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A Mindful Marriage

Kittisaro And Thanissara On Celibacy, Sex, And Lasting Love

Being outside of the monastic community gives us the freedom to offer interfaith workshops and to include practices from other traditions. Also, because we, as a married couple, experience challenges that one doesn’t experience in the monastery, we have more empathy for the struggles of our lay students. We all need to work on those sharp edges that come up, especially in marriage, and to be more patient, gentle, and compassionate with each other.

Sunbeams

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Moral Combat

Chris Hedges On War, Faith, And Fundamentalism

You can spend your whole life struggling against war and end up with a world that’s more violent than when you began, but resistance is what gives you spiritual strength. You trust that the work is worth doing and that it’s helping somewhere, though perhaps evidence of that won’t be apparent in your lifetime. You find self-worth in the ability to stand up and fight back without worrying too much about what you can accomplish. That is part of being human. We’re not God. We have a limited capacity to fight evil. We use the gifts and tools we’ve been given and trust that life is meaningful, even if everything we try to do seems to fail.

Future Zarahs

The Peace Corps doesn’t send volunteers to the countries where we work, those anarchic Fourth World places where the globalization beast barely pauses to wipe its lips — places like Sierra Leone in 2004.

My God Journal

Tonight was my third Christmas Eve service. My friend Diana was playing the organ and invited me into the choir loft with her. I sat looking down at the pews, which were two-thirds full. These people had braved the midnight cold of the Catskills to praise the birth of a king in a barn.

Baton Rouge

It was hot and I wanted to die, in a way. I was tired of being twenty-five years old and festering as an undergraduate at one of the largest cow colleges in the deep South.

Sunbeams

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.

Joseph Conrad