Weekly Word
Once upon a time, an ancient story tells us, the master had a visitor who came to inquire about Zen.
Where I live, winter is raw and bitter, windswept and white, an unpredictable and uncompromising time of the year. We go from dry, cold, grey days to deep, wet, frozen days.
Lady, my parrot, is taken to the office every day down a hallway of toddler and preschool activities. “Bird lady, bird lady,” the children begin to squeal at the sight of her.
"What are we that you should care for us?" the psalmist asks God. The question is still a good one but the answers to it have shifted from age to age.
What happens to the person who does not deal with the secrets of the heart? What kind of energy can a person bring to life who allows the past to clog the arteries of the mind?
“O snail,/ climb Mount Fuji/ But slowly, slowly…” the haiku master and lay Buddhist priest Issa writes.
The haiku, in its short, sharp way, makes three points:
The key to choosing what is authentic in life and keeping our own integrity at the same time lies in tending always in the direction of simplicity.
“Once upon a time,” the tale tells, “an angel appeared to a seeker hard at work in the field of life and said, ‘I have been instructed by the gods to inform you that you will have 10,000 more lives
It’s been a hard year for many, a careful year for most, an unpredictable year for all of us–and, at the same time, a clearly holy year for all those of you who, despite your own financial losses a
The very scandal of Christianity lies in the fact that it sees divinity in humanity. It’s a hard idea to swallow, after all.
The function of Advent is to remind us what we’re waiting for as we go through life too busy with things that do not matter to remember the things that do.
Thomas Merton, Trappist, died December 10, 1968
I have a parrot who does not sing. She cries a lot if I leave the room—if anybody leaves the room actually.
“I learn by going where I have to go,” Theodore Roethke wrote. And that’s an important concept. All of life cannot be planned. Our life is God’s and gratitude is its key.
There comes a time when criticism of the past is simply not enough. There comes a new moment in life when we must dedicate ourselves to creating the future. And that is hard, hard work.