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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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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Bearing the Beams of Love
Our Capacity to Love Although I haven’t heard this sentiment from other than Christians, I suspect they are not the only religious people who find it hard to imagine how an atheist copes. This makes sense. After all, if you find comfort in your relationship with God, you might conclude that peace comes from this connection alone, yet I have known many atheists, and from them, I have learned that the ability to cope with hardship, to find peace in the midst of adversity, has less to do with the specifics of one’s belief than with the capacity one has to love. Of course, this begs the question, what is…
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The Humble Heart
Rewards for the Humble It’s a common theme in folklore, the youngest brother or sister who makes good after the older ones fail, or the reviled stepsister who earns riches through her compassion, industriousness, and obedience, while her lazy and disrespectful sibling earns beatings or tarring or death. In “Mother Holle,” a Brother’s Grimm tale, the ill-treated girl is sent by her stepmother to fetch a spindle she dropped down the well, so she jumps in. She lands, though, not in the water, but on a grassy knoll. Seeing a meadow of flowers, she walks toward it. On the way, she passes by a baker’s oven. The bread inside calls…
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Protecting the Noncompliant
A Longing for Respect On my morning walks, I often pass by a van parked in our neighborhood. Occasionally, the man who lives in it is awake, and we chat. He’s survived outside for years, having lost his home when he lost his last job. Because he gets food stamps, he eats okay, but his phone hardly ever functions, and he scrounges money to buy gasoline. Who knows where he gets the cash to buy the meth he depends on “to keep warm”? The other day, I found him pacing beside his vehicle, looking disgusted. He told me that someone had snuck into his van while he slept and stolen…
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Love and the Work of the World
The World’s Work Between 1909 and 1910, W.E. B. Du Bois wrote prayers for the students of Atlanta University, a historically black school. They were collected and published in the book, Prayers for Dark People. In one of them, Du Bois points to the importance of rain and storm so that plants can produce fruit. He speaks of “hurt and suffering” in the human life that allows us to “bring the world’s work to its highest perfection.” [1] What is this work he’s talking about, and what does he mean by the “highest perfection”? Could it be, as he adds later, that the “the great web which hangs holy to…
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Racism, Sin, and Love
Original Sin? Slavery has been called America’s “original sin.” Barrett Holmes Pitner used the phrase in his article, “US Must Confront Its Original Sin and Move Forward,” published by the BBC. The University of California, Davis, offers a class called “Slavery: America’s Original Sin,” and the same words make up the title of a book by Jim Willis, America’s Original Sin. Barak Obama used the term in his Race Speech in March 2008, and Paul Krugman used it in a 2020 opinion column. These are just a few examples. According to John Patrick Leary, the phrase is an unfortunate one. He explains that we can’t atone for an original sin.…
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The Way, Truth, Life: A Study in Universalism
The Best Way During my first year of seminary, I took a class on pluralism. I expected it to be something of a world religions course, one that taught us about other faiths so we could learn to live peacefully with those who believe differently than we do. After all, it seemed to me, when you live in a pluralistic country, you should be able to get along with people who aren’t like you. To my surprise, the course, while it did explore other religions, focused on how Christians could best preach the Jesus’s message to these nonbelievers. After all, everyone except I understood that Jesus was the way and…
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Shema: Listen and Respond
The Shema and Obedience The religions of the book emphasize obedience to God. The name “Islam,” for instance, comes from an Arabic word that means submission. Christians have the model of Jesus who followed the will of his God the Father. “Not my will, but yours,” he said. In the Jewish faith, we can see how important obedience is in a prayer observant Jews recite every morning and evening, the Shema. Shema, Yisrael, the prayer begins, or “Hear, O Israel.” Shema means listen or hear, but it also means obey. If we think about it, that makes sense. After all, we can’t obey if we don’t listen first, and we…