a poet than by an accountant....
If you feel pain you're alive. If you feel other people's pain, you're a human being.
I now read Christ's being "lifted up" as image language echoing a passage in the letter to the Ephesians that speaks of God putting all things "under his feet" (Ephesians 1:22). As a beautiful paraphrase puts it: God has put everything without exception into Christ's...
By all appearances, it is a Good Friday world. But by the light of Easter, through the thick darkness covering the nations, we can dimly discern a "Yes, but" kind of message. Yes, fear and self-righteousness, indifference and sentimentality kill; but love never dies,...
Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
To be alive at this time means to be caught in the great unraveling that strands us near all the loose threads of creation; but it also means to be close to the revelation of the new design and the next paradigm.
The Holy Spirit as the awe-inspiring power of life and of love is a reality with which every human being is familiar, whatever name we give to it. Spirit is the very aliveness of our life. This holds true for every one of us. We differ only by the degree to which we...