kingdom of God
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Through the lens of love
According to Thomas Moore, teacher, psychotherapist, and author of the New York Times bestseller Care of the Soul, slight shifts in imagination have more impact on living than major efforts at change. Deep changes in life follow shifts in imagination. Jesus said the fulfillment of your deepest dreams and God’s greatest promises – the kingdom Continue reading
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The key to abundant life
“Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice” (Luke 17:15). If you’re confused by the gospel of Jesus, you might have good reason to be. Jesus said he came that we might have more and better life than we ever dreamed of having (John Continue reading
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Finding the missing piece
There used to be a feature in the Sunday Buffalo News called The Magic Eye. At first glance, it appeared to be the kind of image you’d see on your computer screen when the mother board was failing, a mass of colorful, squiggly, incoherent lines. But if you changed your perspective and focused your eyes Continue reading
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With the eye of the heart
After reading today’s gospel (Luke 12:49-56), I have a bone to pick with Jesus. I understand he might have felt frustrated with those who didn’t see what he saw, who didn’t understand what he understood. I imagine he might have wondered if he’d ever get through to the knuckleheads who wanted to be his disciples Continue reading
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In praise of a small life
Our unhappiness arises from one thing alone, according to seventeenth-century philosopher and theologian Blaise Pascal. We’re unhappy, he believed, because we’re unable to stay quietly in one room. We can’t remain present and content where we are. We crave different things or more of the same things, and we strive after them. And in our Continue reading
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When night ends and day begins
There’s a game that might make your Lent a little more interesting; it does mine. It’s called “Purgatory,” named for the waiting room where, some Christians believe, your sins are purged and your soul is purified before entering heaven. The way poet W.H. Auden invented the game, writers with contradictory views of life would be Continue reading
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Walk in gift today
The season of Lent, as I first learned about it, was a sack-cloth-and-ashes season when we church people felt sorry, maybe even ashamed, for how we had been living and the bad things we had done; we repented and tried to get back into God’s good graces; and we deprived ourselves of something we liked Continue reading
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Where’s everybody going?
“I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” So Karen Blixen begins Out of Africa, the account of her life in Kenya. At the beginning of the movie based on the book, Meryl Streep repeats that line wistfully, as if invoking a memory. “I had a farm in Africa . Continue reading
The Sauntering Pilgrim 