Category Archives: * Reflection

My personal reflections on some recent experience in the light of faith.

My Thoughts Are Not Your Thoughts

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Death

How perverse we humans are! In our “sophisticated” age of science and technology we gladly allow ourselves to be made fools of by the ancients who, in so very many ways, understood much more than we do. After all, they lacked all the layers of “sophistication” that we so easily and glibly use to mask and obscure the clarity of what they saw with their “unsophisticated” hearts. We seemingly deliberately “scientize” their writings in a valiant — and effective — effort to obscure their meaning, fulfilling the words of Isaiah: He said, “Go, and tell this people: ‘Keep on listening, Continue Reading →

A Voice Criying In the Desert Make Straight the Way

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As I write this, I’ve been living in the desert now for over 8 months. Yes, we have pretty houses and gardens and swimming pools and everything; but it’s still the desert. After these 8 months (I’ve been through a summer and I now consider myself a “desert rat”) I can honestly say that “I get it.” Right now, I’ve been away from it for a few days and I long to be back to what is now “home.” I miss the parched, dusty earth that you can let pour through your fingers like water. I miss the scraggly creosote Continue Reading →

Prayer: Bicycling Uphill

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A personal note to my readers — please forgive my absence of several weeks. My explanation / excuse / rationalization follows. Life happens. It’s unavoidable. Trying to stop the relentless progress of events from hour to hour or day to day is futile, as is any attempts we might make to try to stop the emotions that accompany the torrent of experiences washing over us. There is no real choice in all of this. It is, as they say, what it is. Our part in this drama is but to choose how we shall respond to these experiences and the feelings that Continue Reading →

Sometimes I Feel Guilty

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Penitence

For millenia, people of faith have been practicing penitence. Some of the oldest texts in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures talk about it.1 For those of us in liturgical Christian communities,2 the forty days leading up the the celebration of Easter is known as “Lent” or “The Great Lent” and has traditionally been a penitential season. From earliest times, Christian believers have been encouraged to embrace penitential practices such as prayer, fasting, abstinence from meat, self-denial and other ascetic practices. Like many young Christians, I did my best to follow the rules and “give something up” for Lent, mainly out of fear Continue Reading →

I’m Not Religious

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Religions

Yeah, I hear it all the time. “I consider myself a spiritual person, but I can’t stand religion.” On one level, it makes me cringe every time I hear it; on another level, who can blame them? After all, the worst enemies of religion are most definitely its defenders. The same thing goes for the “defenders” of God — they’re exactly the people to run farthest away from. If we really understood what ‘religion’ means, we’d all want to be known as religious people. As for the “defenders” of God: well, God needs neither defense nor promotion and with friends Continue Reading →