Spirituality

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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This week’s spiritual wisdom is from Reverend Father Thomas Berry (1914-2009):
You see we are at the terminal phase of the Cenozoic, the last 65 million years. We’re not just passing into another historical period, or another cultural modification, we are changing the chemistry of the planet. We are changing the biosystems. We’re changing the geosystems of the planet on a scale of hundreds of millions of years. But more specifically, we’re terminating the last 65 million years of life development. Now a person would say, “Well, where do we go from here?”

Politics & Society

Conferences to Refresh the Spirit and Develop Strategy

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I’ve heard from hundreds of Tikkun readers and Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) members that they are confused, depressed and de-energized. It is totally understandable that these feelings now pervade the liberal and progressive world in light of the disappointments millions feel at the disjunction between Obama’s ability to touch our highest yearnings for a world of love, generosity and kindness on the one hand and his actual policies which are best characterized as Center-Right, plus the recent Supreme Court decisions giving the corporations the ability to dump billions into our elections, plus the continuing economic hardships facing tens of millions (not just the unemployed). It is understandable. Yet I know that it is this same set of feelings that creates the space for the fundamentalist Right and the Tea Party/ Sarah Palin phony populists to become the major shapers of American politics. We don’t have to let this happen.

Rethinking Religion

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from American writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862):
I said to myself, — I said to others, —
“There comes into my mind such an indescribable, infinite, all-absorbing, divine, heavenly pleasure, a sense of elevation and expansion, and [I] have had nought to do with it. I perceive that I am dealt with by superior powers. This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence which I have not procured myself. I speak as a witness on the stand, and tell what I have perceived.” The morning and the evening were sweet to me, and I led a life aloof from society of men.

Spirituality

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Mahatma Gandhi’s famous statement on the nature of God, which was broadcast to America from London in October 1931:
I do dimly perceive that whilst everything around me is ever changing, ever dying, there is underlying all that change a living Power that is changeless, that holds all together, that creates, dissolves and recreates. That informing Power or Spirit is God. And since nothing else I see merely through the senses can or will persist, He alone is. And is this Power benevolent or malevolent? I see It as purely benevolent.

Rethinking Religion

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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This week’s spiritual wisdom is a quotation from Albert Einstein (1875-1955), as translated by Alan Harris:
The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in the most primitive form – this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness. The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and oldest mainspring of scientific research.

Politics & Society

Gaza One Year Later

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Forty years of dialogue and negotiation with Israelis and Jews clearly has not worked to advance the cause of self-determination for Palestinians. The situation on the ground is far worse than ever before. The two state solution and all the peace plans and road maps have been undermined by the systematic effort to enclose Palestinians in bantustans and deny them civil and national rights. In this context, further efforts at dialogue only benefit those with privilege, unless they are accompanied by strategies of resistance to the systematic inequality Palestinians face on a daily basis.

Culture

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from poet Mark Siet:
Blessings this year all the way through
Lasting until forever in all that you do. Evoking the highest sent from above
Seeing with clarity and feeling with love. Seeking and finding every good thing
Inside and out may this year to you bring
Nothing but wonderful thoughts to sing
Giving to others to let happiness ring. Simple gifts of love floating on the wing. Over and over the path is set straight
Fearless you travel opening the gate.

Health

Pass the Health Care Bill – Then Improve It

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This piece, “Pass the Health Care Bill – Then Improve It,” by Peter Dreier (whose pieces appear in Tikkun from time to time) is worth reading. For those who don’t know, I post occasional articles here and at Current Thinking on the Tikkun home page that I think help us understand what’s going on. The previous article posted at Current Thinking was Jane Hamsher’s “Top 10 Ten Reasons To Kill the Senate Health Care Bill,” so you can see I am not trying to find pieces that agree with each other, nor do they necessarily express my own views.

Culture

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week – In Praise of Santa Claus!

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Thomas Moore, the psychotherapist and author of many books, including Care of the Soul and The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, wrote this beautiful piece, “The Eternal, Holy Night,” about Christmas for Tikkun in 2003. It is no accident that the festival of Christmas occurs at the time of year when the darkness has reached its low point and winter light begins to appear. Christmas is the honoring of light and the hope that comes with the end of nature’s and the human soul’s dark night. In the symbolic turning of time, Christmas is that part of the annual cycle that invites us to leave darkness behind and enter a new way of being, to start a new “year,” that is, a new era of enlightened decisions rather than unconscious acts. The most stirring songs of the season, “O Holy Night” and “Silent Night,” and the popular verse-tale “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” explore the emotion of night, especially this night on which light once again shows itself.

Christianity

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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This week’s spiritual wisdom is in our Guide to Christmas in the current Tikkun. It is by Al Fritsch, who is a Jesuit priest and public interest advocate, a co-founder of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and a writer (see www.earthhealing.info), pastor, and prison chaplain. The True Meaning of Gifts
by Al Fritsch

I distinctly remember one of my very early Christmases when stationed in the Northeast as a newly ordained priest. After the Midnight Mass I was invited by a local family for their gift-opening event, which was for them a traditional holiday affair. In the course of the evening I got a distinct feeling that members of this family were pretending to enjoy opening the many expensive gifts given to each other.