A love affair has to do with immediate personal satisfaction. But marriage is an ordeal; it means yielding, time and again. That’s why it’s a sacrament: you give up your personal simplicity to participate in a relationship. And when you’re giving, you’re not giving to...
The task is not to get God to do something I think needs done, but to become aware of what God is doing so that I can participate in it.
If Christmas is about being happy, jolly, and untroubled and therefore able to celebrate, few can participate. But Advent is about broken people in a broken world, yearning for a long-promised redemption.
We are, on this night, at the pivot point of the Jesus story. And it turns out that on this night we are at the pivot point of the story of the world. Everything depends on the outcome of the trial of Jesus before Pilate. It is a trial we get to remember tonight. It...
Before the water turned into wine, someone had to do the ordinary, tiresome task of filling the water pots. We want the new wine to just appear, but Jesus calls us to fill the jars first. In short, God often wants us to participate in our own transformation.
One man does not make a wave. We are all carried by the flood of heroism in the human spirit. A symphony orchestra is no different. If we are fortunate in our times, we achieve a few moments of that heroism. But this is only the beginning, only the drawings on the...
Pentecost is Babel turned right side up: all speech is unified because it is God, no longer people, who is building toward the heavens. The story of Pentecost goes further than its historical reality. It is also a parable that urges us into the knowledge that the...
My life is not about me. It is about God. It is about a willing participation in a larger mystery. At this time, we do this by not rejecting or running from what is happening but by accepting our current situation and asking God to be with us in it. Paul of Tarsus...
I believe that appreciation is a holy thing, that when we look for what’s best in the person we happen to be with at the moment, we’re doing what God does. So, in loving and appreciating our neighbor, we’re participating in something truly sacred.