Should We All Choose a Simple Life? Many of us in our hectic societies long to live a simple life, but not everyone is attracted to simplicity. Some people prefer wildness and passion, the frenetic dashing from here to there, the unexpected marvels of unknown lands. The young especially enjoy the thrill of adventure and the promise of power, though some of us never outgrow our grasping for the glittering things of the world. Others of us love chaos. Some people choose to have many children. Then they encourage their children’s friends to join them, preferring the noise of the horde over the anxiety of wondering where their children are.…
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The New Year and Starting Where We Are
Making the Best of the New Year It’s the new year, and many of us are making resolutions. There’s a lot online about how to best stick with whatever goal you’ve set for yourself this year, and there’s nothing wrong with trying to improve oneself. The paradox is, however, that’s it often easier to change if, instead of pushing ahead with gritted teeth and a relentless determination, if we do so with acceptance and gentleness. Pema Chödrön talks about this in her book Start Where You Are. She suggests we look deeply at who we are and accept ourselves without judgment. Then we can move forward. If we refuse to…
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One Who Loves Me
Someone for Whom I Am Life He was young to have a stroke, but that didn’t make it any less debilitating. No one knew how much of his old self he’d recover. When I met him, his right arm was cramped, his fingers unwieldy. Speaking was not easy. He needed help with simple tasks. His nurse said he often refused to try to feed himself or brush his teeth. He seemed to have lost the will to live. Call him Jacob. It seems he’d wrestled with angels, though his wound was more severe than his namesake’s, and he felt anything but blessed. Since we rarely recognize godsends when they come…
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Peter Walks on Water
Walking on Water The story of Peter’s attempt to defy gravity is told in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 14. Jesus had just finished feeding five thousand people with loaves and fishes. He wanted some time by himself. So he sent the disciples ahead of him in a boat, and he spent the night praying. For the disciples, it was a long night. By evening, waves were battering the boat. The wind buffeted the craft, keeping the men from reaching shore. When morning dawned, they were worn out from rowing and shaken by the turbulence of the sea. In that vulnerable state, with the sky still gray, and the water…
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Knowing God’s Love
The God of Job About a year ago, while working on a column about the Book of Job, I came across the passage below. Job has demanded that God be put on trial, that he answer his questions about fairness and justice, yet God answers nothing. Instead, God grills him. He asks Job: Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook or tie down its tongue with a rope?Can you put a cord through its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook?Will it keep begging you for mercy? Will it speak to you with gentle words?Will it make an agreement with you for you to take it as your slave for life? [1] Job…
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Life Stages and Spiritual Growth
Learning Right from Wrong Living with my two- and four-year-old grandchildren reminds me that, not only is childhood about discovering the shapes and movements and idiosyncrasies of the world, but also about learning to manage one’s inner experience and behavior. In the best of all possible worlds, we receive help labeling those strange sensations in our chest, the rumblings in our belly. Maybe they’re fear, sadness, rage, embarrassment, frustration. Once we give them a name, we can figure out what to do with them, how to express them in word or picture, in play and movement. Then there’s morality. We have to learn what our culture deems proper, what our…
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The Shadow Side of Gratitude
Grateful to Be Alive What a thing it is to be alive, to see the many shades of the sky, feel the softness of the moss, listen to the wind rustle the leaves. Even to know the sharp stab of loss is a gift, because the pain means we’ve known love. In the face of disaster and death, we can still be grateful for having lived. When we are grateful, we feel better. It’s true that we all struggle with something. Life wounds us. We have limitations. Maybe we’re blind, or lonely, or have lost limbs. Yet we can still be grateful for whatever senses we do have, for the…
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Finding Peace in the Dark
The End of Night On this pre-dawn November morning, not even the moon shines through the cloud-dense sky. Yet it’s not quite dark. Patches of the trail are lit by streetlamps, and even where it’s not, the ambient light makes puddles shimmer, and the path is, if not clear, at least visible. In the city, we never experience true dark. At least not when we’re outside. Some twenty-five years ago, in Port Townsend, I stared in wonder at a brilliant sky lit up with a carpet of stars, for I hadn’t seen such a thing since childhood. In Portland, where I lived, the skies had long been dimmed by the…
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Job, the Perfect Child
A Blameless and Upright Man In the beginning of the Book of Job, God calls Job “a blameless and upright man” (Job 1:8). [1] He feared God, did no evil, and obeyed the commandments. In case any of his children cursed God in their hearts without his knowing it, he sanctified them and made burnt offerings. All he did was good in the sight of the Lord, and he was rewarded with a great wealth of children, oxen, camels, many servants, and more. This theology, that if we do good, we will receive good, was common back in the day (the 4th to 7th centuries BCE) when Job was written.…
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Death and the Death of Balder
It Began with Balder It is unusual for gods to die. Even the Titans, the original Greek gods, who were vanquished by their Olympian offspring, remain alive in Tartarus, a cavernous hell that serves as their prison. Gods that do perish are resurrected. Isis traveled the world to collect the pieces of her husband, Osiris, so she might put him back together, and he might be reborn. The Aztec deity, Quetzalcoatl, after waking up to discover that, while intoxicated the night before, he had cavorted with his sister, felt such remorse that he set himself on fire, burning to ash. Out of this death, his heart rose to the heavens,…