Sharp language

The internet has provided all of us with an advanced class on using innuendo, piercing invective and anger to make a point with our writing.

Now, instead of simply seething or ranting, just about anyone can write an email or a social media post that absolutely destroys someone else.

To what end?

If the goal is to persuade, it’s clearly not working.

If we want to let someone know we’re upset, it might be easier to just say so.

The purpose of speech is to alert others to our point of view, and the purpose of conversation is to connect and to persuade.

It’s not clear that making language angrier or more cutting is helping much.

-- Seth Godin, Sharp Language

Indy 500

This is one impression gig!  Couldn't have been a better day.

Pics here….

Contemplative Nonviolence

Through contemplative nonviolence, we focus on the nonviolent Jesus and the Holy Spirit of peace, love, and compassion, and in so doing, we undergo a lifelong, daily, ongoing conversion to nonviolence, a new beginning that starts every time we sit to meditate. In this contemplative practice, we deal with our inner violence and surrender ourselves to the God of peace, even if we do not want to or do not understand why we should. We undergo a cold-turkey withdrawal from violence. . . . It’s painful and uncomfortable—and literally our salvation. This journey for the sobriety of nonviolence will continue for the rest of our lives. . . . It’s a long-haul, ever-deepening awareness, a daily surrender of our violence to God, so that over time we are transformed by God’s disarming love and sent into the world of war as God’s peacemakers. . . .

-- John Dear

Those who follow Jesus should attract the same people Jesus attracted and frustrate the same people Jesus frustrated.

-- Shane Claiborne

Randoms...?

We tend to stick with what we like — which more often than not are just things we’re familiar with.

It doesn't seen hard to observe (unless there was trauma involved), that many (most?) people return to the ways and values they grew up with.

It seems a little conspicuous how indifferent change is to our opinions about whether or not it should happen.

How much of self-acceptance is correlated to our perception of how much we would lose if we more fully did (accept ourselves)?

Prior Randoms...?

Injustice

Ahead and Around

'Poem for the week' -- "Ahead and Around":

Met, quarreled, quilled the bird of peace,

Untidied a pleasant plane.

Ahead accused Around of complete deceit,

Around accused Ahead of being discontented.

Neither listened to each.

Either lined on,

Making round straight and straight round,

Permitting nothing in-between,

Licked space clean,

Fattened unhappily and flew

Along the geometrical faith of two-and-two,

Hated apart; and far and far

Each wanderer

Hoped toward a spiritually reconnoitered heaven.

“For,” cried sinuous Around,

“More and less than I, am I,

Nature of all things, all things the nature of me.”

Ahead echoed the cry.

Sped toward its own eternity

Of the sweet end before the bitter beyond, beyond.

And both were brave and both were strong,

And the ways of both were like and long,

And adventured freely in fettered song:

One that circled as it sang,

One that longitudinally rang.

The spite prospered. The spite stopped.

Both earned the same end differently,

Prided along two different paths,

Reached the same humility

Of an old-trodden start.

Birth is the beginning where all part.

Death is the beginning where they meet.

-- Laura Riding Jackson

How People Think

How people think about the country depends on the stories they hear about it.

-- Heather Cox Richardson

In the old days, there was a lot of hope that the information age would make us smarter. It didn’t. Instead, high-speed communication, combined with algorithms that discern our biases and feed us what we want, helped us sort ourselves into echo chambers.

-- Rachael Larimore

Symptoms vs Causes

For all the things that politics is interested in legislating, it seems like it’s much more about how to deal with symptoms than it is about causes.

Perhaps, that’s because it is really difficult to legislate things in the causal realm. But, endless treatments of symptoms without recognition of the disease, in the end, is somewhere between futile and hopeless.

At some point, all you end up doing is legislating your legislation, because you're not really working on the problem.

In 2004, a ten-year federal ban on assault weapons expired, and since then. mass shootings have tripled. Zusha Elinson, who is writing a history of the bestselling AR-15 military style weapon used in many mass shootings, notes that there were about 400,000 AR-15 style rifles in America before the assault weapons ban went into effect in 1994. Today, there are 20 million.

-- Heather Cox Richardson

We must find those among us who are willing to work for the service of the people, rather than for power. Because until that happens, nothing substantive will change.

...finish here.

Intellectual Humility Deficit

Instagram: Adam Grant

At the root of our polarization problem is a deficit of intellectual humility.  Too many people refuse to admit that they might be wrong.

Diversity of thought opens minds.  Intensity of conviction closes them.

Knowing your knowledge is incomplete is a prerequisite for learning.

-- Adam Grant

To Notice

I'm wondering...if it is our job to notice.

Should Feel Like

Christianity should feel like, "my love for others continues to deepen," not "my beliefs are more correct than anyone else's."

-- Ben Cremer

The opposite of faith is not doubt — it's certainty. 

-- Paul Tillich

What If Jesus

Randoms...?

We assume a lot, until we’re forced to reconsider.

Almost any serious engagement of life seems to result in a shift in the questions we're asking.

God seems to delight in using surprise to awaken us.

How do you react to this observation — life will tame you, one way or another?

Prior Randoms...?

We Just Don't See How Deep It Is

Or Something Like That

On the Lighter Side:

Meaning of Life?

What is the meaning of life? That was all — a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.

-- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Simulated

Much of our lives seem to be increasingly simulated.  Is there is a tipping point over the degree to which our experience with life is simulated?  What is impacted when our orientation to reality is less and less with real things?  

It appears we are now capable of simulating nearly everything that one can experience in life. AI is, basically, premised on the notion that we can have something virtually, as opposed to actually having it (…and, we seem to have become quite content with this).

But, is anything being lost, particularly when this becomes so pervasive; in so many of the dimensions of our lives? 

Gaming is obviously one example.  But, what about so many other things now?  People say they like nature, but how many actually spend time in it...as opposed to just looking at it or watching something about it?  Many of our home environments are freshly designed for the purpose of entertaining others — how many actually ever have anybody over?  

Even food is simulated now — you can just drink the basic ingredients you need.  And then there is the changing nature of money — it's hard to tell what is real money and what isn't.  Our sense of sexuality doesn't really even seem to require actual sex with another person.  What about our social-media influenced ideas about real connection with others (...or relationships in general)?  …the list goes on and on, and on and on.   

Many of our experiences are less and less with real things, but rather just simulation of real things.

When is the consequence of this like a tipping point, from which we no longer really know what reality actually is or how to relate to it?  Is this still a premature concern, or are we already in too deep to know any better?

...finish here.

False Assumptions

Instagram: stephenmattson

Information

I've noticed...I tend retain information more than the source of the information.  This helps with bandwidth, but also reduces it from time-to-time...when the source is essential to the information.

What We Need Most

What we need most

in order to make progress

is to be silent

before this great God

with our appetite

and with our tongue,

for the language

he best hears

is silent love.

-- St. John of the Cross, Sayings of Light and Love

HOW POLITICS POISONED THE EVANGELICAL CHURCH

The movement spent 40 years at war with secular America. Now it’s at war with itself.

I’ve spent my life watching evangelicalism morph from a spiritual disposition into a political identity. It’s heartbreaking.

Evangelicals — including my own father — became compulsively political, allowing specific ethical arguments to snowball into full-blown partisan advocacy, often in ways that distracted from their mission of evangelizing for Christ.

To many evangelicals today, the enemy is no longer secular America, but their fellow Christians, people who hold the same faith but different beliefs.

How did this happen? For generations, white evangelicals have cultivated a narrative pitting courageous, God-fearing Christians against a wicked society that wants to expunge the Almighty from public life.

I’ve heard casual talk of civil war inside places that purport to worship the Prince of Peace.

And, far from feeling misplaced, these conversations draw legitimacy from a sense of divine justice. The Church is not a victim of America’s civic strife. Instead, it is one of the principal catalysts.

Having convinced so many evangelicals that the next election could trigger the nation’s demise, Christian leaders effectively turned thousands of churches into unwitting cells in a loosely organized, hazily defined, existentially urgent movement — the types of places where paranoia and falsehoods flourish and people turn on one another.  ...continue here.

-- Tim Alberta

Randoms...?

Sometimes you just have to you put yourself in a quiet enough place that you can hear the sounds of life.

It may not be comforting, but it is helpful to know that often the catching-on of a good idea is mostly a matter of timing — when the moment merges with a good idea that makes or allows it to become something of substance.

God is always thinking of you and in ways you can’t even imagine — often through other people.

So, how about...we just stop clicking / scrolling stuff that looks 'outrageous'?

Prior Randoms...?

Effects of Remote Schooling and School Poverty on Reading

MarketWatch

Contact Zone

'Poem for the week' -- "Contact Zone":

Contact 

That’s when two stuff 

Touch, yeah? 

Just like when the tides come in 

And touch the shores

Bringing what it will. 

Fish from the deep 

Limu from the shores 

ʻOpihi from the rocks 

Coconuts on the drift 

Logs from the continent 

People from around the world 

Plastics and ʻopala of all sorts. 

The shore has no choice 

It has to accept 

Whatever the tides bring. 

Here we are 

In this swirling muliwai 

Of ideas and manaʻo 

Philosophies and spiritualities. 

Like the tides 

Ebbing and flowing 

The shore has no choice. 

But we do!

-- Imaikalani Kalahele

The Time That Is Given

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

-- J.R.R. Tolkien

Don't Know What It Is

What do you do when you feel like something is happening to you and you don’t know what it is?

When it feels like you are becoming something that you are not yet (or not fully aware of yet) — when your sense-of-self feels too connected to who you have been. And, in some way, that combination of 'have been', 'are', and 'becoming' sense of things is disorienting.

Put another way, do you ever wonder if you already are something that you haven’t yet become?

Like some cosmic game of Wordle, something has selected your word, but you don’t know what it is yet. And, you are trying to use the information that you have to deduce something, via a process of elimination, that is already there...and it isn't really working. Having just turned 59, maybe my sense of things is that there are only so many more guesses — like being on guess 5 (out of 6).

These days, I feel like this is happening to me. Something is moving, but in slow motion. I keep going, but not sure where or why...not knowing what is happening (or if something even is).

What If...nothing is happening...and I just want it to?

...finish here.

May...

May your strongest convictions lead
to curiosity, not to fundamentalism.

May your deepest wounds lead to
healing, not to destructive patterns.

May the worst of you lead to humility,
not to gaslighting others.

May you always keep an open heart,
and an open mind, towards hope.

-- Carlos A. Rodriguez

This could easily be a mantra for me — so many elements I aspire to.

Basic Humanity

Ever noticed...that TV works when it appeals to your basic humanity? 

The problem is, that much of the time anymore, the part of humanity it appeals to is your basic fears.

Just look at the subject matter of most television programming; at its core, what are the consistent subjects that are being portrayed and why?

What dynamic is being activated / habituated in us when we so regularly diet on fear?

Mothers Day: Unity, Liberty, Charity

In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; in all things, charity.

-- St. Augustine

Though most certainly not intended as such, I can't quite imagine a more Mothers Day-appropriate description of many good mothers.

Randoms...? (from Others)

This is what happens in a nation captured by negative polarization. There are millions of people that aren’t merely unpersuadable — our cocooned media landscape makes them effectively unreachable. It’s not just that opposing messaging doesn’t break through; they’re not even aware of their opponent’s argument.

-- David French

If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy. 

-- David Frum 

The ego has a need to feel separate and superior.  It sees its own faults in other people.

-- Richard Rohr

In the Greek language, the phrases “love neighbor” and “love yourself” are connected by the word os, which is like an equal sign. This suggests we are called to love the self and the neighbor in exactly the same way. When we don’t love ourselves, it is impossible to love our neighbor. . . .

-- Jacqui Lewis

...any thread? Prior Randoms...? (from Others).

Learning Loss in Math

The Morning

Anywhere

Visual - "Anywhere":

Dismals Canyon, AL

I can reflect on the past. 

I can wonder about the future. 

But, the only day I can live, is today. 

...and, like this image portrays, I can do that anywhere.

Neithersideism

Sometimes, I’m asked by readers, “You’re kind of hard to make, politically, these days. Whose side are you on, anyway?” To which I respond: “You’ve heard of bothsidesism? Well in the last decade or so, I’ve become an adherent of neithersideism.”  

Why should I have to pledge my troth to chiselers, demagogues, and performing monkeys? To partisan gasbags and green-room gangsters and social-media harlots? AOC vs. MTG — to take but two party mascots — ain’t really a choice I’m interested in making, no matter how many partisan hacks stick a gun in my back and tell me it’s my God-appointed duty to do so. 

Neither, best I can tell, has any real interest in setting our country right. They’re much more interested in outrage — both provoking it and feigning it. Exhibitionistic rage is the fuel that fires their engines. And they’re not opposites, so much as bookends: professional hysterics whose entire careers are designed to agitate and inflame.

-- Matt Labash, Against Performing Monkeys

...a tidal wave of political narcissism opposed to the idea of social responsibility.

-- Garrison Keillor

My main thought is that too many view this all as a game. For whatever reason — maybe they're young and childless, or their kids aren't actually in school? — they see things in the abstract. You age into a community with other people's families and children and you get along to go along and you grow to love their kids and you find that most people on the local level just want to live reasonable, decent lives, because caring about other people is the only reason to be alive. This discourse is so divorced from that. I don't know how to square it. At the school bus stop, at the ice rink: I am awash in people just being people, regular people. The gender wars, the fascism this-or-that: none of it registers. Whence all the alarmism? The discourse is alarming. I get that. It really is. But if you quit participating in it..."

-- Ben McGrath

Law and Order

Why are we SO interested in law and order?

Especially, since it is often Christians who seem to lead this charge (though the Christian element less and less looks like what we thought it did).  Americans, in general, are armed to the teeth now.  Is that why you can almost smell the fear involved in this preoccupation?  Are we afraid and therefore armed, or armed and therefore afraid?

I’m not saying that law and order is not important or has no benefits — certainly it does, especially socially. But, the obsession with it, especially when promoted by certain groups of people, is conspicuous and reveals a real lack of something — like a false belief that if we could just have it or maintain it, we would be fine. 

And, clearly, that is not true. There is still a huge gap between conformity (and even obedience) and...love.

There are very significant reasons why there is so much in the biblical Old Testament after the Pentateuch (law). God was interested in far more than compliance, even noting (at length sometimes) that God really wants something more than the mere offering of sacrifices, which again we tend to see primarily as the 'orderly' payment of penalties. 

But, it is true that this something more IS much more difficult to manage or control.  So, perhaps this is why we prefer the simplicity of even rudimentary collective calls for law-and-order (or, we could just shoot them...you know, the disorderly).

Really, though, where is the ideology (if not the expression) of love these days?

...finish here.

Who Can Give Them Nothing

You can easily judge the character of a person by how they treat those who can give them nothing.

-- Simon Sinek

What Is Sadness Doing To Me?

I’m wondering…about an abiding sadness I am feeling.

Ever since my son, Conner, had a seizure on December 20, 2021, I have had a growing sense of this.

He had another seizure on Saturday and I sank into tears at the news, even before knowing any of the details.  

I'm clearly carrying something, like an abiding sadness...for him, for his wife, for all of us who know him.  

So, I'm also wondering about how such a thing works for me.  What does abiding sadness do to people?  What is it doing to me?

I'm guessing this answer will take time to discover....

So many people are suffering, in one way or another (at that level, we are all in this together)....

Perhaps the illusion is more when we think we're not...or shouldn't have to, or that it's not normal.

Perhaps it is awareness of our suffering that is the issue we can work with, rather than the myriad ways we've come up with to deny that we do.

Perhaps it is the shared-ness of our suffering that illuminates something in us, like the true nature of our collective humanity.

So, I wonder what sadness is doing to me.  It can feel bad.  But, maybe it isn't; maybe it is doing something for me, like opening me up to something far more common than I'd prefer to think.  Maybe it provides me a more accurate view of my humanity and how I assess that in relation to everyone's humanity.  Maybe it gifts me with a compassion for our collective and individual experience.  

And, maybe, that compassion enables a kind of love that is more accessible to all those around me.

"Be Not Afraid"

Nadia Bolz-Weber describes how Christians might interpret the oft-given scriptural command to “Be not afraid":    

Never once have I stopped being afraid just because someone said that.  

I AM afraid. . . .

So maybe our hope for becoming unafraid is found in . . . the part where Jesus calls Herod a fox and then refers to himself as a mother hen.   

A mother hen.   

Maybe that beautiful image of God could mean something important for us: and by us I mean we fragile, vulnerable human beings who face very real danger. I can’t bear to say that this scripture is a description of what behaviors and attitudes you could imitate if you want to be a good, not-afraid person. But neither can I tell you that the Mother Hen thing means that God will protect you from Herod or that God is going to keep bad things from happening to you.   

Because honestly, nothing actually keeps danger from being dangerous.   

A mother hen cannot actually keep a determined fox from killing her chicks. So where does that leave us? I mean, if danger is real, and a hen can’t actually keep their chicks out of danger, then what good is this image of God as Mother Hen if faith in her can’t make us safe?  

Well, today I started to think that maybe it’s not safety that keeps us from being afraid.   

Maybe it’s love.  

Which means that a Mother Hen of a God doesn’t keep foxes from being dangerous . . . a Mother Hen of a God keeps foxes from being what determines how we experience the unbelievably beautiful gift of being alive.  

God the Mother Hen gathers all of her downy feathered, vulnerable little ones under God’s protective wings so that we know where we belong, because it is there that we find warmth and shelter.   

But Faith in God does not bring you safety.   

The fox still exists.   

Danger still exists.   

And by that I mean, danger is not optional, but fear is.    

Because maybe the opposite of fear isn’t bravery.  Maybe the opposite of fear is love. So in the response to our own Herods, in response to the very real dangers of this world we have an invitation as people of faith: which is to respond by loving.

-- Nadia Bolz-Weber

WOAH!

Randoms...?

When you truly love someone, you are more open to change.

We are all suffering in some way, so it is not particularly helpful to compare suffering — comparing tends to lead to  by-passing, rather than awareness...of ourselves and others.

We have to be more willing to admit that the full experience of humanity includes our collective and personal ugliness and is not unrelated to our beauty — we can’t live in denial of either one.

Despite how social-media appears to be working, what do we do with the reality that so much of what we individually produce is not even noticed?

Prior Randoms...?

Structural Stupidity

In the past 10 years (especially 2011-15), something "went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth."

What happened:

The early internet looked like "a boon to democracy": "Myspace, Friendster, and Facebook made it easy to connect with friends and strangers to talk about common interests, for free, and at a scale never before imaginable."

Instead, the "Like" button, retweet and comments "encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics."

Of three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies, social media "has weakened all three ... social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories."  Continue here....

-- Jonathan Haidt

AXIOS

We Dream The Dreams Dreaming Us

'Poem for the week' -- "We Dream The Dreams Dreaming Us":

You say we should wait— 

It must have snowed all night or season,  

we don’t seem to know  

and there isn’t a clock; 

I say then  

we should  

wait, I  

trust you. 

The white page is blank outside;  

we haven’t heard in days. 

There is not enough time for a whole new plot. 

Inside, the wax dilates  

wide around the candle.

We sit in the dark

and wait

and are separate,

but looking at each other—

-- Brian Tierney

From the author:

“The title is borrowed from Shangyang Fang’s excellent first book, Burying The Mountain, and I loved the possibilities it opened with the complicated concentricism of its claim. Like many poets, liminality interests me. Dream or reality, present or future, snowstorm or apocalypse, prophecy or experience. This is the end or the beginning. This is the new phase or the final phase. Though, really, binaries break down in the face of the potential for love, which can correct and redeem all that we have done to the Earth, and to all earthly life, and, most especially, to each other. Not simple, sentimental love, but the good, hard love that requires believing each other to be worthy; the love of sitting quietly together in a quiet room in a turbulent time—interpersonal togetherness as a starting point.”

What We Are Starving For

What we are starving for is what we are not giving. 

-- Anne Lamont

Life Just Keeps Going

If there’s one thing that seems true about life, it is that it just...keeps going. 

There’s really not much of anything that, in the end, you can hold onto in terms of trying to constrain it. It just keeps going. 

This can be disconcerting at times — sometimes, we just want it to stop. 

But, buried underneath all the dynamics that change requires of us, something is persistent. Something that just must keep going — keep growing, keep creating, keep perpetuating, keep evolving — seems to be at the core of the very nature of life, even as circumstances seem to prevail upon our understanding of what all is happening. 

Something a little surprising to many is that it really isn't even stopped by death.  In fact, death is part-and-parcel of the very dynamic of it.  Life uses death, too, as part of it's keep-going-ness.

Because of this, we can’t really hold onto life (at least in the form of a grip), especially if our grip is an attempt to stop it, keep it the same, etc. In any given moment, we are not experiencing everything exactly as it has been experienced before.  We can’t hold onto the past, we can’t hold onto the present, we can’t hold onto our ideas about what the future will bring. Life just keeps going. 

And the sooner we are willing to accept the reality that change is inevitable, the sooner we are more free to engage (rather than resist) life in all its times and spaces; to cherish the past, to enjoy the present, and to anticipate the future with hope. 

Life is not something after all to try to hold onto (or go back to...sorry MAGA fans) — it's something to accept, to cooperate with, to grow with, to help shape.

Convenience and Boredom

The last fifty years have seen a worldwide effort to maximize one and eliminate the other.

Marketers and technologists work overtime to create convenience. We’ve gone from hunting and growing our food to pressing three buttons on a phone to get it…

And the cost of that convenience is high. We give up privacy, control and satisfaction to get it, in every corner of our lives.

At the same time, the market has figured out that we simply don’t like to be bored. And so there’s more stimulation, more options and more noise than ever before.

The problem is that boredom is a partner with satisfaction and joy. It’s hard to overstimulate ourselves into those feelings.

-- Seth Godin, Convenience and boredom

What I Have Been Exposed To

I've noticed...that I believe things that I have been exposed to.

That has a number of implications, doesn't it?

Besides the fact that I don't believe in things I've not been exposed to, wouldn't that have to mean my beliefs are relatively limited...that is, to my experience?

Which would also mean that something could be true, that I don't believe in, simply because I haven't experienced it.

At the very least, humility about the realities of truth is in order.  Judgments about people with different experience really are not only often misguided, but also fraught with opportunity for harm...to those people, not to mention myself.

God Does Not Forget

Dear Child of God, it is often difficult for us to recognize the presence of God in our lives and in our world. In the clamor of the tragedy that fills the headlines we forget about the majesty that is present all around us. We feel vulnerable and often helpless.... But we are not helpless and with God’s love we are ultimately invincible. Our God does not forget those who are suffering and oppressed.

-- Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Randoms...?

When the system becomes primarily something to game, something is really wrong.

It's hard not to observe that politics has become increasingly exploitative — the irony being that each side thinks it is the other side that is guilty of it.

How easily does lying becomes systemic — more and more lies and liars, increasingly less and less sensitive to what is true because when you've lied so much, you can't even 'remember' what is true (not to mention the lies you've told).

How are we complicit when we believe our ends justify our means?

Prior Randoms...?

Confessions of a Past Culture Warrior

On the Lighter Side: Biden's Fault

On the Lighter Side:

Opinion: The latest political cartoons

Earth Day 2022 - "We Are the Earth"

The ultimate luxury in life remains nature. 

-- Robert Rabensteiner

At this very moment, the Earth is above you, below you, all around you, and even inside you. The Earth is everywhere. You may be used to thinking of the Earth as only the ground beneath your feet. But the water, the sea, the sky, and everything around us comes from the Earth. Everything outside us and everything inside us comes from the Earth. We often forget that the planet we are living on has given us all the elements that make up our bodies. The water in our flesh, our bones, and all the microscopic cells inside our bodies all come from the Earth and are part of the Earth. The Earth is not just the environment we live in. We are the Earth and we are always carrying her within us.

Realizing this, we can see that the Earth is truly alive. We are a living, breathing manifestation of this beautiful and generous planet. Knowing this, we can begin to transform our relationship to the Earth. We can begin to walk differently and to care for her differently. We will fall completely in love with the Earth. When we are in love with someone or something, there is no separation between ourselves and the person or thing we love. We do whatever we can for them and this brings us great joy and nourishment. That is the relationship each of us can have with the Earth. That is the relationship each of us must have with the Earth if the Earth is to survive, and if we are to survive as well.

If we think about the Earth as just the environment around us, we experience ourselves and the Earth as separate entities. We may see the planet only in terms of what it can do for us. We need to recognize that the planet and the people on it are ultimately one and the same. . . .

A lot of our fear, hatred, anger, and feelings of separation and alienation come from the idea that we are separate from the planet. We see ourselves as the center of the universe and are concerned primarily with our own personal survival. If we care about the health and well-being of the planet, we do so for our own sake. We want the air to be clean enough for us to breathe. We want the water to be clear enough so that we have something to drink. But we need to do more than use recycled products or donate money to environmental groups. We have to change our whole relationship with the Earth.

-- Thich Nhat Hanh

How the U.S. climate has warmed since the first Earth Day

If we won't do it, maybe Gen Z will:

Climate, environment shape Gen Z life decisions

What If: Like A Flower

What If...we could be more like a flower?

Do you think a flower ever wishes that it could be more like another flower? 

I know, in some ways, the answer is preposterously obvious — no!

And, yet, it seems a little conspicuous (to us humans) that something of beauty would NOT be able to think about its beauty in a frame of how its beauty compares to the beauty of something else. I wish I had more red in my flower. I wish I was bigger. I wish I was used more often in floral arrangements. I wish more people were around, to see me, etc. 

You know, things that we, as human beings, think about all the time.  

We could actually marvel at the possibility that we could be perfectly content in our own color and shape and size and season and use and all the other things that come with existing for the purpose of just being — not for the purpose of gain, popularity, or any other advantage that would somehow put us in a better position to get something we think we need. 

What does a flower need?  It beautifies the world either way, with or without audience, just by existing.

How do I beautify the world simply because I exist?  Why do I evaluate my existence by using audience to validate it?

The irony is that beauty often does create audience — it is, after all, something to behold.

But, truly beautiful things don't need an audience to be beautiful.  Because they are anyway.  

...which may be part of what draws us to it (you know, like a flower).

Calmness

Ever noticed...the power of calmness, in your life?

Seems To Hang On

Ever noticed...how each season seems to hang on as long as it can, before it finally just relents?

This can often be similar to how we live our lives — what are we holding onto?

Something Altered

Ever noticed...how do things feel the day after Easter? 

Something has been altered; but, we are so quickly back to our routines, to so much sameness.  How do we hold both of these realities...at the simultaneously?

If nothing else, Easter expands our imagination. 

Perhaps God awakens us with surprise.

Let him Easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins

Easter: We Are Led...By the Presence of Jesus

If we, who would be his disciples, recall the night before he died, we are led to a table, from a table to a garden, from a garden to a courtyard, from a courtyard to a hill, from a hill to a grave, from a grave to life. The table holds the self-gift of his very flesh and blood; the garden is watered by his tears and blood; and the cross holds him, even as the One whom he knows and loves lifts him up from the grave to release him into the surprise of hope and life. 

-- M. Shawn Copeland

The Eucharist “is not a prize for the perfect”, but rather “a gift of the presence of Jesus in the church.”

-- Pope Francis

Cherry Blossoms at a Tea Plantation

Fujian, China taken by afun阿方

Beauty, color, and order — just a few of the wonders of Resurrection Day!

Solidarity vs Equality

Jesus’ state was divine, yet he did not cling to equality with God, but he emptied himself. 

-- Philippians 2:6–7

Most consider that this was originally a hymn sung in the early Christian community. 

The hymn from Philippians artistically, honestly, yet boldly describes ... the great self-emptying or kenosis that we call the Incarnation and ends with the Crucifixion. It brilliantly connects the two mysteries as one movement, down, down, down into the enfleshment of creation, into humanity’s depths and sadness, and into a final identification with those at the very bottom (“took the form of a slave,” Philippians 2:7). Jesus represents God’s total solidarity with, and even love of, the human situation, as if to say, “nothing human is abhorrent to me.” God, if Jesus is right, has chosen to descend—in almost total counterpoint with our humanity that is always trying to climb, achieve, perform, and prove itself.  

This hymn says that Jesus leaves the ascent to God, in God’s way, and in God’s time. Most of us understandably start the journey assuming that God is “up there,” and our job is to transcend this world to find “him.” We spend so much time trying to get “up there,” we miss that God’s big leap in Jesus was to come “down here.” What freedom! And it happens better than any could have expected. “Because of this, God lifted him up” (Philippians 2:9). We call the “lifting up” resurrection or ascension. Jesus is set as the human blueprint, the standard in the sky, the oh-so-hopeful pattern of divine transformation.  

Trust the down, and God will take care of the up. This leaves humanity in solidarity with the life cycle, but also with one another, with no need to create success stories for ourselves or to create failure stories for others. Humanity in Jesus is free to be human and soulful instead of any false climbing into “Spirit.” This was supposed to change everything, and I trust it still will.

-- Richard Rohr