love

A Place at the Table: Toward the gospel of inclusion

When we make room for God, who is always among us, we open our lives in vulnerability to the power of love. Love isn’t a soft, insipid emotion. It is a power for transformation. Today as we gather, let us pray for a greater openness to God; let us set an intention to make more room in our lives for what is holy and good; let us commit to an expansive, inclusive way of life. Here’s a sermon based on the Gospel of Mark 2.15-17 and “The Guesthouse” by Rumi. Second Sunday of Advent 2021

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In the early part of Mark, chapter two, the Gospel writer sets up the story we’ve just read about Jesus at a table with a bunch of “tax collectors and sinners.” The writer is expanding a theme in these two stories, illustrating the ways the gospel of Jesus is about creating a bigger table. . . .

On life and death, love and joy | The risks we take 

We take risks when we choose to love. Inherent in loving is the reality, in fact, the necessity, of loss. On October 31, 2021, All Saints Day was near and mingled with Halloween and Dia de los Muertos. When we focus intensely on death and our loved ones, no long among us physically, we consciously face not only the fact of death but the way death can make both life more precious and the act of love more daring. As Yehuda HaLevi wrote long ago: “It is a holy thing to love what death will touch.” “To remember this brings painful joy.” Here’s a sermon based on based on John 16.16-22 and a poem by Yehuda HaLevi.

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To live is to risk.

To love is to take a chance.

Life and death walk hand in hand, whether we like it or not. . . .

How to break free from the madness

My wife, Patty, and I are just back from a week along California's Big Sur coastline, one of the most astonishingly beautiful places on earth.  Just type Big Sur images into your web browser and see what I mean.  

Nature is God's art and it nourishes something deep within us.

Today I stumbled on a piece by Daniel Ladinsky who's spent his life writing contemporary renderings of the ancient mystic poets.  Here's what Ladinsky says about nature; his description gets at what I feel when I am drawn into the vast, Divine canvas: 

"Nature and art are sacred breasts we can feed on to grow. They are vital to our evolution. They offer a jailbreak or leave from the madness and demands we can get caught in. Of course love does that, too. Love dissolves boundaries and ultimately removes any contour that is not luminous." 

For more on the nature of nature and art and love, and especially poetry, see Ladinsky's full blog post on Huffpost here. 

Go there, because if you can't get to the Big Sur coastline or any other place of extreme beauty, you can pick up a poem and it might carry you into ecstasy.  (And Ladinsky's got a couple great poems in his essay, especially the spiritually flirtatious poem by Rumi, The Body is Like Mary).