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 for our precious, limited life. Too…
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 socialist vision of a worker’s paradise descended into…
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 return, except in memory and dreams. Occasionally we…
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 we’re closer than ever, we’re coldest because of our angel…
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 the Indian Ocean, around Africa, and up to Europe. This…
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, or God. Healing is an act of both…
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 India came up in the summer of 1972, I went. …
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 to convince their subject peoples, especially the nobles, of…
What is the worth of matter and these bodies made from it? Some religionists say matter provides a mere stage on which we act the drama of our lives, creating the conditions of our afterlives. Some scientists say it and our world are just insignificant specks in the enormity of the universe. Are we lost in a false dilemma? Must we choose between irrelevant matter and senseless matter? We should reject both irrelevancy and senselessness. As I once wrote in a paper for the…