A Fresh Perspective

I do not believe it is possible to live a thriving spiritual life without gratitude. By gratitude I mean a particular orientation toward life, a pervasive spirit that saturates our thinking and compels our doing. Gratitude is a way of life that flows naturally from the awareness that all of life is gift, that all we have and are is due to divine grace. A life of gratitude, therefore, should not be equated with expressions of thanksgiving that all too often arise from feelings of superiority, deservedness, and the delusional belief that we are self-made. One might recall the barrage of opposition launched at President Obama when he pointed out that no one has succeeded in this life without some help.    Some of you may recall the table-grace offered by Jimmy Stewart’s character in the movie, Shenandoah . He prayed: Lord, we cleared this land. We plowed, sowed it, and harvested it. We cooked the   harvest. It wouldn’t be here and we wouldn’t be eat...

The late William Sloan Coffin, when he was chaplain at Yale University , would sometimes ask students, “Who tells you who you are?” Coffin knew all too well the power of higher education to tell students who they are. I ask myself, “Who tells me who I am?” My greatest regret is that for a large part of my life my need to be somebody—to be successful, popular, and important—influenced so many of my decisions and controlled so much of my thought. My ego, attached to American ideals of success, determined who I was. In high school, I strove to be a stand-out basketball player so I would be popular. I danced to the music of whatever tune would win me applause. One Sunday in church, a girl from another high school attended my Sunday School class. Attracted to her, I asked her out and we started dating. She was not popular and I began to catch drift of rumors questioning my judgment. She was a good person—real and authentic; I was shallow and superficial, driven by ego. Wit...

Sometimes deaths in communities come like waves. I am ready for the tide to turn. I have conducted too many funerals in too few days. The following is a story I love to share with families. I’m not sure where it originated. I got it from a minister who got it from a minister who got it from a minister. Once there lived a colony of grubs at the bottom of a swamp. Ever so often a member of the community would feel the urge to swim to the surface of the water and then disappear, never to be seen again. This confused and bewildered the others, and so one day they agreed that the next time one of them felt compelled to leave the colony, that one would return and share with the others what it was like above the surface of the water. It wasn’t long before one felt the urge to depart. She swam to the surface and crawled out onto a lily pad and in the warmth of the sun went to sleep. As she slept the carapace of the little creature broke open, and out emerged this beautiful rainbow...

The only time in the Gospels where Jesus talks about life after death is in a response to a question by the Sadducees. They did not believe in life after death, so the question posed to Jesus is a loaded question. A woman had married seven brothers successively in obedience to the law of levirate marriage. Whose wife will she be in the resurrection? The Jews who believed in life after death, like the Pharisees, believed in resurrection, not immortality. Many of the Greeks believed in immortality. They believed in a sharp distinction between soul and body. Some Greeks called the body the prison house of the soul. They believed that in death the soul doesn’t die, it simply departs the body. In the Hebrew tradition, there is no separation of soul and body; soul and body are one. The immaterial is inseparably connected to the material in Hebrew thought. Therefore, they believed that when the body dies so does the soul, and then it takes an act of God to raise the total person....

Once a month I visit with my mother who lives a couple of hours away. Typically, we talk for a couple of hours, I take her out to eat and we run some errands. Though I am a minister, spiritual teacher, and a writer, we rarely talk about religion. There is a reason for this. On a recent visit, I took her a copy of my book, Being a Progressive Christian (is not) for Dummies (nor for know-it-alls): An Evolution of Faith. I did this, as I have done with all my books, because she is my mother. And because I am her son, she reads them. She doesn’t read them quickly or easily, but she reads them. She told me, “They’re deep.” What she really meant was, “How the hell did my son come to believe such nonsense?” She would never admit this. She would severely object to the way I just used “hell,” in her view a perfectly sound biblical teaching. I am joking, of course . . . kind of. Our conversation turned toward the state of the world. Such a state signals for many conservative Chris...

The conference program said that just before the message the vocalist would sing accompanied by tape. She had rehearsed this song numerous times in preparation for this event and the time had now come. Confidently on stage she waited for the music to begin. The sound operator looked up and made some motions. The unthinkable had happened. The tape had malfunctioned, and he didn’t have a back up. She knew there was a decision to make. Either leave the stage rather awkwardly calling attention to the problem or sing the song without the music. Out of the silence, strong and sure, the vocalist sang unaccompanied by the sound track.  Can we sing the song of faith without the music? The prophet Habakkuk faced such a dilemma. The prophet wants to know why God is silent when the wicked hem in the righteous and justice is perverted? What do we do in those times when we cannot hear the music on account of the screams of violence or from the noise of our own fearful chatter and cries ...