Our
spiritual lives are where we reckon head-on with the mystery of ourselves, and
the mystery of each other.
We create
transformative, resilient new realities by becoming transformed, resilient
people.
Listening
is about being present, not just about being quiet.
People
who have turned the world on its axis across history have called humanity to
love.
Love can
be practical, creative, and sustained as a social good, not merely a private
good.
We are
made by what would break us.
Human
beings have forever perceived that naming brings the essence of things into
being.
Tolerance
doesn’t welcome. It allows, endures,
indulges.
Tolerance
was a baby step to make pluralism possible, and pluralism, like every ism,
holds an illusion of control. It doesn’t
ask us to care for the stranger. It doesn’t even invite us to know each other,
to be curious, to be open to be moved or surprised by each other.
What
you see in the past is dependent on what you are able to see now.
Convenience
is an illusion, merely shifting the burden of process and consequences.
We need
our bodies to claim our souls.
Whether
we know it or not, we’re spending our whole lives preparing for our death.
If God is
God--- and that in itself is a crazy shorthand, begging volumes of unfolding of
the question – he/she does not need us craven.
He/she desires us, needs us, grateful and attentive and courageous in
the everyday.
Spiritual
life is a reasonable, reality-based pursuit.
It can have mystical entry points and destinations, to be sure. But it is in the end about befriending
reality, the common human experience of mystery included.
We are
among the first peoples in human history who do not broadly inherit religious
identity as a given, a matter of kin and tribe, like hair color or hometown.
But the very fluidity of this – the possibility of choice that arises, the
ability to craft and discern one’s own spiritual bearings – is not leading to
the decline of spiritual life but its revival.
It is changing us, collectively.
Fear
comes out in public looking like anger, when it comes to nations as well as
individuals.
The
human participant is always a participant, never merely an observer. Somehow our subjectivity, our presence, our
wills matter cosmically, whether we want them to or not.
Love has
a quality of a bedrock reality we discover – adventurers, travelers, each of
us, only fitfully apprehending its potential.
The idea
that God is love has nothing to do with beliefs or transcendence and everything
to do with actions and people.
Spirituality
is water, and religion is the cup which carries it forward in time.
In
science, light can be a particle or a wave, depending on what question you ask
of it. Its kind of a way of
demonstrating something we all experience, that contradictory explanations of
reality can simultaneously be true.
Hope,
like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a practice that becomes spiritual
muscle memory. It’s a renewable resource
for moving through life as it is, not as we wish it to be.
Shift
from wish-based optimism to reality-based hope.
Reality
is a both/and.
The
internet is in its infancy. It is at a
fundamental level a new canvas for the old human condition, salvation and sin,
at digital speed and with viral replication.
It is a magnifying glass on every human inclination, beautiful and
terrible, trivial and mean, generous and curious.
Our world
is abundant with quiet, hidden lives in beauty and courage and goodness. There are millions of people at any given
moment, young and old, giving themselves over to service, risking hope, and all
the while ennobling us all. To take such
goodness in and let it matter – to let it define our take on reality as much as
headlines of violence – is a choice we can make to live by the light in the
darkness.
