One thing is clear to me: the temptation of power is greatest when intimacy is a threat. Much Christian leadership is exercised by people who do not know how to develop healthy, intimate relationships and have opted for power and control instead. Many Christian empire-builders have been people unable to give and receive love.
A powerful reflection from my seminary classmate, colleague, and friend Shirley Hobson Duncanson
“In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has …
After the Magi’s Visit – Cruelty Arrives
I do not think of myself as your teacher. I think of myself as a friend who has made a very long journey and has learned something so important that he does not want to keep it for himself. I have come to a place in my life where these obvious and beautiful differences among us seem small in the context of the unity that binds us all together. The unity of life among us is even deeper and stronger than the diversity between us.
Words of wisdom for contemplation as we begin the New Year…
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. — Thorin Oakenshield (from The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien)
We become like vessels empty of water that they may be filled with wine. We are like glass cleansed of dust and grime to receive the sun and vanish into its light. — New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 263
The true meaning of Christmas is expressed in the sharing of one’s graces in a world in which it is so easy to become callous, insensitive, and hard. Once this spirit becomes part of a [person]’s life, every day is Christmas and every night is freighted with the dawning of fresh, and perhaps holy, adventure. — The Work of Christmas: The Twelve Days of Christmas With Howard Thurman, p. 62
So when we think of Christmas, let us think of it as a time when we remembered the graces of life. It is important to seize upon the atmosphere created in this period, to let it tutor our own spirits in kindness and imaginative sympathy. — The Work of Christmas: The Twelve Days of Christmas With Howard Thurman, p. 56
The first step toward love is a common sharing of a sense of mutual worth and value. This cannot be discovered in a vacuum or in a series of artificial or hypothetical relationships. It has to be in a real situation, natural, free. — Jesus and the Disinherited, p. 88
If you dare to believe that you are beloved before you are born, you may suddenly realize that your life is very, very special. You become conscious that you were sent here just for a short time, for twenty, forty, or eighty years, to discover and believe that you are a beloved child of God. The length of time doesn’t matter. You are sent into this world to believe in yourself as God’s chosen one and then to help your brothers and sisters know that they are also Beloved Sons and Daughters of God who belong together. You’re sent into this world to be a people of reconciliation. You are sent to heal, to break down the walls between you and your neighbors, locally, nationally, and globally. Before all distinctions, the separations, and the walls built on foundations of fear, there was a unity in the mind and heart of God. Out of that unity, you are sent into this world for a little while to claim that you and every other human being belongs to the same God of Love who lives from eternity to eternity.
The quality of Christmas—what is it? It is the fullness with which fruit ripens, blossoms unfold into flowers, and live coals glow in the darkness. It is the richness of vibrant colors—the calm purple of grapes, the exciting redness of tomatoes, the shimmering light on the noiseless stirring of a lake or a sunset. It is the sense of plateau with a large rock behind which one may take temporary respite from the winds that chill. — The Work of Christmas: The Twelve Days of Christmas with Howard Thurman, p. 35
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