Light that Knows No Boundaries Throughout the night, my neighbors’ lights blare from their house, spilling into backyards, trespassing into bedrooms, streaming into space. Light respects no boundaries. I can curse and cajole to my heart’s content, yet nothing will turn the glare aside except a wall or a shield. Even eyelids are not enough to protect us from the artificial glow that blights the world. So much brighter than any flame or distant star, the glare we have created confuses birds, leads turtles astray, and disrupts the hormones of every mammal, including ourselves. None of this matters when our fear of demons and criminals is used against us to…
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Hannah and Claiming a Voice
Hannah Transforms Prayer Samuel was a Nazarite, promised to God for his lifetime by his mother before he was born. The biblical book that bears his name tells not only his story as the last judge of Israel, but also that of Saul and David, Israel’s first kings. This is a book of transitions. Politically, it shows how Israel went from being ruled by the guidance of prophets or judges to being ruled by kings. It also marks a religious transformation, a new understanding of how to pray. Our story takes place before Samuel was born, when his mother spoke heart-felt, but silent words to God. It would be more…
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Creating Love Out of Tragedy
Tragedy and Faith The man had lost everything. His four brothers had died, as had his parents. A few weeks ago, his marriage fell apart. When his wife left him, she took the dog. He had no children. Sick and unable to work, his income was limited, and he couldn’t pay his rent. Now he was in the hospital. He felt scared and overwhelmed. Once up a time, he believed in God. He’d grown up Christian, but the message he heard was that if you believed in God and prayed for what you needed, God would take care of you. He explained to me how, after hearing that promise, he…
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Being that Leads to Doing
No Thing There’s a story told of a Bodhisattva who went to the mountains to meditate and teach. He had special powers, such as flying and hearing people’s thoughts. He built a Sangha, and five hundred holy men came to there. One day, when the chief follower brought half the community into the woods to gather food, the Bodhisattva lay down to die. As was the tradition, those who had remained behind sat with him, and as the end came near, they asked him, “What was the greatest thing you achieved in your lifetime?” “No thing,” their teacher said. Then he died. Nothing? Their teacher accomplished nothing? He must have…
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Ownership and the Spiritual Life
The False Idol of Ownership In trauma circles, there is a saying, “Don’t ask, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Instead, ask, ‘What happened to you?” In other words, all those people who seem crazy and wrong—the addict, the mentally ill, the homeless, the timid, the broken-hearted, the hungry, the prisoner trapped by cell walls or greed or an unacknowledged emptiness of heart—are not crazy or wrong. They are wounded. Trauma, which is the battering of our defenses, the shattering of our spirit, an event that overwhelms our capacity to cope, is not the only way we become scarred, though it is, perhaps, a more common one than we might suppose. Not…
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Celebrating Independence
The American Mythos Here in the United States, we value independence. The mythology that we are self-sufficient, free-thinking, rugged individualists has been used to sell trucks, guns, beer, and insurrection. We fought a war against England to guarantee our right to govern ourselves, and no one’s going to take that right from us. “Live free or die,” as they say in New Hampshire. [This 1809 quote from General John Stark became the New Hampshire state motto in 1945.] It’s that kind of sentiment that we celebrate on the Fourth of July. This is not all bad. Values are important, and we in this country do have shared values. We stand…
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Communicating with God
Does God Communicate? Her parents talk to God. Her partner feel God’s presence. They all say that the Holy Spirit guides them. Yet God has never spoken to her. That doesn’t mean she stopped believing in God. She believes. How could she not when she has been taught since infancy that this Christian God was real, that he created the universe, walked through a perfect garden with Adam and Eve, and blessed the faithful. This woman tried so hard to be faithful. She did not feel blessed. What was wrong with her? Had God forsaken her because of some terrible thing she had done, something she could not remember? She…
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Fathers and the Divine Within
The Divine Within There are many ways to twist a child’s soul. We can neglect children, hit them, make fun of them, demand perfection from them, expect them to take care of us, deny their pain, discount their emotions, hold them responsible for our feelings, bear grudges against them, insist on obedience rather than kindness, and treat them as possessions instead of seeing them as real, human, divine. A Hindu fable tells of a time when every person was a god. People abused their divinity, however, so Brahma decided he would have to hide their god-ness someplace it could never be found. Yet where could he put this divinity so…
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Magic and Magical Thinking
When Magic Ruled In the days of myth, when the land was wild, and the animals talked, and the people knew the shape of time and the color of laughter, and the gods spoke from the grass and the clouds and the creek, magic filled the pores and cells of every creature and every stone, and the people and the cosmos were one. Magic was the thread. It connected the creation to the gods and embedded humans solidly into the natural world. As it wound its way through everything, magic made the universe whole. Sometimes it was huge and dangerous, for it could trap people as easily as save them.…
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God’s Wrath and God’s Love
Divine Inspiration Divine inspiration comes from many sources. In Ancient Greece, there were the muses. According to the tradition of some religions, God spoke directly to their founders. For instance, there was the Mesopotamian author of the Atra-Hasis; Muhammad, who wrote the Quran; Joseph Smith of the Latter Day Saints; Báb and Baháʼu’lláh, authors of the Baha’i scripture; and Helen Schucman, who claimed that, when she wrote the Course of Miracles, she was receiving dictation from a voice who identified itself as Jesus. Although neither Jews nor Christians assert that God dictated their scriptures, many consider the Bible to be God’s spiritual word, if not the literal one. If nothing…