Your greatest gift may lie yet undiscovered… This is a season in which both joy and loneliness can be amplified. Many will reconnect with families and friends to eat and laugh and relax. For others loneliness will be intensified. The very fact that so many families come together and celebrate magnifies their own disconnected…
In The Lord of the Rings Sam Gamgee mused, “I wonder what kind of tale we’ve fallen into?” If your newborn could speak I believe he or she would ask a similar question: “Who am I and what kind of story do I find myself in? Is the universe good or evil? What is my role…Am I enough?” But how are the answers…
To imagine God as some divine architect standing at the beginning of time with a blueprint in his hand, according to which all things will unfold, is to enter the boredom of a pre-determined universe and the slavery of a manipulated existence. But to recognize God as the possibility beyond the past and present,…
Desire is the thing that both leads and eludes us. As reflective beings, desire is the force that flows between our intricate web of relationships, capable of binding or dividing us. Largely beyond our awareness, we are compelled by the desire of others. When we receive inspiration, it is always from this collective other. We begin to…
Yesterday I walked past a tennis court where a family was trying to have fun. Only one problem – there was a two-and-a-half year old who could not understand why he had to make turns hitting the ball with his older brother. He insisted that every ball should be personally delivered to him. The eventual…
Occasionally the small wood fire crackled. One by one the stars began to wink. The top of the mountains caught the last diffused light, but darkness soon enveloped them as well. Above them the heavens awoke – an innumerable host lit the skies. The only light on earth was distant and dim – a farmhouse…
We can conceive of God as one who is present everywhere (omnipresent), including all of time – past, present and future. That obviously depends on our understanding of time. We can also conceive of God as being omniscient in this sense – knowing all things past, present and future. For such a god nothing is…
I have never tried to stand in the way of a train at full speed. The fact that you are reading this suggest that neither have you. Time, like a train, is often experienced as an unstoppable and unyielding movement. You either flow with it or you are crushed by it, but never does…
Unknown, yet intriguing. Dangerous, yet exciting. The future. So much effort invested to determine it. So much time spent to secure it. Yes, our actions today have consequences that extend into the future, but the future is much larger than what we can personally control. If we ever succeed in making the future certain, it…
Violence is easily recognized as evil when it is directed against us. It is however more difficult to recognize it as such when it is our own violence directed against deserving targets. In fact, our own violence is most often seen as sacred and sanctioned by God himself. Righteous indignation, justified retribution, are some of…