For many years, I compiled an annual list of books of matters soulful or spiritual for those who might want to explore new writers or re-visit old ones in the ongoing work of tending a spiritual life. Some of you have asked me to do that again, after a several year hiatus. I found the task challenging and in some ways forbidding, therefore liberating. I have come to understand, if that is even the right word, that one’s individual spiritual life, call, development and resonance is as unique as one’s DNA, and in some ways perhaps formed in part by the same. I cannot escape my Irishicity (new word!), the replete foundation in all things spiritual and religious that is my heritage as a born-Roma Catholic, nor can I alter, nor do I want to, the profoundly formative work of Jesuits on and with me, eight years as their student and nine years as their brother. The facticity of my sexuality in its interface with the world, too, is beyond dispute a most significant factor in my development, as is nearly thirty years of settled domestic life (and eighteen months of marriage…). I listen keenly to individuals every day, twenty women and men a week, and have for the past quarter century. They have shaped me deeply. Thirty years of sobriety has given me a wide angle lens to view life and matters external to me and interior to me. So I am the sum of those, and really countless other, parts. Education, family birth order, parent’s histories, born in America, a male, raised in the exact circumstances that I have been, given a superior education and having taken even more. All contribute to the ongoing development of this spiritual and soulful person. As do your exigencies shape and influence, create really, you.

I am continually influenced by Christians of every stripe and none, by Roman Catholics and Protestants, by cosmologists and naturalists, by Buddhists and the Hebrew prophets, by my daily companions, the Muslim Sufi poet Rumi and the luminous face of Jesus, present through every transmutation of my spiritual path, both in its vibrancy and its nadir states.

I have recently come through a Gobi of a two years. During this time, I continued to read in these vast fields, though sometimes with distaste, sometimes with a faint awareness of that which is beyond any state we inhabit. The following are reflections on what I encountered between the bindings of books that made their way to my lap.

Laurence Freeman’s Jesus: The Teacher Within is the best book of its kind I have read. But what is its kind? It is part testament, part Christology, part manual on obtaining maturity, part exegesis, part autobiography, in great part a book on meditation and its necessity and efficaciousness in the world today. It is beautifully written, engaging, intellectually rich, immensely rewarding. Freeman, an English Benedictine, is the director of the World Community of Christian Meditation, yoked to the East and the riches of Buddhism, in the tradition of the great Benedictine meditator John Main, with a forward by the Dalai Lama (no slouch to achieve that endorsement, one need not be reminded). I read this book at the enlightened cusp of my recent descent, though I had no idea that was ahead, so danger may lurk within its lofty pages. If you have a shard of faith in Jesus, whatever that might mean to you, this book will be a gift you might give yourself. Actually, no shards required. Richard Dawkins might just find this moving and erudite enough to read. And ponder. Maybe.

The Spirituality of Imperfection by Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham is the book I have recommended to others the most in the past three years and the book that has had a singular impact on me, a perfectionist in the grand tradition of being so very proud of my perfectionism even as it took me down and reduced me to tears. Alas. Kurtz and Ketcham utilize the accreted wisdom of the Twelve Step programs (which many Jesuits have recognized over the years as having a foundational structure in Ignatian wisdom) to walk the reader through the ravages of a life lived perfectly, or rather, in the embrace of a perfectionism which is both a psychological trap and the great sin of hubris, both of which lead to despair. This is a peculiarly American and Christian encumbrance, one which literalizes and fetishizes the Word and disavows the deep humanity of the listener. From the pits of perfectionism, the authors invite the reader, if one is still reading at this point, to consider these lovely graces, outcomes of leaving perfection in its dust: release, gratitude, humility, tolerance, forgiveness, being-at-home. Wow. Just the way these words fall on the eye is pleasing, and a relief. If you are an Enneagram One (or a Two, or a Six…), a Virgo (or whatever), have impeccably ordered closets and cabinets, hold quite a little bit of judgment inside, find it remarkably easy to spot the faults of others, can’t quite figure out why nature, human and otherwise, doesn’t quite align itself with your vision, find a little narcotic of some harmless kind a good antidote to the highly imperfect world in which you and I are required to live, read this book.

Many years ago, I discovered Terry Tempest Williams. Or perhaps more correctly, she discovered me. I have no idea who introduced me to her, but ever since, she has been my companion. And what an unusual companion for me: a Mormon! Keep reading. Williams lives in southern Utah, though she writes from many places. She is the latest in a long line of strong independent Utah Mormon women, no oxymoron there, and she writes evocatively about her grandmother, her mother, Utah’s spiritual landscape and topography, deserts, faith, the oceanic bottoms of the Great Salt Lake, Jesus, her husband, life, light, the intrinsic value of humor, need I go on? Her first book, Refuge, is a refreshment, and her latest book Finding Beauty in a Broken World is a meditation of the juncture of art, ecology, human violence and redemption set in Ravenna, Italy (the home of the worlds’ most magnificent mosaics), a forsaken Rwandan town, and the vast prairie dog villages of the southwest Utah desert. She weaves together these seemingly disparate places into a beautifully poignant testament of hope and possibility. If you are an Annie Dillard fan, you will find her becoming. If you are not, read them both.

During the past eighteen months, I searched broadly for a way to understand the phenomena I was experiencing. I found Tim Farrington’s slight volume, A Hell of Mercy: A Meditation on Depression and the Dark Night of the Soul. In a scant one hundred pages, Farrington speaks of his own complex spiritual journey within the constructs of contemporary American psychiatry, which views, if I can cut to the chase, psychopharmacology as the solution to every form of human suffering. Much to our ultimate detriment, I believe, and Farrington’s eloquent book gives such testimony. While the appropriate response to organic depression is rightly medical, I observe that much of what we call depression in this culture is an appropriate feeling response to the conditions of life, the feelings about which being the great gift that lets us find our way through often dark thicket to re-create and re-imagine and re-enliven worn out patterns, boundary-less relationships, and inhuman expectations (see Imperfection above). Farrington says near the end of the book that the dark night is God’s solution to our solutions, not a bad summary of a spiritual journey which if medicated away bears no fruit.

While in the sands, I returned to Thomas Moore’s immensely popular book of nearly twenty years ago, Care of the Soul. I had found it engaging back in the early ‘90’s, and found the title again alluring. I did not expect it to affect me, but affect me it did, more than my first reading when I was a young whippersnapper in my early forties, knowing quite a lot as I did then. Moore is trained in classical Christian spiritual tradition and has become very familiar with the work of Carl Jung, whose contribution to spirituality is not yet fully realized. Moore is a most accessible writer, and invites one to deeply, and this is the word, live one’s life, all of it, with particular attention to the dark side, the shadow, the winters in which much of our most vital work is undertaken and brought to fruition. If you read Care of the Soul way back then, it is worth a re-reading. If you have come of age since, this book is a fine introduction to the complexities of the soulful spiritual, read: human, path, with its necessary vicissitudes, wanderings, stumbles, detours, failings, grandeurs, soarings, and mostly dailinesses, and how fidelity to the work and the disciplines inherent in it are both the work itself and its reward.

A companion to Moore is Breakfast at the Victory: The Mysticism of Ordinary Experience by James P. Carse. Carse is a professor at NYU, and brings to the conversation about mysticism the experiences of a very lay man, one steeped in both the classics and religious tradition and committed to the ordinary path we are all called to, one that requires observation, attention, physicality, silence, intuition, self-awareness and a great slowing down. Anecdotal, humorous, self-effacing, filled with the wisdom of sages (the Sufis, Nicholas of Cusa, Meister Eckhart, Socrates, the Buddha, the Hindu Vedas, Pascal, et al.), Carse writes an unpretentious book about what it means to be human, in the presence of the divine. Towards the end of the book, Carse says that the revelation I sought for was of God; the revelation I got was of a self I did not want to be…but seeing how far we are from God, the mystics thought, is the way God begins to seek us. The book is filled with such nuggets as these.

Dave Eggers, the celebrated San Francisco author who manages a school in the City’s Mission district teaching immigrant kids how to write creatively, has written another gem himself. But this one is no novel, though it read like one, or rather, an extended and engrossing journalistic account of reality, tragedy, hope, humor, humanity. Zeitoun is maybe the most truly soulfully spiritual book I read this year. It is an account of the travails of the Syrian-American Muslim Abdulrahman Zeitoun and his formerly Southern Baptist Louisiana wife, Kathy, in pre-, during- and post-Katrina New Orleans. If this man were a character in fiction, he would be read as is Huckleberry Finn today, for ages to come. Hopefully the fact he is a real human will not deter future readers. Part intensely recorded history of the advance and fall of the storm on the city of New Orleans, part account of the fantastically peaceful days immediately after the storm, part account of the beyond inept and cruel and unconstitutional story of the government’s response to this one of her citizens, part family log, and mostly a portrait of a magnificent and highly admirable human being, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, and how he faced circumstances that would have broken many of us. His humanity, his humor, his faith in his God, his love for his wife and daughters and family in Spain and in Syria, his devotion to the city of New Orleans, his care for abandoned pets and abandoned people while forging for food for himself and his companions, his ultimate trust in God and in humanity, all shine through on every page. If you begin this book, plan on not going to work tomorrow, so committed to Zeitoun and his story you will become.

Many years ago I read and was charmed by Chet Raymo’s Honey from Stone. Raymo teaches the sciences at Stonehill College and writes beautifully about the natural world. When young, Raymo was a ferverino, a term we used decades ago for one obviously committed to the spiritual life, if excessively. He outgrew the excesses and eventually, the dogmas and many of the disciplines, too. His most recent book When God Is Gone Everything Is Holy is a brief, extended meditation on reverencing the natural world, the cosmos, creation, as a source of wisdom, experience, and ultimately spirit. He observes that much of God language has kept human beings from having a profound experience of nature, and thinks that if we would recover some of our innate regard for our place in the natural world, that we might see and experience the world as holy, and in doing so, our perspective would shift from an other-worldy focus to knowing and committing to a focus on this world, the only one we can currently inhabit. Such immense challenges as climate change and global warming would be more succinctly addressed by our absolute participation in the world as it is, not as it might be dogmatically constructed.

In my work in clinical psychology, I remain a pupil of Carl Jung. Though I am not a graduate of a Jung Institute, of which there are several in the United States, I am always reading some of his adherents to deepen my understanding of his insights. A book I reviewed many years ago The Scapegoat Complex by Sylvia Brinton Perrera has been most instrumental in my professional and person life, and I recently reread it for the fifth time, as best I could ascertain by the various marginal notes I have taken over the years. This year a friend sent to me Living in the Borderlands: the Evolution of Consciousness and the Challenge of Healing Trauma by Santa Fe Jungian analyst Jerome Bernstein. Bernstein combines an understanding of Native American mythology and ritual, an appreciation of the separation we in the West have experienced from nature, the hidden paradoxes of human intuition, and the openness of some humans to ways of knowing that are both contra-indicated in our rational world and are often regarded as akin to some kind of pathology. Living in this borderland is a fraught and ultimately graced experience, and is not dissimilar to the path of Christian mysticism that some other books in this list are engaged with. The complexity of modern life calls from us new ways of seeing, knowing and acting to recover what is most deeply human and natural, as opposed to mechanical, the reign of which seems daily to be ascendant. This is a difficult and spotty book but speaks to an experience some readers of this blog will both identify with and appreciate.

Trickster Makes This World is the most engaging book I have read in many years. Its author, Lewis Hyde, is a genius, and had such status confirmed when he won the MacArthur Award. He taught creative writing at Harvard, perhaps by passing out his own wonderful texts, and writes with vast knowledge of the mythological traditions and their intricacies of African, Asian, Australian, and North American native tribes and peoples, contemporary art (Duchamp, Ginsburg Cage), with expositions on Frederick Douglass, Greek mythology, the Christ, and with enough Shakespeare, Jung, Freud, and contemporary writers of fiction to delight and amaze and provoke you. He is wise, witty, counterintuitive, disruptive, smart, connecting, demanding,. This is a delicious book. It took me many months of a few paragraphs at a time to digest, and well worth the effort. It utterly humanizes us, and respects that which is steeped in Mystery with uncanny regard, and often surprising accuracy. Like Perrera, I will re-read this, hopefully many times. It cannot be gotten the first time, though the first time is joyous.

I conclude with the most recent book by a man who was among the first writers to whom I was drawn as I began my adult life forty years ago. It was 1970, and we were both so young. Then a Catholic priest at Boston University, and an anti-war activist, James Carroll wrote elegantly about a life of faith, and offered prayers in an idiom I hungered for. Elegantly he still writes. Now primarily known as a novelist (Mortal Friends, Prince of Peace, et al), he recently penned Constantine’s Sword, an indictment of historical Christianity’s treatment of and active participation in the persecution of the Jews, up to and including the Holocaust. It is a troubling and very beneficial text. He most recent book is Practicing Catholic, which I was shy to pick up but my fealty to Carroll invited me to the same. I was amply rewarded. While Carroll writes in a vein not dissimilar to Chet Raymo, he is a man who has stayed within the walls of the institution, though on his terms. Having gone beyond the ancient and inadequate dogmatic and political constructions of a conciliar church, and here we are talking about Nicaea and Chalcedon in the fourth and fifth centuries, not Vatican II, in the late and not missed twentieth, Carroll dissects the political, sexual, inter-religious, hierarchical, theological accretions of Catholicism, and yet makes a case for maintaining ties to a group of pilgrims on this journey, and for him how the act of reformation, as radical as he deems it to be, one worthy of an educated and fully invested in the twenty-first century human being, knowing that paths to the divine are sacred even when they have been mutilated by injustice, abuse, arrogance, denial, intellectual rigidity, and obtuseness. For readers who are practicing Catholics, for those reading these who grew up in the Roman Church (I recently read that there are upwards of ten million former Catholics in the United States…), for those interested in how massive religious institutions operate and perhaps change, Carroll is a good and faithful guide. And a very decent human being.

Happy reading and a happy New Year to you.

The headlines scream about extremists who seek to cause suffering in the lives of ordinary people in order to create a climate of fear and instability. We read and watch daily reports of extremist groups like Al Qaeda or the Taliban. The Southern Poverty Law Center monitors extremist activity in the USA, especially threats from the Ku Klux Klan.

Extremist is a dirty word.

Those of us old enough to remember may recall that Martin Luther King Jr. was also called an extremist by those who opposed segregation and racial equality.  Back in the day, many white people were threatened by King’s activism and charisma. They argued that he was trying to bring about change too quickly. Some openly claimed that he was a communist or at least an extremist.

Dr. King said he wasn’t a communist, but, after considerable reflection, he admitted he was in fact an extremist.

The definition of an extremist is “one who advocates or resorts to measures beyond the norm, especially in politics.”

To label another as an extremist is an intensely derogatory tag. Extremists are demagogues who employ faulty logic. Extremists show disdain for the rights and liberties of others and resent the limitations of their own activities. Extremists are not nice people.  Extremists are people to be avoided.

Right?

Extremists hate the status quo.

But Martin Luther King Jr. argued that there is more than one way to be an extremist—there is more than one kind of extremism and there is more than way to change the status quo. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, King wrote:

Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”…was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand I can do no other, so help me God.”….And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.”….So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?…Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

Perhaps the deeper and more important question these days is not whether someone is an extremist but what kind of extremist.

Generically speaking, extremists divide the world into Us verses Them.

What the world needs now is a deeper extremism. This deeper extremism is not rooted in ideological thinking but in compassionate living. A deeper extremism is not one that divides, incites fear or causes suffering, but one that unites to bring healing and promote possibility.

Extremist thinking divides the world into Us and Them. Extremist compassion knows there is no such thing as Us verses Them.

Especially in this world and at this time, Dr. King’s version of extremism is the one and only brand of extremism that has the power to heal the world.

The question is not whether you are an extremist but rather, what kind of extremist will you be?

The latest story of the failed “underwear suicide bomber” is one more example that homeland security requires something deeper than a revealing image  from some full body scanner. Full body scanners can’t penetrate body cavities or see under flabby folds of skin. The latest technology has its limits.  This recent kerfuffle reminds us that when it comes to the monster of terrorism–we typically react to the symptoms rather than dealling with the root cause–the  breakdown of human community.

By definition, terrorism is all about the power of coercion that wreaks fear and suffering. Yes, in the short run security must be ramped up. But over the long haul, the power of coercion can finally and ultimately only be overcome by the power of persuasion.

Life is all about relationships. Cultivating and supporting healthy relationships is the only thing that can create a strong social immune system capable of repelling the virus of terrorism. The only real solution is to build up our social immune system.

Ever since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and more recent actions of terrorists, the relationship between Muslim and non-Muslim Americans in the US has deteriorated. As events and stories unfold, many American Muslims are feeling defensive, depressed and marginalized.

Although many American Muslim leaders have spoken out against terrorism, the conventional wisdom and perspective of the mainstream media is that American Muslims are too timid.

Offering up a plethora of commentaries, non-Muslim pundits often share opinions that imply if not insist that the American Muslim community is at worst supportive, at best ambivalent about the violent actions of extremists who carry the Muslim banner.

With disturbing regularity the American news media carries headlines about the latest action of a “Muslim terrorist” or “Islamic jihadist” who shouts “Allahu Akbar” while committing some violent act. The 24/7 news cycle contributes to this feeding frenzy. Generalizations and stereotypes about American Muslims and the “world of Islam” abound among the non-Muslim American majority, prompting some to coin the term “Islamophobia.”

While many American Muslims confess feeling marginalized and powerless, non-Muslim Americans are given precious few opportunities to look upon their neighbors as anything but the latest iteration of “the other”. This complex dynamic creates a sense of powerlessness for each.

Taken together, these combustible narratives create an accelerating dynamic of fear and suspicion among Muslim and non-Muslim Americans alike. Comparisons between the current public mindset toward American Muslims as “the other” and the climate that allowed the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, as the “other,” gives one pause.

This fearful and complicated reality reflects the breakdown of the American community

.Everyone is focusing on what has gone wrong.

But focusing on what’s gone wrong only takes us back to the past. It is only as we focus our attention upon what is already working (our assets) that we develop the capacity to create a future lived on higher ground. This proven methodology is known as Asset Based Community Development.

Only as we engage in a new conversation based on building capacities of new understanding, new relationships and community will we transform the old grievance stories (on both sides) of the past and create a new future. The creation of a new community begins with a new conversation.

Let us begin by writing together a new narrative by focusing on where and how Muslim and non-Muslim Americans are working together to live out the American dream. It is time to write a new American map—let’s call it the cartography of the heart.

Please share your awareness of local and national groups, eg. peace and justice organizations, secular groups committed to human rights, organizations committed to peaceful conflict resolution, colleges and universities, religious and inter-religious initiatives like United Religions Initiative Cooperation Circles, Interfaith Youth Core, the Interfaith Alliance, local Baptist-Muslim, Jewish-Muslim and Catholic-Muslim dialogue projects, etc.

Do you know of a grassroots effort that could  help us to change this tired, old conversation?

It is time to move from fear to hope, from problems to possibility.  New conversations have the power to create new relationships and new relationships have the power to re-create the world.  I invite you to join me in this new conversation built not on problems and fears but strength and possibility.

When I was a very young man, maybe a very old boy, during my freshman year at Creighton Prep, I was assigned a very young Jesuit, Tom Shanahan, as my homeroom teacher. He engaged me unlike any teacher before, and over the next few years, we became friends, a friendship I still hold in high regard. Tom, now a professor of theology at Creighton University these many years, came into my consciousness this morning and I was reminded of an observation he shared with me about our kinsmen several decades ago: We Irish , Tom said, have a lot of faith, and we have enough charity, I suspect, but we don’t live with much hope. Having immersed myself in Irish history over the intervening years, I have some sense of the why of that insight. And, of late, I have been meditating on hope.

On my journey, an interior one like yours, I have been at a place Juan de la Cruz, the misfit mystic of medieval Spain, called, luminous darkness. It is a still place, spacious, anticipating some ineffable movement, devoid of embellishment and singular, solitary, alone. It is a good and intuitively right place for me to be, though not without its particular challenges.

It is also appropriate for this Advent season, since a boy, my most looked-forward-to time, moreso than Christmas, or summertime, or even the brief eclipse that is a birthday. One of the graced ironies is that Advent is if anything only a season of hope. Of some spectacular or more probably undetectable thing happening, something desired and somehow understood, but only in the recesses of the soul, not available to the over-processing intellect. That it is a time of darkness is essential, midnight blue its evocative color, and the night sky its only source of light, the constellations in all of their hauntingly beautiful and undecipherable array. Luminous darkness. In the northern hemisphere, we find it cold, this year very cold, a bleak mid-winter, which somehow adds to the mystery or obscuration our hearts contemplate.

Only a season of hope. Well maybe other elements are present, too. Surrender. Trust. Even dread, (but the holy not the abject kind…so don’t stop reading).

Teresa of Avila, Juan’s very close friend and confidant, says: You find God in yourself and yourself in God. I think that’s where the dread comes in.

I am terrified by the encounter with what Jung calls the Self, what mystics, Christian and otherwise, call by many evocative names, most precisely, the One, or, as the Galilean wanderer most intimately called Love. Why dread, and why during this season of hope? Because the closer we come to its realization, the sharper its contour, the more demanding its energy, the more enthralling its draw, a gravity of insuperable completion. Its scares the BeJesus out of us. Our egos run amok, sentimental drivel takes hold, we get caught in what Owen Barlow calls the desert of non-participation, mechanically going through motions that deaden, rather than vivify our hearts and lives, and those grace places in our path.

My friend Grace Myerjack, a contemplative nun in upstate New York , who, like Tom’s, presence is in this room as I type, writes in her Christmas letter this year about all the places in our lives we have this encounter. Grace says we bump into this Presence even as we flee and seek to survive on our own. Survive on our own. Hmmm.

I am flee-er. Grace has my number. But I am working to sit and be still and wait. And, contrary to my heritage as a son of Eire, I am hoping.

Signs of hope are actually everywhere. I just forget to look sometimes.

For instance:

The Hubble continues to send to us beyond-beautiful images of universes untold, suggesting the vast magnificence and unknowable depths of the universe and of its Originator, inviting us to contemplate from a posture of humility and surrender and, yes, hope. While ultimate meaning may elude us, with our prehensile brains, other internal organs, the heart and the seat of intuition, soar. Hope.

In our cities, on this cold day, human beings are caring for human beings in every imaginable way: people who might otherwise be out in the freeze are being invited inside, being fed, clothed, gifted, educated, nurtured, restored to health or expiring with dignity and ease, recognized as human, perhaps even seen. Not just in our cities. Hope.

Each day, countless billions of humans are treating each other with dignity and respect, and delight. Friends everywhere are reaching out to friends, and making new ones, and learning how to listen a bit better, be a bit more honest and a bit more present. Parents are sacrificing for their children, and their children are amazing their parents with previously unimagined delights. That goes for aunts and uncles of all stripes with their nieces and nephews, too! Strangers are aiding strangers, and even some enemies are doing the most impossible of tasks, forgiving and repairing and healing the wounds that are evident everywhere, too. Music is being made, some of it soul stirring, and art is being created as if the world depended on it. Hope.

I received a letter yesterday from my friend William, a lifer recently transferred to a prison far away from the accessible San Quentin for the mass overcrowding there. He is a bodhisattva –in-training, though he may not know those terms. He had no rancor for being sent far from his loved ones in the East Bay, only hope that his reconstructed, reformed, grace-infused life would continue to flourish in an alien space. For me, hope.

In every country on the globe, a totally unreported cable news story, I might add, humans are caring for humans, and caring for animals, our dear close companions in this life, and caring for plants, and caring for the very life of the planet, caring for its survival, creating organizations to more efficiently care, so great is the caring, so disciplined are we desirous of becoming so our caring might be maxed, so that this great human adventure, this raising of consciousness, will not end in the collective ego’s great collapse, and along with it life on earth, but rather one enormous connected effort to learn again to reverence this one absolute gift we have been given, this majestic planet and our very lives. Hope.

We celebrated my father-in-law’s eighty fourth birthday last Sunday at a simple family lunch, prepared lovingly by Scott’s mother, Mary. Dick is a man of large humor and capacious intellect. He loves the earth and cares for it, as farmers do, with focused attention. He is a peerless citizen and a family man replete when his family is near, though with great friendships and associations in the world beyond his home. And he has taught me much about how to be a citizen, moreover, about how to be a human being, and, oddly perhaps, mostover, how to be a son. For me, hope

World leaders are meeting in Copenhagen as I write and as you read to address the aforementioned crisis being created by fossil fuel use. The Times said today that actual progress might be made. Hope.

Our president will soon join them. We have in Mr. Obama a national leader, commandingly elected by an electorate bereft of hope, who faces the insurmountable tasks we laid at his feet on 20 January of this year with grace, vast intelligence, patience, a collaborative, consultative style, a compelling joie de vivre, and a remarkable absence of rancor. For me, hope.

We have current moving images that inscribe humanity onto the soul: Gabby Sidibe as Precious, Morgan Freeman as Mandela and Matt Damon as his co-conspirator supplying hope in Invictus, Colin Firth, close to despair and yet, in A Single Man. Hope.

The green-banded young and not-so-young citizens of Iran continue to twitter and email and Iam each other and march together in their stunning effort to overthrow their own flawed national election and remedy the gaping wounds their culture has suffered for a generation. Inspiring and courageous. Hope.

Stories abound this time of year of a baby born to a with-child-in-the-eighth-month teen-ager (see Precious above) without benefit of acknowledged patrimony but an intuitive but nonetheless cockamamie story about a superior sense of an impending pregnancy trolling through the high desert countryside to fulfill some iron-fisted colonists’ demand that a census-for-tax-purposes occur (and right now!) with her perhaps shamed companion, a dreamer of a man a bit older but undoubtedly baffled by the incongruities of his girlfriend’s story, bizarre and sympathetic at once, and their not finding a place to shelter themselves in the freeze, and a barn, and big wide bovines nearly cramping them, and sheep herders (the smell is apparent, no!?) and some extraterrestrials (angels, in the vernacular, but really) and monarchs (perhaps minor dukes) from eastern kingdoms (see Iran , nee Persia above) with gold (currently the commodity of choice) and incense (masking the shepherds odor, hopefully) and myrrh (no allusions immediately available but it sounds generally taboo). We don’t really know from swaddling, we like the word Magi, for some reason, and this impossible story is the narrative upon which one can somehow build a life.

It contains every necessary element: a journey, vulnerability, intuition, humility, suffering, yet trusting, surrender, attention, unexpected gifts from improbable sources, the willing exchange of the material for a generous enough dose of the improbably spiritual, the life giving and love bearing presence of nature. Of course we know its outcome because we have read ahead. But the outcome is necessary, no?

No dogmatic articulations necessary. No atonement, nor soteriology, no human sacrifice to a venging deity. Those accretions obscure the life-vivifying truth of the story.

We are invited to live a human life. Every day.

I nearly floated as I walked home from dinner on the small Pacific island of Miyake a few weeks ago.

The location was special: an island of stunning black beaches, gentle temperatures, and ragged cliffs, towered over by one of earth’s liveliest volcanoes. The food had been superb: thinly sliced meats grilled at the table and dipped in scrumptious sauces, supplemented by an array of pickled dishes, salads, and sparkling beverages.

But it was the conversation that had made the evening exceptional. For three hours, the four of us, all teachers, paused only to fill our mouths. We talked about Japanese politics, about the island economy, about Afghanistan, about sumo wrestling, about families and travel. We laughed; we sighed; we agreed; we disagreed; we heard each other–and felt heard–with both heart and head.

I experienced that night what we mean when we speak of the oneness of the human spirit. Our religions varied. We were single and married, old and young, Japanese and American. None of us was wholly comfortable with the others’ language. Yet the mutuality was magical. I understood what Bob Thompson means when he says that “the idea of a separate self is a construction of the mind.”

My euphoria, however, was punctured soon by a sobering note. If the dinnertime oneness was satisfying, the walk home got me to thinking about the price that mutuality exacts, about the fact that when I start empathizing, I start seeing things from my companions’ perspective. And when I do that, I have to take new, even uncomfortable, ideas seriously.

The topic that stirred the unease around the table was Okinawa. Obama was coming to Japan that week, and the hot issue was the presence of dozens of American bases–and 20,000 GIs–on Okinawa. Japan’s new government had begun discussing possible policy changes regarding the location of one of those bases, and U.S. diplomats had countered with a threatening line, warning that change might threaten the entire U.S.-Japan alliance.

The thing that became clear in the evening’s conversation was that policy specifics were less important than tone, in particular the impression American officials gave that they were not interested in Japanese nuances or sensibilities. The American bases, I was reminded, are on Japanese soil. Japan bears a significant share of their expense. American GIs are perceived to get special treatment when they commit crimes on Okinawan soil. And yet, Americans lecture the Japanese about what must be done–in the authoritarian tone of stern parents.

As I talked with my Japanese hosts, I saw–no, I felt–how humiliating it can be to deal with bullying partners. Even when those partners consider themselves friends.

And as I thought back over the conversation, I realized, quite painfully, that empathy is not always the easiest way. Feeling loved and accepted had prompted me to love back. When I loved back, I was drawn into my companions’ perspective. And when I entered their space, my easy certitudes began to fall away.

What was more (and what was hardest!), that moment of empathy sent my mind spinning off in broader directions. If empathy impelled me to take my companions’ views seriously on this matter, what if I did the same with even hotter, bigger issues? What if everyone took this idea of oneness seriously?

Is it possible that some Palestinians’ hatred of Jewish Israel stems from an inability to get beyond their own (justifiable) sense of victimhood to an understanding of the Israelis’ own sense of threat? Or that many Jews hate Palestinans primarily because their preoccupation with personal vulnerability prevents them from looking at the world as Palestinians experience it?

And is that the way it is everywhere? Americans, smug in our own wealth and power, have no interest in seeing through the eyes of those affected by our actions. Moslem extremists, feeling ignored and marginalized, ask how to bring the infidel down but not how the infidel feels as a fellow human being. Rich nations, focusing on profit lines, shut their ears to the worries of poor countries who will bear the brunt of global warming.

Listening to others will not make solutions easier. It may make them harder, because it will force us to take competing claims seriously. Feeling a sister’s hurt will not necessarily make me agree with her, but it will refuse to let me ignore her position. And that will make my own intellectual struggles more complex, and thus more difficult.

But empathizing will change our interactions. It will drive us to discover ways of living together, to choose love and respect over hatred and alienation. And that will make the complications worth the struggle. It is, after all, the only way to justice.

On this lovely piece of property where Scott and I get to live and cultivate, we have planted in the past half decade over one hundred trees, though you would not suspect since the groupings limit the eye’s ability to correctly ascertain how much it is seeing.  We have a hedgerow of Leland Cypress, a dozen and a half new redwoods, several October Blaze maples, currently blazing right on cue as if they were in the Green Mountains of Vermont.  We have beech and birch and liriodendron (dropping their large golden leaves just outside my study’s window as I write) flowering plums, katsuras, two elegant cedars, a Colorado Blue Spruce on which to hang blue lights at Christmas, an Atlas cedar from the mountains of the Maghreb, planted to honor Trappist monks living amidst the poor, wantonly slain at Tibhirine in the far south of Algeria many years ago, their simple witness too much to bear to religious fundamentalists.   The surviving monks stayed on.

We have a Jujube, yes, like the candy and from which the movie palace sweet acquired its sticky name.  A dozen Japanese maples huddle together in the slash of shade on the house’s northern perimeter, along with a Hinoki cypress, their aesthetic sister, under which sits a Buddha now covered, after many years, in moss, befitting somehow his mission.  Douglas fir create a partial screen in front, where we removed many reedy old cottonwoods (farewell, Nebraska…).   This fenced land has seven old live oaks, Valleys, deciduous, majestic, with canopies that in the summer create total cover, and, in the winter, through which stars shine one does not otherwise see.   After several years of raking up their immense drop, I learned recently it is best for the trees to leave the leaves in place.  Ah.  O.K.

Fruit trees produce an abundance of apricots and figs and a smattering of peaches and pears too small yet to eat and enough pomegranates for the holiday table.  No cherries to speak of, not a jujube in sight, but plenty of quince, about a century late for jamming purposes.  The old plum tree produces hard little miniatures with stones too big for their skins.  The apricot has cankers, and will have to be removed.  Older and wiser orcharders told me you can’t really grow apricots in this part of Sonoma County.  I did, but not for very long.

But these are not the woods I have moved into.  Even saying I have moved denotes an inaccurate placement of the pronoun, and the wrong case for the verb.  Am being moved?  Moving?  Have been moved by?  Shoved?

Maybe wrong verb grouping altogether.  The more precise one is deform.  I am being deformed, or I am partially deformed, with some movement apparent towards a total deformation.  The forms, on which I have staked my life, actually, are melting.  No, withering away.  Falling apart.  Crushed by their own weight.  You get the picture.

The forms:  metaphysical assurity, moral absolutism, perfectionism.   More colloquially: understanding (of incalculable value), controlling (hello?), tasking, an inheritance of both Jansenist and Puritan forbearers with instructions on how to cram jam full a day, or perhaps a life, and maybe  even naming, Adam’s forlorn task.

Sometimes I can escape my body and float above and look down on this poor chap and all his efforts, genuine, sincere to a fault, and yet with a moral calculation to please and control the divine just enough to ensure some predicated outcome.  Some acceptance.  Some redemption.  Some abject atonement.  Some fulfillment of the tasks necessary, finally, to be found worthy.

Alas, no task, no matter how arduously performed, or how often, even to the end of one’s days, qualifies one.  There is no competition.  There is no reward.  No atonement.  No justification.  Your categories, dear Bill, are backwards.   Well, not even backwards.  No longer applicable.

The past eighteen months of my life have left me with one knowing, if you will: the divine (my awkward word) is not to be managed.  It is not to be defined.  It cannot be understood.  It cannot be manipulated.  It cannot be secured.  It cannot be disciplined.  It cannot be metaphysiced.  It cannot be natural lawed.  An asteroid rammed into Jupiter recently the size of the Pacific Ocean, and plot, if that happened to the earth, history is, shall we say, altered for all time. That being the case, in what lies the meaning, if at all, of our treasured lives.

Our imaginations have failed us, or at least not kept up pace.  Physics, particle, astro and otherwise, has over taken metaphysics, and all on which therein relied.  The universe is an immensity we cannot even though barely glimpse.  Hubble is the photographer to the divine court, and the billions upon billions of galaxies it suggests are a tribute to the divine imagination, always changing, or as Thomas Keating says, always just a bit ahead of where we might be.  To us, he is generous.

My precious categories are being shattered.  Missouri Valley Thomism (yes that’s the nomenclature used by Aristotelian metaphysicians at Saint Louis University and Jesuit environs mid-last-century) into which I was intellectually birthed 40 years ago is like an antique side car, clanging along next to the vehicle who dimensions I do not know nor cannot fully fathom but in which I find myself delighted to be travelling at a clip I cannot measure .

Eighteen months ago while on retreat I had an experience.  I attended to the experience, using what I had at my disposal, and did so sincerely.  Nonetheless, the experience got bounded by my limitations.  What else could I do?  I have my understandings.  I have my notions, formed by those I have thought much brighter than me, with candle power in excess of my own.  I have been attending to the One who was at the heart of that experience for a long time.  But my categories are so short, so clipped, so narrow, for all their breadth.

The divine, how can one say anything of this, I, like you, am experiencing is More.  Ahead.  All.  Ether.  Cupping the immensity of the universe in the anthropological hand which we provide him.  (So interesting, no?,  that humankind in inventing language did not create a fourth pronoun-set for the divine, instead relying on the third person singular masculine, now so entirely inadequate yet nonetheless clogging the pipes with its accreted corrosion).

We know so little.  And yet.

Saint Francis knew enough to touch the leper on her sores.

In Sonoma County, persons of accidental means are creating winter shelters for those whose accidental means have left them shelterless.

Paul Farmer is carrying medicine up the mountainsides of deforested Haiti to heal the sufferings of the most abject of human beings.

A woman I know has taken Bodhisattva vows to unite herself with those who suffer.

Parents are kissing their children good night before kissing each other.

Someone you love is weeping today with the immensity of which she carries in her heart.

We can’t pray disease away, nor keep our loved ones , let alone the worthies of every description in every place, from pain.  And every one is worthy.  So we do what we do.  And we pray for whom we pray.  Praying only changes us.  Our hearts.  Our capacity.  Our breadth.  Our deepening into mystery.  Our total trust in That which we intuit with our advanced evolutionary brains and hearts and souls to be at the source of all of this splendor and yet somehow imbedded in this immensity of suffering, too.  That must be suffering, too.

We can evade the suffering for awhile, some of us with those accidental means, seemingly for a long while. We can robe ourselves so finely that we forget our nakedness and the absolute reliance we have on others to sustain us.  We are no isolates, no independent actors, no self-reliant individualists.  We are only together even if our vocation calls us to be apart.  Our sinews are threaded to bones other than our own.  How different this is from the daily action agenda our electronic devices spew forth each morning.  How different from what I have planned.

So I am grateful to be in the forest, the place filled with the immensity of trees in which I am small and yet happy.  Fog in the morning, appropriately.  Deep shafts of light between the arched branches.  A soft floor for the inevitable falls.

And yet we are called into the desert with such regularity: the scorching sun, the altered vision, the parchedness of the land and the throat, the psychological lizards, the emotional cacti, mainly the sense of being in some untenable way, desolate, alone.

And the terrible news is, there are times the desert is the requisite place for our necessary tutelage.

And the time there leaves a lasting impression.  One is shy to forget their instruction: To give up the old categories.  To stop praying in the old ways to the old gods.  To stop idolizing the drossed bulls we have fashioned with such sincerity from our tired and ineffective beliefs.  Beliefs appear as so much smoke.  You thought you could grab them and hold them but they are elusive and now gone, a repetition of a mirage, leaving only the faintly acrid odor of ash.

If anything, we leave the desert with trust.  A mighty and de-glamorized trust.  Only trust.   It is a world away from belief.  There is no dogma to explain either the desert or the beauty of a supernova other than the dogma of awe.  To admit the paucity of the moral imagination and enter the realm of awe feels like salvation to me.

Mother Teresa (who I am not used to quoting) said: Do one thing.  Don’t take on the suffering of India.  Hold one outcast.  Spike Lee, likewise whom I’ve never quoted, says: Do the right thing.  We actually kinda know what that is, and it’s gonna cost us.  There is some whiff of suffering involved.  Chosen suffering, or at least a pinch thereof.

We are not in charge, really, of anything.  Our bodies will do what bodies do, and our minds, too.  History has a damnable tendency to repeat itself, and asteroids just fly into whatever planet they damn well please.  And yet, we are the recipients of grace, of beauty, of all of this created splendor.

And of the knowing beyond knowing of something More.  Something  Other.  Something Deeper, Penetrating, Mysterious.
God, the commonly held word to capture something beyond even the imagination and the limits of the limitless universe, appears to have endowed this evolving creature Homo Sapiens, (ah, sapientia, wisdom) with a capacity to feel deeply this knowing: of empathy, of relatedness, of love, our best word, our very best word.

In this must our wisdom lie.  It is contrary to imposed suffering, injustice, war, violence, exclusion, shame, power.  We know just a smidgen about it, but the yeast of that smidgen is enough.  From it love bread will rise.  We can trust, and we can gain our fill.  What else offers such hope and possibility and insight and vision and splendor.  What else?

“Liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations,” so states the first sentence on the Conservapedia, a website begun by Andrew Schlafly, son of Phyllis Schlafly, founder of the Eagle Forum.

Launched in 2006 and proclaiming itself as the one true defender of the Truth, Conservapedia is making news with its claim that modern translations of the Bible are tainted by liberal bias.

With an allusion to the 10 Commandments, Conservapedia asserts that modern translations of the Bible fail to adhere to its ten guidelines, beginning with a “Framework against Liberal Bias” and concluding with “Preferring Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness.”

Liberals are “downplaying the very real existence of hell and the devil” and responsible for inserting later stories into the biblical text such as Jesus forgiving the woman caught in adultery. As found in John’s Gospel, Conservapedia says noted scholars discount this story as being a later addition.

This is not news.

Even conservative Biblical scholars admit that Mark’s Gospel, the earliest, wasn’t written down until 65-70 CE. There are no pure or unfiltered accounts of the life of Jesus.

When it comes to the Bible, interpretation always depends on assumptions and perspective. Liberals read it liberally, conservatives read it conservatively.

Some time back I had a lunch meeting with a Messianic Jew.  We met at (where else?) the Blind Faith Café.

Messianic Jews are people who were raised as religious or cultural Jews who have converted to Christianity. Messianic Jews believe that Jesus really was the Jewish messiah, the one and only Son of God. For all intents and purposes, messianic Jews are evangelical Christians.

To my partner in dialogue I said, “I believe that Jesus is not the one and only door to God but at once a  window to our humanity and divinity.” He immediately flew off the handle. “And you call yourself a Christian? That’s the problem with all you liberals, you believe that truth is relative. And that’s what’s wrong with this society. The moral breakdown of our society is due to the fact that we don’t believe in the authority of the Bible anymore. Take sex for example. Homosexuality and sexual promiscuity are a result of a society that no longer believes in Biblical morality.”

His retort provided a perfect opening so I said, “I imagine you believe that the Bible teaches monogamy, right?” “Absolutely,” he said. “Then how do you account for the fact that Abraham did not practice monogamy. Abraham not only had a mistress, but the mistress was Hagar, his wife’s maid, and Abraham got her pregnant. This is biblical sexual morality?”

“All right”, he countered,” if you want to talk about the Hebrew Bible, what about the 10 Commandments? Do you believe in the 10 commandments, or not?”

“Sure , I believe it’s wrong to steal unless you are stealing bread to feed your starving family. I believe it’s wrong to lie. But there have been many times that people have told a lie in order to save the life of somebody else. Sometimes morality calls us to confront the complexity of life and seek the highest good”. Life cannot be reduced to dogmatic formulas,” I said.

Round and round we went.   When it comes to the Bible this is the ongoing liberal/conservative debate.

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the definition of an idol is : “a representation or symbol of an object of worship; broadly : a false god.”

Every attempt by liberals or conservatives to reduce the Bible to fit a preconceived ideology is an attempt to turn the Bible into God. Bibliolotry is another word for this.

A bibliolater is “one having excessive reverence for the letter of the Bible.”

The Bible is not God.

Get it?

I don’t fault conservatives for wanting to change the words to make them more palatable to conservative tastes. We liberals do the same thing.

So let’s start here: in whatever form the diverse biblical cannon appeared or appears, it is not God.  It  is a collection of books that contains the narrative quest of people who seek God–this is why the literature is sacred.

Get it?

In whatever form the flawed biblical narrative appears, I am moved most by the words of Paul in I Cornithians 13: “If I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.”

As Dante Alighieri reminds us,

The love of God, unutterable and perfect, flows into a pure soul the way that light rushes into a transparent object. The more love that it finds, the more it gives itself, so that, as we grow clear and open, the more complete the joy of loving is. And the more souls who resonate together, the greater the intensity of their love, for, mirror-like, each soul reflects the other.

Whatever your preferred translation, the Bible is not God—never has been and never will be.

I openly confess however that I am a loveolotrist.

A few weeks ago I wrote on this blog about the things I have learned from people who frown; a month before that about the joy of living in a neighborhood with people whose customs challenge me. I must be in a diversity mode these days.

Maybe that (plus my arrival in Tokyo for a two-month stay) is what led me to recall an episode of many years ago, when the reverse side of this mode shocked me–and reminded me how much we human beings share even when we’re being self-centered.

I was sitting on a cushion across a low table from my friend Manabe-san, engaging in a conversation about religious things. Our visits were intended to help me learn Japanese, but their primary effect was to stimulate my mind and deepen our friendship.

“I am convinced,” Manabe told me, “that Japan is God’s chosen country.” I think I gasped.

The thing that made his comment surprising was that Manabe was a deeply conservative Christian. Jesus, for him, was God’s only son; failure to believe in Christ sent a person to hell. “God’s favorite nation”–even though fewer than one percent of his fellow countrymen were Christian?

Why was he so sure, I asked, and he provided well thought out answers.

These days, I am less interested in Manabe’s answers than in the ideas his comment has fostered in my own set of beliefs as I have pondered the favorite nation idea across the years.

1. Manabe is simply wrong if he thinks Japan is better–or more “chosen”–than other countries, or if he thinks his land has some “special,” God-given right to power and prosperity. Japan is no more God’s favorite place than Israel is. Or the United States. Or Afghanistan. A universal God does not play favorites.

2. Yet Manabe is right. Japan is indeed God’s chosen land. So is Iraq. And Ireland and Namibia. Just this morning, as I went for a newspaper, I noticed Tokyo’s Olympics slogan stretched across an elementary school playground: Nihon da kara dekiru, “This is Japan; so we can do it!” That’s true, I thought, just as much as it would be true if one substituted Brazil, or Spain, or the United States. If the divine spirit flows through us all, we’re all capable of remarkable things.

3. This equation ought to apply to every area of life, not just to politics and national culture. My faith is special; some days I’d even call it “the best”–just as I would the faith of spiritual seekers in every religious tradition.

My family is wonderful; so are the Blegens, and the Chartoffs, and the Hoshinos, and the Husseins. To love my family passionately need not diminish the equally superlative qualities of other families. Nor should the specialness of theirs lessen the love I have for my own. As with faith and nation, it is not a competition.

The Quakers get my attention when they assert that there is something of God in each of us.

It is easy to see that in my two-year-old grandson Ryu. When he asked his father the other day where poop came from, then declared after hearing his father`s explanation that he must be eating poop, I grinned and saw something divine. That was easy.

That divine spark should be equally easy to see in the woman who comes by each morning and sorts through our neighborhood garbage, to make sure people have discarded the appropriate things for that day. My temptation is to dismiss her as eccentric, but there is a divine brightness in that fastidiousness.

There is that of the divine too in the fifty men and women who show up at 7:00 every morning at the nearby park to exercise loudly. And in the rule-inclined postal clerk who last week sent me home, grumbling, to get the right sized envelope. Even in the right-wing zealots who blare their nationalist slogans from soundtrucks and make me grimace.

I may dislike their views; I may wish them away from my nighborhood; I may even invoke imprecations on them. But I cannot deny that spark of spiritual energy that makes their commitment to something bigger than self wonderful–indeed, divine.

Again and again I am taken aback when I consider how much we human beings share. Even when we think different thoughts and follow conflicting ideologies, even when our customs vary, we nonetheless laugh and love and hurt and smile at the same things. We share a need to serve and a vision of giving ourselves to something beyond and above ourselves. That which joins us is too profound, in my reckoning, to be anything but divine.

So I think Manabe was right, though in ways he might not have realized. The Japanese are God’s chosen. So am I.