Some days we burst with life like buds swelling to meet the sun. Other days we feel cracked, empty, and brittle as old skeleton leaves blown along the ground. We gather in religious community: new and old, empty and full, to create in our togetherness a richness, a subtlety, a completeness that we do not achieve in isolation.
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We are not separate from the wild things of the earth, nor from the ecology that drives all. We are part of an immense predator-prey, cause-and-effect network that is at once wonderful, terrible, and profound. Yet from the Book of Genesis on, we have adopted an attitude of arrogance toward the earth which becomes more costly with each passing year. What we do not know can yet be learned and what has been done can yet be undone. It is upon us to make a beginning.
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We continue on, always, in the richness of time. The promised land is, for us, merely our best action in the moment. The promised land is where we are and what we are doing at this moment, in hearts reaching out to hearts, in love, support, and accountability. It lies in this moment.
These are times, most of all, to be true to ourselves and true to one another, in the sometimes harsh light of our highest ideals. We move forward. We love and are loved. We act and are acted upon, for good or ill. What we do in this moment–the best we can do in this moment–is the eternity toward which we aspire.
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It is in the very worst tempests of life that we learn what faith really is. Faith is courage to go forward when the way seems heaped with rubble from the storm, so that we feel peril at every step. Faith is feeling empty of energy yet committed to engage, forgive, challenge, be challenged, then forgive again. Faith is merely a short word for that love which ‘kicks ass, takes names, and will not surrender.’
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We swim in the very fountain of life. Sweet zephyrs draw us to a dreamed-of future even as torrents buffet us, erupting from a past not of our making. Both the sweet breeze and the savage flood stem from the same creative power, which pummels even as it enlightens. May our best ideals lift us. May our love bind us. For both are indispensable for us to achieve the destination we seek.
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Society is like a great pyramid of sand, where people seem more afraid of those trying to climb up from below than of those kicking sand down from above.
This is the very soul of insanity.
May we remember that nature put hands onto the ends of our arms in order that we might help one another up, rather than push one another down.
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