Trinity United Methodist Church - Austin, Texas

 may my heart always be open to little

birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old
  
may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young
  
and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile

                                     ~e e cummings

I cannot point to any one time in the last dozen years when I “got” faith. There were—and are—many moments, nudges, and jolts that incubated my faith and helped it to grow.

                                                                                                ~Kathleen Norris

 It may be that when we no longer know what to do

     we have come to our real work,

            and that when we no longer know which way to go
                   we have come to our real journey.

     The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

                                     ~Wendell Berry, “The Real Work”

Meditations for the celebrations this Sunday were themed in honor of the eighth anniversary of September 11th. Click on the links to see a performance of the songs quoted here.



God's drifting in the heavens, devil's in the mailbox
I got dust on my shoes, nothing but teardrops.

~Bruce Springsteen, "You're Missing"


One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

~Agatha Christie


All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.

Outside in the [cold] distance a wildcat did growl,
two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

~Bob Dylan, "All Along the Watchtower"
[] words added by Jimmy Hendrix


They have not wanted peace at all; they have wanted to be spared war--as though the absence of war was the same as peace.

~Dorothy Thompson

Where do I find the words to say?
How do I teach him?
What do we play?
Bit by bit, I've realized
That's when I need them,
That's when I need my father's eyes.
My father's eyes…
As my soul slides down to die.
How could I lose him?
What did I try?
Bit by bit, I've realized
That he was here with me;
I looked into my father's eyes.
My father's eyes.

--from Eric Clapton, “My Father’s Eyes”



Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”



When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness' sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em.

--Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

pride, n. A strong sense of self-respect; a refusal to be humiliated, as well as joy in one’s own accomplishments or those of a person, group, or object with which one identifies.


“Frog Prince”
For D.

She swore she'd change me,
and she did. Unzipped
the old skin and hid it,
somewhere, ripped out
the webbing between my fingers,
snipped off a few inches
of my too-long and sticky tongue.
And she had the swamp
behind the house drained,
convinced her dad that
I was just like him, her mom
that I wouldn't return
to my old ways, herself
that she could make it work,
that she would make it work.
Perhaps I'd thought she could,
perhaps I'd hoped.
But now this new skin,
itchy and dry, wrinkled
when wet, and always hot.
And there is this new face
I wear like my own.
And the ring on my finger,
the gold hoop I couldn't jump through.
So now I see us everywhere,
trapped in these bodies
and these lives, our frantic
gray-green eyes like fires
banked into coals, nostalgic
for other places, other desires.

--Ed Madden


Pride enters when my spine aligns and I stand tall, when I speak my piece and my chest opens to the resonance of my voice. Pride enters when I am fully immersed in the dance of life: proud to be human, proud to be alive, proud to be about my work, proud to know you, and proud to begin to know myself. Pride emerges when our will is engaged and we stand upright in our truth.

--T. Thorn Coyle

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead.

--Albert Einstein




Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things hath done, in whom this world rejoices;
Who from our mothers’ arms hath blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.

--Martin Rinkert (1663)




“1DER”

--seen on a license plate in Hyde Park this week




Let us praise God. Oh Lord, oooh you are so big. So absolutely huge. Gosh, we’re all really impressed down here, I can tell you. Forgive us, O Lord, for this dreadful toadying and barefaced flattery. But you are so strong and, well, just so super. Fantastic. Amen.

--Michael Palin in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

--Henry David Thoreau



A living planet is a much more complex metaphor for deity than just a bigger father with a bigger fist. If an omniscient, all-powerful Dad ignores your prayers, it's taken personally. Hear only silence long enough, and you start wondering about his power. His fairness. His very existence. But if a world mother doesn't reply, Her excuse is simple. She never claimed conceited omnipotence. She has countless others clinging to her apron strings, including myriad species unable to speak for themselves. To Her elder offspring She says -- go raid the fridge. Go play outside. Go get a job. Or, better yet, lend me a hand. I have no time for idle whining.

--David Brin



Opie, you haven't finished your milk. We can't put it back in the cow, you know.

--Aunt Bea Taylor, The Andy Griffith Show

It is an enlightening excursion, this wandering into the spiritual insights of other whole cultures, other whole intuitions of the spiritual life. It depends for its fruitfulness on openness of heart and awareness of mind. But the journey is well worth the exertion it takes to see old ideas in new ways because it can bring us to the very height and depth of ourselves. It can even bring fresh hearing, new meaning to the stories that come down to us through our own tradition.

--Joan Chittister, Welcome to the Wisdom of the World



“Tell us what you got from enlightenment,” the seeker said. “Did you become divine?”

“No, not divine,” the holy one said.

“Did you become a saint?”

“Oh dear, no,” the holy one said.

“Then what did you become?” the seeker asked.

And the holy one answered, “I became awake.”

--Sufi story

Celebrating motherhood is a historical tradition dating back almost as far as mothers themselves. A number of ancient cultures paid tribute to mothers as goddesses, including the ancient Greeks, who celebrated Rhea, the mother of all gods. The ancient Romans also honored their mother goddess, Cybele, in a notoriously rowdy springtime celebration and the Celtic Pagans marked the coming of spring with a fertility celebration linking their goddess Brigid together with the first milk of the ewes.

Modern scribes write, “In Jesus Christ
Everyone is free”
And the doors open wide to all straight men & women
But they are not open to me
And who is teaching kids to be soldiers
To be marked by a plain white cross
And we kill just a little to save a lot more
The philosophy of loss...

Whatever has happened to anyone else
Could happen to you & to me
And the end of my youth was the possible truth
That it all happens randomly
Who is teaching kids to be leaders
and the way that it is meant to be
The philosophy of loss.

--The Indigo Girls, “The Philosophy of Loss”




The church is standing in the way of God’s grace. The United Methodist
slogan of opens minds, hearts and doors continues to be the salt in the
wounds of gay Christians who refuse to leave the church and the faith
they love. For thirty-six years the church has ignored the unconditional
love of God by rejecting our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.

--Monica Swink, Board Chair of the Reconciling Ministries Network (last Wednesday evening after the vote in Fort Worth)

Sin is centrifugal. When at work in a human life, it tends to push everything out toward the periphery. Bits and pieces go flying off until only the core is left. Eventually bits and pieces of the core itself go flying off until in the end, nothing at all is left….

Other people and (if you happen to believe in God) God or (if you happen not to) the world, society, nature—whatever you call the greater whole of which you’re part—sin is whatever you do, or fail to do, that pushes them away, that widens the gap between you and them and also the gap within yourself.

--Frederick Buechner




For many, the central existential issue is not a sense of sin. Yet, though the language of sin may not speak very powerfully to them, the language of blindness, exile, alienation, a closed heart, or captivity to culture may speak with great power. Also for some, the issue is not their own sin, but their victimization by others. For example, what does the message of sin and forgiveness mean to victims of domestic abuse? Though at some point they may need to forgive their abusers in order to get on with their own lives, an emphasis upon sin may lead them to focus on what they have done to cause their abuse. For them, the message they need to hear is not that they have sinned and need forgiveness, but that it is not God’s will that they live under an abusive and oppressive power. God wills their liberation and safety.

--Marcus Borg

The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw and knew I saw all things in God and God in all things.

--Mechtild of Magdeburg




God is the ground of all being but is not a being.  God is the force that causes all things to exist but God does not exist.  To be clear, God is in all things and somehow all things are in God, but God transcends and is more than all things.

--Paul Tillich on the subject of Panentheism in Systematic Theology




The Goddess has infinite aspects and thousands of names—She is the reality behind many metaphors. She is reality, the manifest deity, omnipresent in all of life, in each of us. The Goddess is not separate from the world—she is the world, and all things in it: moon, earth, star, stone, seed, flowing river, wind, wave, leaf and branch, bud and blossom, fang and claw, woman and man.

--Starhawk in Dreaming the Dark





For from God and through God and to God are all things. To God be the glory forever. Amen.

--The Apostle Paul, Romans 11:36

In the absence of a visible God, the temptation is always near to make a god of whatever is visible and related in some proximate way to the real thing. At its best we call this symbolism….

The inherent risk in symbolism is that the symbol becomes a substitute for what it is meant to represent. The means becomes an end in itself, and the worship and devotion that the end requires, when devoted merely to the means, become a form of idolatry and an exercise in fraud. The history of belief is, in the West, replete with instances of this conflict….

To give a book the reverence due God, and to submit the Bible to the sovereignty of one’s own reading of it, is to come dangerously close to idolatry... The Bible is not God, nor is it a substitute for God, and to treat it as if it were God or a surrogate of God is to treat it in the very way that it itself condemns over and over again.

--Peter J. Gomes




Seek not to follow in the footsteps of the sages of old; rather, seek what they sought.

--Buddhist saying

And the God formed a human being from the dust of the ground, and breathed into its nostrils the breath of life; and the human being became a living soul.

--Genesis 2:7





The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred,
    No matter who it is, it is sacred—is it the meanest one in the
             laborers' gang?
    Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf?
    Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as
             much as you,
    Each has his or her place in the procession.

--Walt Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric”






Having shared our bread,
we know that we are
no longer hungry. It is enough

that you see me for myself.
That I see you for yourself.
That we bless what we see

and do not borrow, do not use
one another. This is how we know
we are no longer hungry… that

the world is full of terror, full of beauty
and yet we are not afraid to find solace here.
To be bread for each other. To love.

--Gunilla Norris

A young poet asked the playwright Samuel Beckett, “How are you?”

“Words fail me,” he answered.

Dance without sleeping
Dance without fear
Dance without senses, no message I hear
Dance without sleeping
Dance till I’m numb
Dance till I think I can overcome

--Melissa Etheridge



tiredness grounds me into quiet stupor
of the spirit.

i yearned to be inspired, to be lifted up, set free
beyond the place of darkness.

the struggle goes on, however,
and you and i, god, we exist together with seemingly little communion.

yet, in the deepest part of me,
i believe in you, perhaps more strongly than ever.

i am learning you
as a god of silence, of darkness, deep and strong.

i do not wrestle anymore, only wait,
only wait, for you to bring my dry bones
into dancing once again.

--Joyce Rupp



And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false that was not accompanied by at least one laugh…

I would believe only in a God that knows how to Dance.

--Friedrich Nietzsche



I danced on Friday and sky turned black;
it’s hard to dance with the devil on your back;
buried my body and thought I’d gone,
but I am the dance and still go on.

Dance, then, wherever you may be;
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he.
And I’ll lead you all wherever you may be, and
I’ll lead you all in the dance, said, he.

--Sydney Carter

I write this on a day given to remembering the triumphant entry of Christ into Jerusalem.  This year the day seems empty and abstract. The events of the week are too overpowering.  The knowledge that Christ’s entry led directly to his Crucifixion looms too grimly ahead.  This seems the strangest holiday of the year, a celebration of misunderstanding.  In this world, the dominion has not yet come, though our hearts long for it and our lives incline toward it.

--John Leax




Jesus’ awareness of his impending death permeates his actions and can be compared, I believe, to the knowledge held by the terminally ill. . . . Jesus on Palm Sunday may be likened to the cancer patient who celebrates an anniversary—fully aware of the “lastness” of it all, yet celebrating nonetheless.

--Lucy Bregman




Like splendid palm branches, we are strewn in the Lord’s path.

--Latin antiphon

…[B]elief is not the supernatural sleight of hand designed to save us from the exigencies of life. “There are those who say in winter,” the Sufi story teaches, “‘I shall not wear warm clothes. I will trust in God to keep me warm.’ But they forget,” the story says, “that the God who made winter gave human beings the power to protect themselves from it.” Belief is not fantasy. Belief is not an excuse for irrationality. Faith is not what gives us the tricks it takes to control God. Belief is a basis for personal develop-ment and a topographical map of life that signals a way through the valleys and plains, raging rivers and vast oceans of experience in which we grow. Belief makes a life more a quest than a place.

--Joan Chittister, In Search of Belief






It is terribly important to realize the leap of faith is not so much a leap of thought as of action. For while in many matters it is first we must see, then we will act, in matters of faith it is first we must do, then we will know; first we will be, and then we will see. One must, in short, dare to act wholeheartedly without absolute certainty.

--William Sloan Coffin, Credo

Purification will come
and grandma will cradle us
in her arms
    and wipe away our tears
and grandpa will walk among us.
    It will be this generation
you people
    will make it reality
and the hoop
will come together again.

--Mitakuye Oyasin


Peace comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the centre of the Universe dwells Wakan Tanka (the Great Spirit), and that this centre is really everywhere, it is within each of us.

--Black Elk


One rain won’t make a crop.

--Creole Proverb

No matter what looms ahead, if you can eat today, enjoy the sunlight today, mix good cheer with friends today, then enjoy it and bless God for it. Do not look back on happiness or dream of it in the future. You are only sure of today; do not let yourself be cheated of it.

--Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1878)





When I think of all the worries people seem to find
And how they're in a hurry to complicate their minds
By chasing after money and dreams that can't come true
I'm glad that we are different, we've better things to do
May others plan their future, I'm busy lovin' you (1-2-3-4)
Sha-la-la-la-la-la, live for today
Sha-la-la-la-la-la, live for today
And don't worry 'bout tomorrow, hey, hey, hey
Sha-la-la-la-la-la, live for today
Live for today

--The Grass Roots (1967)





Forever is composed of nows.  

--Emily Dickinson

Don't believe in the 60's
The golden age of pop
You glorify the past
When the future dries up
Heard a singer on the radio late last night
He says he's gonna kick the darkness
'til it bleeds daylight
I... I believe in love

I feel like I'm falling
Like I'm spinning on a wheel
It always stops beside of me
With a presence I can feel
I... I believe in love

--Bono & U2




As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our mother
And God revealed that in everything and especially in these sweet words
where God says,
“I am the power and goodness of fatherhood,
I am the wisdom and lovingness of motherhood.
I am the light and grace that is all blessed love.”

--Julian of Norwich




I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for their religion--
I have shudder'd at it.
I shudder no more.
I could be martyr'd for my religion
Love is my religion
And I could die for that.
I could die for you.

--John Keats