Conversation Pieces
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This morning I was reminded again of Soren Kierkegaard’s phrase “to need God is man’s highest perfection.” First time I heard these words I was sitting in a summer class up at Regent College in Vancouver, B.C. Somewhere midway through a morning lecture, Dr. James Houston got off his notes and began to reflect more personally […]
On the walls and columns of a grey stoned sanctuary hung twelve to fifteen prints of Rembrandt’s painting Return of the Prodigal Son. The audience was a mix of parents and grandparents and nuns and pastors and students. We were all gathered in a Beverly Hills’ Anglican church to hear writer/speaker Henri Nouwen speak on […]
As the New Year begins I find myself returning to certain thoughts that have lingered with me over the past year. Jesus’ personal way with others has dominated much of my wonderings. His way of life always offers an alternative to our culture’s dominant ways of relating. Jesus lived out his mission by forming and […]
I came across a question today from a few weeks back: “Where is there breathing space in your life?” And my mind ended up thinking about Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s little book Gift from the Sea. Amidst the seemingly endless distractions of our lives, she asks, how do we remain attentive to that which matters most? […]
We can live so unreflectively nowadays, always hoping to “get by” with what we already know. Yet if life experience teaches us anything along the way, it is that we still have so much more to learn if we are to flourish as people. We will not be able to “get by” without a good […]
The Spiritual Formation Retreats of the past two weekends, one in Olympia, WA and the other in Crestline, CA afforded me an opportunity to reflect and converse with a number of Emerging Journey participants around this simple poem, “Fire.” It is often very simple images that can cause us to think or re-think where we […]
Genesis 3. Adam and Eve have just eaten of the tree from which God had forbid them to eat. The story goes on to say that their “eyes were opened” and they became “ashamed of their nakedness.” Then Adam and Eve hear God walking in the Garden and immediately they hide among the trees, “away […]