So first I need to take time to look into my own self, to find in myself a willingness to be vulnerable, honest about my own story, its roots and its past, confronting the reality without attempting to escape into fantasy or nostalgia. For when I am attentive to where I am standing, I [...]
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Aesthetics studies new ways of seeing and perceiving the world.
–Wikipedia on “aesthetics”
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True faith is not assurance, but the readiness to go forward experimentally, without assurance. It is a sensitivity to things not yet known. Quakerism should not claim to be a religion of certainty, but a religion of uncertainty; it is this which gives us special affinity to the world of science. For what we apprehend [...]
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Though spring begins slowly and tentatively, it grows with a tenacity that never fails to touch me. The smallest and most tender shoots insist on having their way, coming up through ground that looked, only a few weeks earlier, as if it would never grow anything again. The crocuses and snowdrops do not bloom for [...]
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The hardest thing about really seeing and really hearing is that then you really have to do something about what you have seen and heard.
–Frederick Buechner, as quoted in In Constant Prayer (page 71) by Robert Benson, 2008
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“The contemplative mind is not just something you do, it’s a way of seeing.”
–Fr Richard Rohr, Spiritual Direction Colorado 2009 Spirituality Conference, 16 January 2009, Arvada
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Listening is noting what, when and how something is being said. Listening is distinguishing what is not being said from what is silence. Listening is not acting like you’re in a hurry, even if you are. Listening is eye contact, a hand placed gently upon an arm. Sometimes, listening is taking careful notes in the [...]
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What we see, and like to see, is cure and change. But what we do not see and do not want to see is care, the participation in the pain, the solidarity in suffering, the sharing in the experience of brokenness. And still, cure without care is as dehumanizing as a gift given with a [...]
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“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
–Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, 1973
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The way this world works, people are very apt to use the words they speak not so much as a way of revealing but, rather, as a way of concealing who they really are and what they really think, and that is why more than a few moments of silence with people we do not [...]
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