I think the state should ONLY be in the business of civil unions. No marriages, gay . . . or straight. Leave it all the church, or whatever substitutes for the church people want.

I think marriage is sacred - a spiritual union. Of course the western human history is that marriage was as much a property and legal arrangement, which is why the state is involved. But that's not what is truly important.

Much of the argument of including gays in marriage is based on the legal protections that go along with marriage, things that affect property, visiting rights at hospitals, etc. Only someone really hateful would deny those rights, and civil unions also have the virtue of providing a mechanism for other circumstances that are hard for a one-size-fits-all legal system to take into account - two sisters living together, for instance. They need legal protections too, even though they aren't married, aren't in that category at all.

I've always wondered why one person's marriage would threaten another.   more »

It’s Sunday and I’ve turned toward acknowledging the larger spiritual reality in which I exist. Only I’m disappointed.

I’m discovering a disconnect between what I believe about how the world is created and governed (ie, God) and how I feel about it.

I’ve been to seminary, I’ve thought about this stuff, I’ve had enough experiences to know how energy and love works . . . blah, blah, blah. I’ve worked it out in my head – and even more than that.

There’s something new and it’s been gnawing on me for a few years really. I haven’t known what to do with it, so I’ve stuffed it.

I am disappointed with my place in the world. I’m disappointed with what the universe has provided me. I had expectations and they’ve not been met.   more »

I suppose this conversation with myself must come up every year?  I blogged about it May of a year ago.

Anyway, I felt I'd forgotten how I wanted to be - not goals, but ways of being.  And that I needed to remember what values are important to me.  Here, the fruit of a nice journal session, is the list.

1. Romantic Relationship with love and spark and partnership
2. Taking care of my own spirit
3. Be happy with myself & enjoy my own company
4. Sleep enough, exercise, eat well
5. Be charismatic and confident
6. Live truthfully (integrity)
7. Find and learn from mentors
8. Taking care of my “customers” in work
9. Keep my commitments
10. Follow up with people

I can only handle a "top ten" list.  The rest is too much to remember in the moment as life arises.  But, for what it's worth, here is the rest of the list:

1. Spread love
2. Live Lightly on the environment
3. Approach People
4. Building a team in my work
5. Make money
6. Study People
7. Help & Teach
8. Celebration & creation of beauty
9. Listen to God
10. Be a desired lover
11. Welcome people
12. Win
13. Be a “success” in the world’s eyes
14. Following spontaneous inspiration
15. Be happy and charming to myself
16. Be loved
17. Be attractive
18. Spread peace
19. Confront oppression
20. Build community
21. Set high expectations for myself
22. Get out there and DO, even when I feel stuck
23. win
24. Be thankful
25. Set goals

You'll notice it's all color coded - that's different levels.  Red is what I really want and orange what seems essential.  And on down.

I'm trusting that you, the reader, won't be actually holding me to these standards!  I want to live this way . . . but I get no exemption from being human and do not claim so.  Actually these are my growing edges.  The values I've locked in I don't have to think about.

The following is quoted from an e-mail to the All_Aboard list by L.H. [nawdry@gmail.com]

Susan Pantell, a research associate with the Light Rail Now Project, has just completed an analysis of worldwide terrorist incidents in transportation spanning the past 40 years (1967-2007). Here's a quick breakdown of the percentage of total incidents by mode (rounded to 1 decimal):

Private Motor Vehicles 73.7%
Buses and Stations/Stops 9.5%
Aircraft and Air Facilities 8.6%
Rail Transit Trains 3.6%
Intercity Rail Trains 3.0%
Boats, Ships, and Maritime 0.9%
Other Transport Vehicles or Facilities 0.6%
   more »

I'd prayed for an answer to what should give my life motivation and meaning, since I've been a bit low in that department, what with all the disappointments in people and reasons to be grumpy at God.

OK, so this is what I realized . . .   more »

Acceptance is what Eastern spiritual traditions suggest to alleviate suffering. This directly contradicts the world I grew up in, which was based on expectations.

As a teacher and leader, I know that expectations have their place – they spur us on towards something better. At the same time, I know I suffered from expectations that were other people’s notions of “normal” or some other box they wanted to keep me from expanding out of. And now, in my thirties, I find myself disillusioned because I had unrealistic expectations of human community. So I’m sorting this out for myself.

I’m grateful for the lesson of acceptance. I’ve become calmer and more accepting of how other people present themselves.

And yet . . .

I realize that I’m really unhappy because my expectations are not met. In fact, I’m really angry. I feel like somehow I was promised a better world than I find myself in.

So this is my spiritual crisis of the moment.   more »

The inner drama was like a switch changing from 'content' to 'I want' and quickly, 'I lack'. Not even that I did want very much, but once the switch was thrown all the repressed wanting was activated for every thing I've ever been denied. And that force seems stronger than my will. I can't choose 'abundance' then, no matter how many self-help books I've read in my life. So I was watching that inner drama with more awareness than before. And I didn't feel very good about it, or myself.

So I've been thinking about how I relate to people. I want to relate to everyone with love, but SO OFTEN there is some situation of wanting. Basically wanting love in some form. Wanting to fit in, wanting to be liked, wanting to be approved of, successful. I shoot myself in the foot that way, because then I get in my own way and am no service to others. I'm really grieving this. I want to find my power - in situations where it matters. I like being in situations where I am the leader or the teacher or the hero somehow - then people give me power and I feel approved of and it's all good. But I want to be able to feel my power in confrontive situations, when people don't like me. That is when things can be transformed (and also when you can go acting like a fool and hurt others). I want that for myself and instead I run up against my limits.

And so I've been living out the same drama that drives people to their God. 'I want' equals materialism, but it also equals thirst for God. 'I lack' calls for God to fill the space. But not even God can fill 'I lack.' Instead, we have to throw that switch back over to 'abundance.'

I have some power over that switch with myself. If I remain conscious, I can remember the that I can indeed always choose how I respond to situations, which keeps me away from the 'I lack' setting. But I have even more power with other people. So long as my own tangles don't wrap me up, I can set up an emotional climate with the people around me that help them remember they are secure. So I pray for help to do that as a leader.   more »

My Kenny G moment . . .

Now I'm not someone who listens to music as "background," unless I'm SO familiar with it that it moves me on some automatic sub-conscious level. I CAN multi-task with music as a soundtrack, but it becomes my main emotional animator while I'm doing something else. If there is music on (for example) while driving and conversing, I often give the music the lead voice in my brain.

I'd never heard of Kenny G (I don't listen to much of that genre) but one day I was in a travel-induced stress and boarded a United Airlines flight and this sound washed over me and completely changed the moment. 'What is THAT?!' I said to myself. I liked it.

The truth is there is a wide range of good music that could have affected me at that moment. The anxiety of travel is constrictive, pulling my body tight as I worry about missed connections and things that can go wrong. Music takes me on emotional flights - good music, anyway. It also has intrusive power, in the best sense - it will butt into whatever grumph of a snitch I've worked myself into, transforming it, making me happy.

In that moment, the soaring saxophone of Kenny G was exactly right to lift me into bliss.   more »

Friend Sarah Pullman has a post on Howard Kunstler how has warned darkly about Peak Oil -- and a number of other sceneries in which he predicts a catastrophic currency devaluation, global flue epidemic, stock market collapse war with china, between India and Pakistan . . . et. al. It's the peak-oil scenario that is getting the most attention around me right now. There's two parts - the cause of trouble and then the prediction of collapse, the end of the automobile, suburbs, are nice comfy lifestyle, political order, domestic peace and the Republican party.

Sarah's post has a list complied by her reader Tom about all the predictions made (and passed without much effect). It reminds me to just take life a little more lightly and not to worry so much.

Which isn't to say that all those things aren't a worry.   more »

I realize what a hermit I've been lately.

I've stayed home from Meeting. I'm disillusioned, not sure what use a church community could have to me or the world. I'm tired, tired putting on an act, and of putting up with other people's control needs. I don't feel any attraction to being there and any commitment I had has waned in the face of disillusionment.

So here I am at home, listening to my housemate's Steven Halprin   more »

Terrorism is miniscule when put in context.
The real threat to our national security is ourselves . . . and our tools.



Terrorism isn’t a big deal. There. Somebody had to say it. Republicans have desperately been spreading fear, bringing up terrorism at every chance. But when you look at the numbers, it looks very minor compared with other threats to our national security that we have gotten used to. You can see for yourself, in the accompanying list of all the major risks faced by Americans.

In fact, since 1995, the average number of Americans killed by terrorism at home or abroad is 286 a year. Now look what else kills! More Americans are killed by law enforcement than by terrorists! 470 people are electrocuted every year and 776 people are shot accidentally. 16,692 were murdered last year.

In 9/11 four planes when down and there were many deaths in the towers. Yet that many people die on American highways every couple of months and there is no outcry, no threat to our civil liberties, no invading of small countries half way around the world. Even more die because of pollution from autos and power plants and politicians are busy trying to dismantle what imperfect environmental protections we do have. And deaths due to smoking and poor diet and lack of exercise dwarf all of these threats, and nobody is sending in the national guard to shut down McDonalds or Phillip-Morris.

So what is different about terrorism?   more »

Rob writes of his struggle: The problem I’ve faced is that living in that power, whether you call it Christ or not, is so damn hard. We live in a world that makes commitment and singleness of heart so impossibly difficult.

Oh, it's hard, it's so true. And all that Rob cites is waiting to make it harder. But it's always been hard. Because it's not the world that makes it hard. We DO have this choice, and Rob sees it. The reason it's hard is because of our own inner make up.   more »

I was watching how I was acting and I feel lacking. Specifically I feel a deficit of love. I’m fully competent, respectful, likeable, ethical . . . but not so loving. In fact, to be honest, I’m downright grumpy and annoyed sometimes.   more »

Alex Schein was running a poetry ("spoken word") workshop at the Pendle Hill youth service camp which I'm co-leading right now. So I wrote a poem in the workshop. Not making any claims about it, but having written it in the first place is surprising and makes me smile. Here it is:   more »

I was at Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting and there was this fellow who said he was from North Carolina when visitors were recognized. He was dressed several measures more conservatively than the rest of us and had come for a memorial service. Just before Meeting ended (when there was no time for any response . . . I mean any messages that would go deeper) he stood up and said "Jesus said I am the Truth the Way and the Life. No one comes to the Father but through me." And then he sat down.   more »

An article I wrote for the Vermont Guardian:



The first use of the word “hitchhiking” is reported to have come from a Sept. 19, 1923, article in The Nation about three young women traveling through Vermont.

Many people put hitchhiking on the other side of an invisible line that divides “safe” from unknown. Yet, the practice continues, and Vermont has a good reputation among hitchhikers, who say people are friendly here.

Hitchhiking is legal in most places in Vermont, but it is illegal to solicit rides on interstates and on highway entrances past the “no hitchhiking” signs. It is also illegal to stand in the roadway.

“I have amazing luck hitchhiking,” reports Brattleboro resident Ian Bigelow, 23. “I have been able to get there time after time. Not all the time.”

“Most of the media teaches us to be afraid of each other, and one thing in my time hitchhiking, is that it really gave me faith in people,” said Serene, a 20-something at Brattleboro’s Common Ground who didn’t want her last name used.

The hitchhikers contacted for this article said meeting people was the most positive aspect of hitchhiking.

“I believe that hitchhiking is on a rise back up,” said Bigelow. “There’s more and more young people who believe that those old wives tales aren’t so true and are willing to risk it,” he said. “I think that in Vermont, with gas prices rising and we don’t have a good minimum wage and a shortage of good housing, there’s a lot of people hitchhiking because they just have to. It’s not always easy to repair your car.”

Read the entire article on the Vermont Guardian web site   more »

Today's scripture is deceptively simple. Love one another. Jesus says we are loved and are to love others as we are loved.

Right here is the essence of Christianity. This is the fulfillment of the Law, as Jesus says. If we get this, we can go home.

Alas we give lip service to love, but abide in a different spirit.

This is today's message: Abide first in God's love! -- we are first loved . . . and for love Be willing to sacrifice -- as Jesus gave his life . . . and remember This is a commandment, so work at it!   more »

Canadian, Ian Welsh writes that power and leadership requires that you must supply meaning and a way for people to belong:

"The Christian right supplies meaning for their people."

This is not just theological, but political.

The problem for the rising repressive class is that they have outsourced their meaning to evangelical Christians who are not easily controlled. This is our opportunity.   more »

I can't think of anything that can take the place of romantic relationships as a giver of spiritual lessons. Other relationships don't have the same depth of risk and agony and commitment and love and necessity to give up control (even though other relationships may have all those things and plenty of romantic relationships lack them). I think it's the giving up control that is most important.

Community is the closest thing.   more »

Amanda struggles with acceptance and writes about it beautifully.  How well I know the agony of this struggle.

I grew up taught that I could grow up and change the world. How many times have I heard that story about the starfishes getting thrown back into the sea?   more »

Another good analysis of the right - from a liberal Canadian Ian Welsh on bopnews. His theology of the right: God is Death   more »

an excellent analysis of fundamentalist movements.   more »

A Statement of faith is commonly a list of beliefs, presented so we can determine if we agree. But humans have a long history of getting it wrong and then fighting about it. I want to present this as a snapshot of what now informs my choices and outlook. I hope that we can give more energy to learning and living in the spirit than in making dividing lines.

My faith is part explanation, part inspiration, part experience, and part trust.   more »