Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now. Let it teach you Being. Let it teach you integrity — which means to be one, to be yourself, to be real. Let it teach you how to live and how to die, and how not to make living...
You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose...
Do not take that gift of hope lightly. It has the power to conquer despair in the midst of sorrow, to light the darkness in the valleys of life, to whisper “One more time” in the face of failure. Hope is what gives life to dreams, making the fairy tale the reality.
For some Christians... The Bible is only authoritative when they interpret it. Freedom is only for everyone until they say it isn't. Oppression is only real when they feel it. Justice is only fair when it favors them. Capitalism is king until socialism profits them....
Time is real because it has eternity itself as its content. The temporal contains the temporal and the eternal. The temporal will be consumed by fire in the last separation of "nothing" from the reality of the world. But this will not be the dissolution of the world....
If I take Easter as the starting point, the one incontrovertible fact about how God treats those whom he loves, then human history becomes the contradiction and Easter a preview of ultimate reality.----------------------------------Gender-neutral version: If I take...
THE PROBLEM WITH THE WORD 'NONVIOLENCE' is that people think they know what nonviolence is apart from Christ. Then nonviolence becomes a marker more determinative than Jesus – it conceives peace apart from the crucifixion. But in reality, discipleship is the defining...
The rear-view mirror has a version of reality, but you couldn't drive far or well chasing it. The road, for better or worse, is onward.
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...
Advent is a powerful time to remember that we are in process. We await the arrival not of the cute little baby Jesus, but of the new consciousness he represents—a new way of perceiving and reacting to “reality.” Jesus’ birth heralds the arrival of what we’ve come to...