Humor and paradox are often the only ways to respond to life’s sorrow with grace.
I turn a lot of stuff down – big, big movies, the kind I wouldn’t want to go to the cinema to see.
Evil is the shadow of angel. Just as there are angels of light, support, guidance, healing and defense, so we have experiences of shadow angels. And we have names for them: racism, sexism, homophobia are all demons – but they’re not out there.
Political movements for justice are part of the fuller development of the cosmos, and nature is the matrix in which humans come to their self-awareness of their power to transform. Liberation movements are a fuller development of the cosmos’s sense of harmony, balance, justice, and celebration. This is why true spiritual liberation demands rituals of cosmic celebrating and healing, which will in turn culminate in personal transformation and liberation.
To speak of creativity is to speak of profound intimacy. It is also to speak of our connecting to the Divine in us and of our bringing the Divine back to the community. This is true whether we understand our creativity to be begetting and nourishing our children, making music, doing theater, gardening, writing, teaching, running a business, painting, constructing houses, or sharing the healing arts of medicine and therapy.
Creativity as Divine intimacy flows through us and is bigger than we are, urging us to go to the edge and grow larger. And our growth in turn delights God. “God is delighted to watch your soul enlarge,” says Eckhart.
What happens to another, whether it be a joy or a sorrow, happens to me. – Meister Eckhart.
Creativity and imagination are not frosting on a cake: They are integral to our sustainability. They are survival mechanisms. They are of the essence of who we are. They constitute our deepest empowerment.
From suffering I have learned this: That whoever is sore wounded by love will never be made whole unless she embrace the very same love which wounded her. – Mechtild of Magdeburg.
The doctrine of the Incarnation is itself an invitation to all believers to love the earth, cherish it, find the divine in it.
God is voluptuous and delicious. – Meister Eckhart.
Human beings are midway between the size of a living cell and the size of Earth.
The letting go of patriarchy which creates one-sided citizens of women and men alike and culminates in violent living and violent relationships.
Who is this woman who preached of the “web of life” that all creation shares, but who warned that “the earth must not be injured, the earth must not be destroyed” – and that if humans misuse creation, “God will permit creation to punish humanity”?
Who is this woman who took on the Emporer Barbarosa, comparing him to an infant and a madman, and threatened that God’s sword would smite him? Who is this woman.
What do we do with chaos? Creativity has an answer. We are told by those who have studied the processes of nature that creativity happens at the border between chaos and order. Chaos is a prelude to creativity. We need to learn, as every artist needs to learn, to.
Is any place more intimate than the place where we create? Where we co-create with the Spirit of God and the Spirit of largesse that inspires our souls where we love? Where we make love? Where we love others through serving them with our labor? Where we love our children? Where we paint our truth? Where we dance our dance? Where we speak our words? Where we work? Where we utter our poetry? The.
Only art as meditation reminds people so that they will never forget that the most beautiful thing a potter produces is... the potter.
As Rabbi Heschel teaches, humanity will be saved not by more information, but by more appreciation.
Who we thought we were dies when a beloved dies. And it takes a while for a new self to rise, often haltingly, from the ashes of our ravaged hearts.
Julian, by calling us to interfere with patriarchy and heal the wounds that it has wracked upon human history and the human soul and the earth, beckons us from folly to wisdom. Are we listening?