An unforgiving nature reflects in your face. Holding negative energy drags down the facial muscles, puckers one's frown and causes lines around the mouth. Working daily on forgiveness (forgiving oneself as well as one's enemies) is the cheapest, most effective facelift in the whole wide world. All it requires is love and discipline.
Love does not end when we don't see each other.
All religions, at one point or another in their evolution tried to proclaim their single, inerrant consistency. All religions even the most liberal, were tempted by the reactionary impulse to freeze faith in place. Because as Jesus teaches, it's easy to be threatened by the reality of the complicated, messy, syncretic, God-bearing truth that becomes incarnate among us and makes things new. We'd rather have a dead religion than a living God
Faith, for me, isn't an argument, a catechism, a philosophical “proof.” It is instead a lens, a way of experiencing life, and a willingness to act.
It doesn't promise to solve or erase suffering but to transform it, pledging that by loving one another, even through pain, we will find more life. And it insists that by opening ourselves to strangers, the despised or frightening or unintelligible other, we will see more and more of the holy, since, without exception, all people are one body: God's.
I was, as the prophet said, hungering and thirsting for righteousness. I found it at the eternal and material core of Christianity: body, blood, bread, wine, poured out freely, shared by all.
There's a hunger beyond food that's expressed in food, and that's why feeding is always a kind of miracle.
Jesus doesn't care if you feel guilty. Jesus wants you to change.
Heavenly comfort, rather, is truth, which blows away human fantasies that we can live forever, control everything, or fake our lives before God.
I was expelled from four schools. Today I still read with difficulty.
