Keeping silence is work indeed. It goes against our obsessive need to communicate, socialize, produce, achieve. It is a confrontation with our emptiness, self-deceptions, even self-image—those things we try so hard to hide under blankets of activity and sound. Silence...
Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of meaningless and empty life… It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as...
In short, our congregations are marked by a warped spirituality. We have been formed spiritually in ways that bracket the realities of violence and poverty and oppression, ignoring them (at worst) or confining them (at best) to the margins of our attention. We have...