When I was notified that my first book, published as This Very Moment, and a second edition, In This Very Moment, had gone out of print I felt a wave of emotions. The book had a long run. It was meant as an introduction to Zen; in the first edition it was aimed at the Unitarian Universalist world, in the second for a broader audience. I was grateful for the opportunity. And I think it was useful. And, as I re-read it,... Read more
Two hundred years ago on the 26th of May in 1825, the disparate liberal congregationalists and few random others reluctantly but finally formed an official denomination, the American Unitarian Association. The beginnings of this event were long in the making. The divisions between the Calvinist “orthodoxy” and the several strands of anti-trinitarian liberalisms trace back a good two decades with threads going back farther still. Most scholars seem to be of the view that Cotton Mather’s turn into the eighteenth... Read more
I think of Malcolm X and I think of America, I think of spiritual pilgrimages, and I think of what might save us. Malcolm Little was born in Omaha, Nebraska on May 19th, 1925. He was the fourth of seven children. His father was a Baptist preacher and an outspoken advocate of Black self-reliance. From Omaha the family moved first to Milwaukee and then to Lansing. His father was killed when he was six years old. The family believed his... Read more
As our American Mother’s Day rolls around, I find my heart flowing backwards in time. It’s all part of the mystery of this day. I think about my mother now long dead. But also my auntie, my “junior mother,” now dead a decade. And I continue slipping back in time and memory. Near and far collapse. And, looming behind their mother, my dreams take me to my grandmother. Each of them now among the great cloud of witnesses. A few... Read more
(I had the privilege of reading Teshin Matthew Sweger‘s recent talk at the North Carolina Zen Center. While it was addressed directly to his community, I thought it touched directly on issues for all our Zen sanghas, and, really, for spiritual communities at large. I asked for permission to reprint it here, and the roshi graciously consented…) Today, I want to talk about Sangha and how to be in community. When I first came to Zen practice, community was not... Read more
On my Facebook account a friend just announced that Edwin Arnold’s epic poem the Light of Asia was available for free download over at Urban Dharma. It set me to thinking about the poet and the significance of that particular poem. Edwin Arnold was born on the 10th of June, 1832 at Kent, in England. A graduate of University College, Oxford, his early promise as a poet won him the 1852 Newdigate prize. Upon graduation Arnold became a schoolmaster. After... Read more
A sermon I thought worth sharing again for this day… For the last half of my professional ministerial life, I served in some venerable New England parishes. Spiritually we were pretty much generic contemporary Unitarian Universalists. That is, we shared a naturalist and humanist bent. And issues of social justice were very important to us. But at the same time, there was always a bit of a Protestant Congregational Christian sense to the whole thing. This sense was something more... Read more
Yunmen, asked, “I do not ask you about the fifteenth of month. Come. Tell me about after the fifteenth. He then gave his own response, “Every day is a good day.” Blue Cliff Record, Case 6 Today is Good Friday. And I find it a perfect day to consider a koan. Koans are not puzzles, although they look like them. Rather they’re invitations. They point, they invite. As, I believe, Good Friday can be. A strange turning moment in the... Read more
Palm Sunday in the year 2025. In this season I find myself thinking Arthur Symons poem captures the moment… Because it is the day of Palms, Carry a palm for me, Carry a palm in Santa Chiara, And I will watch the sea; There are no palms in Santa Chiara To-day or any day for me,I sit and watch the little sail Lean sideways on the sea, The sea is blue from here to Sorrento, And the sea-wincl comes to... Read more
They thought they were safe that spring night; when they daubed the doorways with sacrificial blood. To be sure, the angel of death passed them over, but for what? Forty years in the desert without a home, without a bed, following new laws to an unknown land. Easier to have died in Egypt or stayed there a slave, pretending there was safety in the old familiar. But the promise, from those first naked days outside the garden, is that there is... Read more
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