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Quickened by my attention to what surrounded me
As I sat on one of the pale yellow rounded boulders in the creekbed.

May the food that we eat
And the friends that we share
Give us strength for spreading
True justice and peace.

Oh, nurturing God we thank you for the seeds
The source is yours and all in it

Drawn by God’s presence. . .
. . .we gather
Inspired by God’s spirit. . .
. . .we worship

When prayers were words

I felt like

I was failing

a sentence prayer exam.

Mindful Christianity is mysticism: the experience of a human being in spiritual union with the divine, seeing each other with the same eye. The observer within you, when you are deep in mindfulness meditation, is God. God is lovingly attentive toward your every experience, every feeling, urge, and thought. In mindfulness practice, God notices all of that is going on inside of you, with deep compassion and without judgment.

Our eternal life which is in all creation
Holy, Holy, Holy is your name

This song and video offer a lyrical analysis of our southern regions and the onslaught of environmental abuses laid onto sacred lands. The lyrics touch on the Gulfcoast oil spill, Mountain top removal, and fracking, and beg the question WHY is this south is so “filthy Dirty”.

Part 2 of Sacred Energy (Mass of the Universe) contains the complete text of the mass

The Supreme Court has declared corporations to be people, according to its Citizens United decision. And, likewise, in its Hobby Lobby decision, it decided that a company can be exempted from obeying laws that contradict his/her personal …

Today, over 2,000,000 Americans are in jail or in prison. We’ve got 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of its prisoners. More black men are under the control of the criminal justice system in America today than were enslaved before the Civil War began. Our prison-industrial complex has become the latest of a long series of forms of systematic oppression against people of color. Lawyer and activist Michelle Alexander rightly calls it “The New Jim Crow” in her recent book.

What can the prophet Jesus teach us?
Where shall the mystic Christ lead us?
His Way is wonder, the path compassion,
And through letting go we shall find life.

This film explores some major concepts, but two of them are simple: places and spaces. Places are merely physical locations, with often no meaning attached to them. However, a simple, empty room can be formed into a space; turned into a place of meeting, creativity, innovation, and community. Places are often beautiful, awe-inspiring, breathtaking, but they only become spaces when we engage with them. When we experience beauty, peace, or joy from a place, our reflections and responses to the place are what create an experience, as well as the emotions that we feel.
Here’s the problem, when we reflect during an experience, or bring pre-conceived notions to an experience, we arent truly experiencing. Reflection must exclusively follow experience.

We come to the desert at least as much for what is not here as much as for what is. Monastics of every religion are drawn to it. Moses encountered God in a bush on a desert mountain. The first theologians of Christianity were known as the Desert Fathers. In wilderness they prayed, meditated, contemplated – uncluttering their hearts and minds in an uncluttered space. Mohammed went to a desert cave and there he waited until the Angel Gabriel dictated the Koran to him. Around the same time, Buddhist monks retreated to the mountainous deserts of Central Asia to meditate.

Through the lens of evolutionary Christianity, Sanguin works through moral, spiritual, and scientific issues raised in Mad Men, the writings of Richard Dawkins, tales from the Bible, and other stories that inform our views of the world. Sanguin’s reflections will revitalize your faith and leave you celebrating that you don’t need to sacrifice a rational, evidence-based worldview to be a person of faith in the twenty-first century.

Combining the stories and meditation practices from the previous edition of A Pebble for your Pocket with those collected in Under the Rose Apple Tree and several new stories, this completely revised edition is comprised of Buddhist parables and stories from the author’s own childhood experiences. They elucidate principles of Buddhism and mindfulness practice, giving young readers and their parents concrete advise on handling difficult emotions like anger. Written in a highly accessible style that doesn’t rely on lot of jargon or difficult vocabulary, this collection emphasizes the importance of the present moment through vivid metaphors, original allegories, and colorful stories. Young readers learn about handling anger, living in the present moment, and “interbeing” — the interconnectedness of all things. Thich Nhat Hanh offers various practices that children can do on their own or with others that will help them to transform anger and unhappiness and reconnect to the wonders of nature and the joy of living in the present moment.

Bridging the gap between the world of science and the realm of the spiritual, B. Alan Wallace introduces a natural theory of human consciousness that has its roots in contemporary physics and Buddhism. Wallace’s “special theory of ontological relativity” suggests that mental phenomena are conditioned by the brain, but do not emerge from it. Rather, the entire natural world of mind and matter, subjects and objects, arises from a unitary dimension of reality that is more fundamental than these dualities, as proposed by Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung.

Sometimes issues need to be reframed, and it can often be helpful to look outside one’s own tradition for a framework. So for those who may be struggling with similar misunderstandings in their congregations, I offer the Four Yogas as a lens through which to see things differently.