What and who are we, and whither would we go, and why, really?
I start to answer these questions, not by copying what others say, or by mouthing what others expect me to say as a minister, but by honestly saying what I think I know.
As you know, I entered ministry via a route through embalming. At 18 I looked closely into death. It awakened a wonder at the structure of our bodies and an appreciation …
What ever became of vision? Our current political and religious leadership have visions so dark and backward we forsake ever hoping for better. Can we look past these dreary scenarios? Dare we?
The visionaries of the past left failed results, leading us to cynicism. Skinner’s meager Walden II was at least a fair attempt at being fair. The Farm in Tennessee and the Oneida Community in upper New York were limited to limited communes. The great …
Humans are meaning-seeking creatures. We want to know, or at least want to seem to know. We want coherence and congruency. We want to know what is, why it is, and how to live in it.
By “it” I mean this obvious manifest material world. We find ourselves born into a family and culture, living in a body that grows and ages. We cling to life and see that those who pass from it do not …
The end is near! When? Any moment. Every moment. All kinds of things will happen by a year from now; I guarantee that. A year up, next solstice, December 21, 2012, could mark the very end. That’s when the rogue planet Nibiru from the Kuiper Belt is said to arrive here. Or maybe it will be because of the electromagnetic pole shift. Or all-out nuclear war. It makes you want to plan your last …
It seems paradoxical that here on Perihelion Day, when we’re the closest to the sun, we’re so cold. If we’re three million miles closer now than we are on July 4th, Aphelion Day, why aren’t we hotter now and colder then? It depends more on the angle of relationship than the distance. Our northern hemisphere gets a glancing-off short day of sunlight that also has to penetrate more atmosphere at that shallow angle. So, while …
Bucky Fuller, one of the more innovative and colorful engineers of our 20th Century, saw early boats as the strong shape of a dome upside down. Typical of his far-reaching sort of thinking, he once speculated that early boats either went with the wind or against it. In the west, we admire the daring-do of earliest ship captains fighting the wind by using it, angling sail and rudder just so to travel zig-zag out of …
We greet the sun in the morning
We sigh good-bye at night
But the sun is always with us
Though to us, seems dark and bright.
It stands still, ‘tis we go spinning
Whirl our earth-flung way
Counting our days and our seasons
Living our life’s time away.
Our perspectives on time and life are limited. We fool ourselves by the immediate and the apparent, missing the interconnectedness of time and life. But we reorient ourselves to our longer and larger reality by …
Humanists tend not to believe in prayer. Humanists believe in human ability and choice in a natural universe. Miracles are either impossible or explainable. Working material and social reality by merely thinking something fervently just doesn’t happen. Scientific evidence for the effect of prayer is scant. But personal experience of many is profound.
Prayer may not be humanistic, but is human. Many humans in all sorts of cultures pray. They talk as with ancestors, saints, gods, …
I once got to meet The Blind Saint of Vrindivan, India. He was the guru of my guru, Dr. Vasavada. Dr. Vasavada, of Bombay, India, was fresh in Chicago from having been trained with Carl Jung as an analyst. I was at the University of Chicago in seminary and took to helping Dr. Vasavada get around town while learning about Jungian psychology and eastern religion from him. When the chance to meet his guru in …
The eastern version of our western divine right of kings was the Chinese Mandate of Heaven. Let us consider its framework and apply it to our current king of sorts, King George. I do this, not in a partisan way, but towards loving our country, all humanity, and earth.
The Chou, a somewhat crude but ambitious crew, defeated the Shang in 1115 B.C., beginning one of the longest dynasties in Chinese history (1115-221 B.C.) In order …