Awe and the Beginner’s Mind What inspires awe? What leaves us wondering and mystified? I think of nature, of all kinds of beauty, of childbirth, death, and the unimaginable vastness of the universe. Poetry can amaze us with language that sings and soars. Music and dance can take away our breath. Ideas, too, can sweep us up in amazement, and mystics dwell in the land of awe day after day. With all the opportunities we have to experience awe, you would think we’d wander around amazed and wondering all day long. Little children, unjaded by years of repeated exposure to trees and cats and ice cubes, often take delight in…
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On Resilience and Teapots
Becoming Resilient As the Psychology Today website (1) puts it, when challenged by tragedy and trauma, resilient people “rise from the ashes.” They re-engage in life, learn from their mistakes, maintain optimism, and bounce back to try even harder next time. If you’re resilient, you’re less likely to try to escape with drugs, food, gambling, or overwork because you won’t feel as lonely, uncomfortable, or ashamed. Now that science has discovered the trait of resilience, everyone’s talking about it. We admire people who overcome horrible childhoods to become successful and happy. We’d love to have more capacity to cope effectively with stress, to bounce back, feel optimistic, and keep going…
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Temptation and Holy Innocence
Lead Us not Into Temptation In his version of the Lord’s Prayer, the Quaker educator, Parker Palmer, talks not about avoiding temptation, but about embracing innocence. “Lead us,” he prays, “to holy innocence,” one that is “[b]eyond the evil of our days.” [1] The primal couple, Adam and Eve, started life with “holy innocence.” Like protected children, they had no worries. As far as we know, God’s only rule for them was that they not eat from the Tree of Life. Everything else, He allowed. Was this because such innocents would never think to harm another being? Basking in the joy of paradise, and feeling no anger, animosity, fear, nor…
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Seeking the Treasure Within
Seeking Within As part of our human desire to create meaning from our experiences, we seek Truth, that wisdom and knowing that surpasses all understanding. Most people I know have a sense that some Truth lies beneath the uncertainty and suffering of our existence, so we spend our lifetimes seeking it in the vain hope that we can rest, satisfied that our misery has some purpose. I’m not sure that, in this lifetime, we ever find the ultimate Truth. Religions, individuals, cultures all create their own understanding of life and death; evil and good. Our truths are different. Even one person holds different truths throughout a lifetime. Perhaps the answer…
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As Merciful as God
As Merciful as God In his reflection, “Perfection of Wholeness,” Richard Rohr equates mercy with “God’s all-inclusive and impartial love.” He then explains that the biblical passage that calls us to be “perfect” as God is perfect should instead be translated as a call to be “merciful” as God is merciful. Therefore, to be merciful, we must be inclusively and impartially loving. That sounds pretty hard to me. Can we really be impartial? How do we include everyone when we dislike some people and others hurt us? How can we be infinitely merciful like God? We can’t be infinitely anything. Fortunately, this isn’t as difficult as it sounds. Whatever God…
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Rigorous Honesty versus Opinion
Truth and Leaving According to World of Proverbs, the Slovenians have this saying: “Speak the truth, then leave immediately after.” If I had heard that proverb when I was young, perhaps I wouldn’t have lost a loyal and kind friend when I was fifteen. For my birthday that year, she had given me a book by Albert Camus. For those who don’t know Camus, he was a brooding, thoughtful, absurdist author who wrote about meaning, purpose, death, and life. I didn’t read the book. I didn’t want to read it. Not because it was dark or philosophical, but because it was nonfiction. At the time, I only read myths, stories,…
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Happiness and Pleasure
Depression We can learn a lot about happiness from folk tales. You may know the one from Italy, “The Happy Man’s Shirt.” In it, a king’s son suffers from sadness. He lies in bed all day, stares out the window. He sighs, he won’t eat, he barely talks. Concerned, the king tries to cheer up his son with games, jokes, parties, and tournaments. It doesn’t work. “What’s the matter with you?” the king asks. “Are you in love with someone who does not love you back?” No, the boy is not in love, nor is he physically sick, though he grows thin and weak, and the king is afraid he’ll…
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Black Lives and the Wise Fool
Beauty and My Back Yard Last week, I gave myself a gift. I sat in the shade of our back yard and watched. Not much happened. Insects fluttered past my face, a scrub jay pecked at an apple in the neighbor’s tree, a breeze touched my cheek, swallows sailed over houses. I heard traffic noises, the trilling of a bird, a dog barking, someone talking. With their blue flowers flared open, the borage plants attracted big honey bees and fat, black ones, their heads marked with yellow, their legs dabbed with the orange leavings of stamens. All this happened, and more. In places I couldn’t see, like the recesses of…
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Freedom and Rebellion
Protecting Ourselves Sharon Salzberg, a Buddhist teacher who specializes in loving-kindness, tells of riding with a friend in a rickshaw in Calcutta when man grabbed her and tried to pull her out of the carriage. Her friend pushed the man off her, and they got away safely. When Sharon told her teacher about the incident, he said, “Here’s what you should have done. Using great loving-kindness, you should have hit him on the head with your umbrella.”1 This is freedom, and it is rebellion. Some of us learn that we have to get back at anyone who hurts us or our families. We learn that we need to protect our…
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Punishment versus Forgiveness
Imprisonment and Punishment In the wake of the Supreme Court’s June 20 decision in Utah vs. Strieff that gives police officers the right to stop you for no reason at all, discover you have an outstanding warrant, search you, and then use anything they find as evidence against you in court, I feel a kind of despair. Our insatiable need to contain, corral, and punish those who threaten our money, power, or comfort is so strong we’re willing to erode all safeguards against police overreach. In her rebuttal to the court’s decision in the Utah vs. Strieff case, Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “We must not pretend that the…
