THE GUN INSIDE

I grew up in a church tradition that told us each Sunday how hopelessly depraved and sinful we were, with no possibility for being anything other than sinful unless we went through a specific kind of salvation experience taught by that tradition.  By the time I...

A SENTENCE OF PEACE

A line of peace might appear if we restructured the sentence our lives are making, revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power, questioned our needs, allowed long pauses . . . from “Making Peace” by Denise Levertov We wake these days to the distressing news of a new...

ON BEING HUMBLED

I once heard a minister deliver a sermon entitled “Humble Pie a la Mode.”  A clever title—and a perfect instance of how we tend to view humility, especially in the context of liberal religion: humility is not a virtue, but rather a problem, a symptom of lacking a...

THAT’S NOT FAIR!

  Fairness may be a nearly universal value, something all seek to demonstrate in our dealings with one another, certainly something all expect to receive when we are being dealt with, whether by laws or government agencies or neighbors or family members.  We love...

ENOUGH FOR NOW

  After a very long time of weekly therapy appointments with no evident change or lifting of the depression that gripped me, I one day marched into the therapist’s office to declare that I was done with trying to improve, to get better, to make changes in...

LEARNING TO BE DEPENDENT

  A member of my congregation once argued that the key element in aging well was learning to be dependent.  I felt terrified by such an idea—because it rang true for me.  We spend the first half of our lives developing an increasing level of independence, from...