Spiritual Sunday Like many mainline Protestant churches, our little Episcopalian congregation in St. Mary’s City, Maryland is having money difficulties. The expense of aging buildings plus a recession that wiped out much of our endowment has forced us to hold fairly continuous fundraisers to balance the budget. People have become testy and […]
Tag Archives: Spirituality
A Tiny Seed Can Save a Church
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Brothers Karamazov, Church, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nature, Religion Comments closed
Gifts that Come with Sitting in Church
Spiritual Sunday When I was young, I could never understand why someone would want to sit for 90 minutes in church. But when I became a man (to quote Paul) I got it. There is something in the experience that grounds one, a peace that descends. This can occur even if one’s mind is wandering […]
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A Harvest Love Poem to God
Spiritual Sunday Here is a harvest poem that moves quickly from an actual harvest (in the first line) to a heavenly one. The clouds are like sacks of grain, their meal drifting across the skies, and we can gaze upward and glean them with our eyes. As Gerald Manley Hopkins sees it, God reveals himself […]
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From Spiritual Hunger to Obesity Epidemic
Spiritual Sunday My wife Julia has been telling me about a book that she’s reading, Geneen Roth’s Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything. The thesis of the book seems to be that overeating, like other compulsions and obsessions, is a means of escaping a spiritual emptiness. Or to put it another […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "When Death Comes", Dubliners, Emptiness, English Patient, Hunger, James Joyce, Mary Oliver, Michael Ondaatje, Nikos Kazantzakis, Religion, Zorba the Greek Comments closed
Churchgoing: Delightful and Unexpected
Spiritual Sunday Thanks to Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion for alerting me to this wonderful passage from John Updike’s “Churchgoing” (which appears in Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, 1962): There was a time when I wondered why more people did not go to church. Taken purely as a human recreation, what could be more delightful, […]
Rising Again to Dance
Chidi Okoye (Nigeria) Spiritual Sunday I refute Berkeley thus, Samuel Johnson famously said. And kicked a rock. Bishop Berkeley was the 18th century idealist philosopher who asked how we know reality is really there if we are dependent upon our senses for perceiving it. Is the rock in existence when we turn our backs? Johnson’s […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "To Be Alive", Bishop Berkeley, Dance, Gregory Orr, Lucille Clifton, materialism, Religion, Samuel Johnson, Science Comments closed
Movies for Surviving Medical School
Film Friday A film doesn’t have to be masterpiece to help us at critical times in our lives. For instance, La Bamba may be a so-so biopic about rock legend Ritchie Valens, but it opened my eyes to the difficulties of being a second child. In Ritcie’s younger brother I saw my own younger brother […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Care of the Soul, Education, Evan Almighty, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Medical School, St. John of the Cross, Thomas Moore Comments closed
Finding God in Nature’s Church
The bobolink, Dickinson’s sexton and chorister Spiritual Sunday “Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy,” instructs the fourth commandment. How are we to keep it holy? Emily Dickinson, a writer who wrestled with the stern Calvinism of her day, observed the sabbath in her own way. She was a private person who was skeptical of […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Some keep the Sabbath going to the Church", "This is what was bequeathed us", Emily Dickinson, Gregory Orr, Heaven, Nature, Religion Comments closed
