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This past year, at my congregation on Cape Cod, we began to celebrate the seasons of the year as part of our affirmation of this good Earth. Our congregation’s proximity to the ocean sensitizes us to the …

I support very much the call to ‘create new memories’ for Christmas and I believe the place to begin is with children. However, one of the best known children’s Christmas carols is ‘Away in the Manger’, and this much loved carol has many wrong messages imbedded in the words. The second verse of the traditional words speak of Jesus ‘looking down from the sky’ and the last verse has Jesus up in heaven and the singer requesting him to ‘fit us for heaven to live with you there’. I believe my third verse takes the dualism and the ‘away’ Jesus out and replaces it with the Biblical teaching of very last verse of Matthew – ‘And I will be with you always, to the end of the age’. This surely is the Gospel.

Can bread and wine transform our minds
With all their complex modes?
Can sharing festive liturgies
Unlock empowering codes?

We aim to present a service that offers accessibility to real Christian understanding and faith for people in today’s society who come with a broad range of needs.

So the hymns in this collection are my attempts to express aspects of a positive progressive theology. They are not meant to give a systematic statement of that theology; there are plenty of topics unaddressed here, and there’s plenty of room for a sequel. These hymns are, in the old sense, occasional pieces. They were written for particular occasions in my spiritual journey.

P: We have gathered here today to give thanks for and honor Name’s life. You have come because you are family – close family or extended family; or because you are friends – old, long-trusted friends or newer friends; or because you knew Name through other connections in his life. We have gathered to mourn his death and to grieve for our loss.

I recently conducted the funeral for my father, who died after a long episode of declining health. It was a joy and a privilege to work with my family in preparing this service. But many of our family are not avowedly Christian so I wanted to respect their spiritual traditions as well as be faithful to my own. I also wanted the theology to reflect my own liberal/progressive Christian understanding.

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.

Wisdom from 13 Traditions on 9 Universal Themes: Justice, Gratitude, Peace, Service, Compassion, Forgiveness, Healing, Nature, Prayer

Each birth causes us to wonder
where the spark of life comes from.
Every death makes us wonder
what of that life survives.

What we have done, and who we have been,
remains part of the wider universe long after we are gone.

None of us knows the whole truth about what lies beyond death.
Christians believe that as we journey between life and death,
we are safe in the hands of an infinitely gracious God.

What we do know and believe is that every human life,
with a mind to think and a heart to love,
is an expression of the creative spirit of God.

In the name of the Father,
in the name of the Mother,
source of life,
from whom water flows,
to whom water returns,

We live not for ourselves alone, but toward God and for each other. Our lives are bound in a covenant of love.

As we gather today to welcome……….(name of the child) into the world, we recognise our responsibilities towards……….(name of the child), towards each other and the world in which we live.

Spiritual maverick Matthew Fox believes that through the ages religious patriarchal hierarchy and rigidity have obscured Christianity’s most beneficial and essential teachings: those that arise out of personal, mystical experiences of the Divine. A true religious renewal, according to Fox, can arise only through the mystical dimension of faith. In Christian Mystics, he offers a wide-ranging collection of quotations from Christianity’s greatest mystics and prophets of the past two thousand years. Fox explores and celebrates the mystical path with insightful commentary on the thoughts and revelations of some of history’s greatest religious visionaries.

There is nothing like that feeling of the heart soaring when music touches the soul. And knowing the deep place the music can descend into our psychology, isn’t it our responsibility to approach it with caution and a critical mind? Music teaches us about who we are and can evoke feelings in us we didn’t know were there. Doesn’t music in sacred community, then, need to also be sacred, relevant, and inspiring?

“Without music, life would be a mistake.” So wrote the famed philosopher, Nietzsche. I believe that music in sacred community is the medium which allows us to feel and to express our deepest emotions: joy, lament, awe and thanksgiving. Music in sacred community binds us together. Studies have shown that groups who make music together feel a certain kinship with each other, and leave that time of singing or drumming, playing instruments, etc. with their endorphins dancing, and their bodies humming with better health and vibrations. Surely when all of this is enhanced by words of hymns or songs, we can know that we have participated in a rich experience which has fed our souls.

Such a captivating experience is not limited by the type or setting of the music. Classical, pop, bluegrass, jazz, country, blues, to name common Western music, all have the capacity to release an energy within us, previously pent up, but now free. That release can and does happen to anyone, any time, any place. Music is one of the great equalizers of persons. No matter who you are, you are susceptible to this unfathomed power. What is going on here?

St. Augustine said that the one who sings, prays twice. We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words; we get closest to praying as we ought when we sing. But church singing has changed rapidly in the 30-some years I’ve been a pastor. The hip new hymnal that came out in the nineties contains far too many hymns that were written for an organ and a congregation in the hundreds, not a guitar, a piano, and a raggedy chorus of twenty-some.