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Being a child of God – for Jesus and for the rest of us – is a poetic way of describing our direct, personal engagement with Ultimate Reality. It is an artful expression of ourselves as physically integrated with the divine essence of the cosmos. Being the son or daughter of God does not mean that any of us can leap off the cross in a single bound.

Close your eye and relax.
It’s dark. It’s silent. You are limp, unmoving.
You were defeated, destroyed, ruined: crucified, dead, then buried.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The quintessential cry of despair, when all hope is lost.

CLEAR is what I want to feel and be when it comes to something that means as much to me as FAITH. I want to be at peace with what I believe and choose to say and do, with regard to my way of living in faith. I want to own it whole-heartedly. I don’t want to apologize or make excuses for beliefs that don’t make sense, saying things like, “You just have to take that in faith. Someday it will make sense to me, even if it doesn’t now. God’s ways are not our ways.” With Clear Faith, I am at peace.

In ancient times a woman from the streets of Bethany, emboldened by faith and gratitude, came into Jesus’ presence carrying a jar of fragrant nard.

Let our community not be a circle with people
inside the circle who feel part of the club and
those outside the circle who feel excluded.

Our Goodness, which is in compassion,
We revere your vision.
May we support your ways
In common deeds
As we do in our highest ideals.

I don’t believe in any of the religions

I believe that there is only one God.

A Universal god.


A recent memorial service for a much-loved artist in our church ended with a poem and a prayer. The poem was “When Death Comes” by Mary Oliver,

A growing number of progressive Christians, for a decade or more, have seen themselves less and less of being a theist, that is as one who believes in a ‘God out there’ who intervenes with and over rules the laws of nature. Yet many of these are still very happy to use the words Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This Trinitarian descriptor expresses the way in which Christians may encounter or interpret our ‘God’, but ‘God’ is much more. For many progressive Christians, the Trinity is an expression of different people and communities living in perfect harmony. Now that really is heaven on earth!

Let’s stop assuming that a collection of individuals constitutes community. It doesn’t. In fact, it usually makes for disaster, as evidenced by the number of conflict resolution experts who are making their living off congregational members who are at each other’s throats. It’s not the fault of congregational members. We need to be teaching what it means to be in community, and that includes practices that are going to make us fit for community. Most of us got our training for community life in dysfunctional families. The moment anything approximating intimacy breaks out in congregations most people simply re-enact largely the unexamined history of our family of origin.

Church is not for everyone. Even for those who like it, there are as many distractions as attractions to the spiritual life there. I thought of entitling this “spirituality for loners” because I want to suggest eight ways of experiencing spiritual community outside of church!

So what do I mean by a sacred community or spiritual community, or as Peck would call it a true community? I refer here to an intentional community with an identifiable common purpose. Maybe that purpose is simple to grow spiritually as individuals. It is a community where one can transcend oneself and experience a sense of the interconnectedness of life. It is a community in which each member seeks to see and relate to the divine or the sacred in the other.

Recently there was a debate at the Creation Museum in Kentucky between its founder, Ken Ham, and Bill Nye, the “Science Guy”. If anything resembling scientific evidence mattered to people watching it, they would have been persuaded easily by the Science Guy’s arguments. But even Nye implicitly understood that, for many in the audience, the debate wasn’t about facts.

Sing a new love song; for in every moment, compassion does marvelous things: its power dissipates hate and revenge. Compassion creates contagious miracles

Many Christians today are increasingly unsure about how to “take” the Bible. To borrow from the childhood game “Mother, May I?” I’d suggest we take two giant steps back. We need to move ourselves back to challenge two assumptions that block our comfort with the Holy Bible.

May the peace of God surround you
Like the trees of the forest
May the peace of God warm you all over
Like the sun in the sky

But what our guide told us next has stayed in my memory for the almost twenty years since my visit. With a shrug of his shoulders he explained, “Well, we need a site. An important event—we need to have a site. Do we know exactly where it happened? No. But we must have a site so that we can remember.”