Avatar takes us on an exciting ride that changes our sense of self, scale, and loyalty. We soar up into tree branches and down into the roots as if we’re insects in the forest. Who are we in the larger communities of life? We think of Pandora’s Box as releasing all the troubles of the world, but that’s a perversion of the original myth. In the pre-patriarchal version, Pandora’s Box contained the goods of a natural world. We were similarly tricked out of Eden. We…
Don't let the devil sell you what you already have. Good and getting better is a tag line for an impending song extolling our condition. What? Wait! Aren't we weary of Covid, worried about armed crazies, tired of Texas and taxes? Yes, and we're stuck in a dangerously warming planet that the fossil fuel media and lobbyists would have us "don't look up." I would counter that we should look up, not just at the comet of planetary fever increasingly upon us, but at all…
I don’t want it to. Nor do I believe in some hell in an alleged afterlife. The hell America could go to is an actual one, fires and torment galore! I use this provocative title deliberately in a prophetic way. Prophesies are if/then warnings. If we keep fostering hateful division at home and new enemies to war against abroad, then we could create hell here worse than the Civil War, worse than WWII, worse than we want to think. Besides all the anger and domestic…
(Be sure to see the four impending services I'll be offering in October and November, found at the bottom of this blog post.) Worse than the illness I suffered this summer was the reality reported in my summer's reading and viewing. My health challenges are not much compared to what native and other marginalized people have endured. I suppose it's the big brother and preaching pastor in me that draws me to the ugly reality of how cruelly some would treat others, and it makes…
Three weeks ago, I had a bike crash I can’t remember. I’m finally able to walk and cough without too much pain, but other than some scrapes and bruises, I’m okay and grateful. I’m mostly grateful that I don’t seem to have lasting brain damage (my concussion left me with no memory of the crash, ambulance trip, and most of the hospital). For the first week I could barely walk. Rolling over in bed was an ordeal. Thinking was slow. But the crash left me…
I have a new tagline on my outgoing emails: “We are born of Eden and for it.” The more I learn about our garden planet the more I am astonished and in love. I am in awe at whatever mystery and wonder that brought creation into existence. Why is there something rather than nothing? I hope there’s a God to hear my gratitude. I want to take in Eden fully and treat it with reverence, responsibility and joy. I thank whatever Creator may be by…
And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. (Genesis 1:31) We are born of and live in Eden, and it lives in us. We are made of it and for it. By Eden I don’t mean a mythical land of a biblical past, I mean the actual garden bible writers once loved, and I mean the rest of the garden that we should love. Eden suffers both blunder and attack by us humans, exponentially-so in the last two hundred…
How easy it is to take the goods of life for granted. I realized this in the usual way – by having something injured. Who notices how well their thumbs work? I don’t; they just do. But bang it a few times and infection sets in, making it throb with highly noticeable pain, and you’ll realize all the ways there are to bump it again and again doing ordinary things. Put a key in the lock? Ouch! Open a package? Oww! Type a sermon? …
We are born of, ride along with, and can slightly veer a vast momentum. From the cosmos to consciousness, we are in momentums we might veer. There's a cosmic momentum that launched atoms and galaxies billions of years ago; they hum and spin still and will continue. The rocks on Mt. Ashland seem solid and lasting, but peer inside closely enough and you'll see the momentum of elemental particles coming into and out of existence repeatedly. The electrons vibrate or spin reliably. Given enough time,…
You gotta do to do. Big plans and bigger imaginations don't get it done. Drawers of files of information and ideas just get more crammed. Needs as wide as a round ball planet go neglected. I've taken in too much and given out too little of it. I gotta start somewhere, so I'll start here. I'll start by publishing to the entire world, knowing no one knows I'm doing it. I publish to all humanity, and not just for these decades, yet I'm alone so…