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Consciousness
The Disappearing God
I don’t mistake self-punishment for devotion anymore. I am a born-again believer in lovingkindness. I don’t waste my time with a God who leaves me. My God lies down with me and tells me I am beauty and grace incarnate. My God celebrates me as gloriously as I celebrate Him. I worship a God who believes in me.
February 1999And There Was Light
I felt indescribable relief and a happiness so great it almost made me laugh. Confidence and gratitude came as if a prayer had been answered. I found light and joy at the same moment, and I can say without hesitation that from that time on light and joy have never been separate in my experience. I have had them or lost them together.
February 1999Sunbeams
January 1999Magazines all too often lead to books and should be regarded by the prudent as the heavy petting of literature.
I Don’t Have All Night
Yet even here, at one of the more innovative schools in the country, graduation was still . . . graduation. Even here, at the end of the most violent century in history, graduates were exhorted in the usual ways to step across the mass graves and the poisoned waters and the broken vows. Step lively, the speakers told them.
January 1999
Sunbeams
November 1988Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest, which co-mingle their roots in the darkness underground.
The Distance
As I listen, a finch flies by outside the window, its gold breast in shiny contrast to the black and white of its wings. My son rarely talks about that trip to Peru three years ago, during which he was shot and his friend Patchen was killed.
November 1998Sunbeams
September 1998Economics and politics are the governing powers of life today, and that’s why everything is screwy.
The Grace Of Great Things
Reclaiming The Sacred In Knowing, Teaching, And Learning
Community goes far beyond our face-to-face relationship with each other as human beings. In education especially, community connects us with what Rilke called “the grace of great things.” We are, in reality, in community with the genes and ecosystems of biology, the great questions of philosophy and theology, the archetypes of literature, the artifacts of anthropology, the materials of engineering, the logic of systems and management, the shapes and colors of art, the patterns of history, the elusive idea of justice under the law — we are in community with all these great things. Great teaching is about knowing and feeling that community, and then drawing your students into it.
September 1998Sunbeams
July 1998Some people think that doctors and nurses can put scrambled eggs back into the shell.
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