I've learned, over many years, that church isn't about order or quiet or even ritual so much as it is about showing up. For yourself, for God, and for the people around you who need to feel--just as you do--that the blessings and burdens of being a human are not...
To be human is to live by sunlight and moonlight, with anxiety and delight, admitting limits and transcending them, falling down and rising up. To want a life with only half of these things in it is to want half a life, shutting the other half away where it will not...
I still love the church. I love the church universal, as well as the church local (red brick, white-columned with deacons smoking in the parking lot). With all of its dysfunction and flesh marks, with all of its confusion and humanity, it is still the best thing God...
The fact that we do not speak it but sing it only expresses the fact that our spoken words are inadequate to express what we want to say, that the burden of our song goes far beyond all human words. from Life Together
Matthew writes: “[Herod] sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under.” Jesus is born, but in Flannery O’Connor’s words, “at a devastating price.” No one knows how many children died; the New Testament alone documents the...
The Christmas spirit does not shine out in the Christian snob. For the Christmas spirit is the spirit of those who, like their Master, live their whole lives on the principle of making themselves poor—spending and being spent—to enrich their fellow humans, giving...
If we resolve to be considerate and to help our neighbours; to make friends with people of different races and religions; and, as our Lord said, to look to our own faults before we criticize others, we will be keeping faith with those who landed in Normandy and fought...
The spiritual stature of a person's life is measured by love, which in the end remains “the criterion for the definitive decision about a human life's worth or lack thereof”. Yet some believers think that it consists in the imposition of their own ideologies upon...
A few years ago, my son attended the funeral of a classmate whose life had been tragically cut short by an automobile accident. Though Stan did not know him very well as they were both relatively new to the school, he said the boy was “soft-spoken and very kind.”...
Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that...