Category: Faith

Things are moving so quickly and so angrily that I find it difficult to stay as even as I would like, yet to keep myself grounded and believing.

Life is not simply what happens to us; life is also what we ourselves make happen. What I wish to happen to me is faith in myself and belief in the future.

In such a time – this is new in my experience in America – it seems that the Republic is coming apart, overrun by greedy billionaires without a patience for democracy, or a space in their minds. The richest man in the world has threatened to step into the TSA fight by paying all the workers himself, thus ending the chaos at airports.

Our President thinks it’s a great idea to forget about democracy and do what you want.

How am I supposed to feel about this? The answer is steady. I owe myself, my wife, my farm. I owe it to the world the best of myself. Living in fear is simply another way of hiding.

I can’t do that by drowning in the hatred and conflict of the outside world; it does, for now, have a life of its own, beyond the reach of rational people who believe in compromise and listening. It’s beyond my reach. But I’m right there all the time.

We aren’t broken until and unless we allow life to pass us by or overwhelm and defeat us. We can’t do everything or wave magic wands. We are not good or effective by surrendering our confidence, faith, or hope.

That would only mean I get tired and get exhausted more quickly. Giving up is just another form of death.

I can’t be meaningful or useful if I keep looking to the outside for resolution or salvation. That can only come from the inside. I can keep looking for good, keep meditating, keep focusing on the good I know lives inside most human beings. I see many signs of hope – a return in faith, in courage, in freedom, and compassion.

I can keep doing well every day. That’s my meaning.

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I see this every single day from the Army of Good and their faith in compassion and empathy: strangers all, but wonderful friends.

It’s an important time for me, and I won’t sacrifice it with terror or loss of faith or what we call politics. Hope is not just a word for me. Neither is faith.

Religious people often seem deaf to me, like people at a loud concert. They study the program carefully, but they only really hear a word or thought now and then. We consider the reality of hope and prayer, the almost universal impulse to depend on some power other than ourselves. We don’t have the answers we think we have.

Whatever you wish to call them, God is everywhere, in everything; we worship what works for us and are guided by forces we can’t see.

Any mature person looking back on their own life can perhaps recognize things in life that can’t be explained by teachers, parents, heritability, environment, or even chance.

It’s almost as if a hidden power, personal, living, or free, were working inside of us, in all kinds of circumstances, pushing us in a certain direction, molding us in a certain design. I call that God. It’s my faith.

We forget how small we are, how insignificant, how ignorant of the real meaning of life.

When I do look at the news, less and less – I sometimes turn to Evelyn Underhill, the brilliant mysticist and one of my spiritual tutors.

She wrote this in her book “The Spiritual Life.”

“The people of our time are helpless, distracted, rebellious, unable to interpret what is happening, and full of apprehension about what is to come, because they have lost this sure hold on the eternal,” writes Underfill.

They have abandoned the idea of God in any sense, instead worshipping hatred, power, and money. They have sacrificed love for greed.

In that way, she warns, it’s tempting to escape from our fears and problems, or the ability to believe in or turn to what some people call God, others call nature, and others call faith.

Underhill helped guide me through the cruelty and fear of our time.

“Eternity,” as she believed it, is not a distant future or a mysterious “forever,” but an ever-present plane of reality that exists alongside and within our idea of time. It’s also known as mysticism, the pursuit of direct, personal experience and oneness with whatever we call God.

It moves beyond doctrine or ordinary sensory perception to an interior experience of the divine, most often involving meditation and prayer.

It helps me know, every day.

We are simultaneously children of time, the outside world of chance and fleeting things, and Eternity, the world of a God, of the abiding, the absolute.

I find myself living in both worlds, but I feel more and more every day the rising and return of faith, community, humanity, and kindness in our world.

If you close your eyes and listen, you can hear it. Cruelty and hatred breed that; it’s the irony of being human.

It is coming. I believe it, and it sustains me and keeps me in hope. Something more. I have faith in it.

We lost our faith and belief in honor and kindness to cruelty and disconnection. We are better than that.

It is coming back. I feel it and hear it.

“As I went down in the river to pray, Studying about that good ol’ way, And who shall wear the robe and crown, Good Lord show me the way.”

“O sisters, let’s go down, let’s go down, come on down, O sisters, let’s go down, down in the river to pray.” – Alison Krauss, Down In The River To Pray.

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(“Down in the River To Pray” is a beloved traditional American song described in many ways: a Christian hymn, an African-American spiritual, an Appalachian song, and a Southern Gospel song.)

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I doubt that I will ever completely resolve the complexity of my spiritual life. I don’t believe in God, but I pray every day.

I’m Jewish, but Jesus has guided much of my life. I stay away from organized religion, yet I read the work of its prophets and leaders as often as I can. Where will I land? I believe faith is the cornerstone of human life, and I have absolute faith that our country will work through this turmoil.

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My religious leader and teacher, in a way, was the late Thomas Merton, a monk and spiritual leader who taught me meditation and the sanctity of nature. Joan Chittister, a nun in a convent, is my favorite living spiritual writer and philosopher of aging. I guess I live in a kind of powerful spiritual river.

I take a little bit from everywhere:  St. Augustine, Anne Lamott, Evelyn Underhill.

Of all the faiths, I feel closest to the Practical Mystics, the seekers of reality who never quite land.

Maria says her God is nature, and I don’t quite have a God, but I moved to nature to be close to it and live my life around it.

My flower photos are a spiritual experience for me, etc., etc. You get the picture. This morning I woke up and saw the very beautiful light coming through the window.

It felt like a church window.

Then I came down to take my pictures and felt the spiritual power of my Pastoral photography. Coming back into the house to meditate, I saw sunlight falling on a Llama planter – a gift –  that catches it. And I prayed to tears to Alison Krauss and the way she sang “Down to the Rivery to Pray,” a religious classic that went right to my heart and left me with tears.

The feeling was so strong that I had to write about it. Keep the faith, is what I was thinking. It is in all of us waiting to come out.

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My spiritual search changed my life and continues to shape it now. I was Christ and St. Therese, who inspired me to create the Army of Good and to live it.

The Spiritual Journey never stops for me; I hope it never does.

I’ve just surprised myself again and ordered a Benedictine Bell, which costs $8 and is scheduled to arrive via Amazon on Thursday.

My idea is to ring it every day to mark the passing of time, or to remind myself of my lifelong promises and life’s essential things.

It’s actually not my idea. The idea is hundreds of years old, but I have only recently learned of it. It seems a wonderful thing for me to do in our chaotic world. I can’t think of a more timely idea to distract me from this insanity.

I have a lot of work to do on my Spiritual path, lots to change, much to let go of, and much to accept and give up. I feel as if my bell will help, strange as that may sound.

I won’t be drawn into the whirlwind of hatred and grievance racking our country.

We are so distracted and overwhelmed in our world that it’s easy to forget who we are and who we want to be. St. Benedict, even as early as around 530 AD, wanted his followers to pause every day and gather the best aspects of themselves.

His ideas came to be known as the Monastic Heart.

I plan to ring mine every day around noon.

In our greedy and disturbing time, I’m drawn to the idea of the Benedictine Heart; the bell is one part of it. The idea is much bigger than the time. Benedictine communities are known for their bells. It’s an idea that appeals to me, and I intend to try it and take it seriously.

I’ve been drawn to almost every major religion in my life – Christianity, Judaism, the Muslim Faith, Christ, various Saints and writers, and the Quakers. I have a curious habit of studying each one and taking something valuable from it, but I have never quite succumbed to or fully embraced any of them.

I’m faithful to one part of each of them.

Of all of them, I’ve been drawn to and influenced by Jesus Christ and a number of the Saints, including St. Augustine, St. Teresa, Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis, and some of the most profound thinkers and philosophers of all time. In America, Christianity has been evolving, shifting closer to a political movement than the faith Christ preached and pleaded for.

I see no new St. Augustines on the horizon.

The Christian scholars, writers, and Saints gave me more than any of the others – Thomas Merton in particular. Joan Chittister in recent years.

One of the most interesting saints to me was St. Benedict, the founder of the Order of Saint Benedict, a monastic community of monks, nuns, and lay brothers who follow the Rule of St. Benedict, a set of guidelines for communal living written by Saint Benedict of Nursia. His teaching was known as “Ora et Labora,” or “Prayer and Work.”

Historically, Benedictine monasteries have been centers for learning, hospitality, and the preservation of knowledge. Bells ring wherever his monasteries are.

Life is all about change. Christ might not recognize his own faith.

The purpose of the Benedictine bells is not to spell out the hour of the day. Their bells exist to jar or wrench our attention back to what is truly important: in my case, life, love, creativity, empathy, and charity – wanting less and giving more.

My goal in life is to be happy, find love, live in harmony with nature, and make a positive impact in the world.

I have a feeling this bell will help.

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St. Benedictine said his bells were meant to jog the memory that there are actually more important, more meaningful, more demanding elements in life than almost anything we might be doing in our world – cell phones, streaming, podcasts, endless news we don’t want to hear, hate, bigotry, violence, division, greed.

Just looking at what we call news is an almost shattering experience. Is that really the true meaning of life? I don’t think so, not for me.

“The bells stop us in midflight to prod us to ask ourselves again if what we are doing is what we are really meant to be doing,’ writes author John Chittister, A Benedictine nun. “They are asking us to hear the cries of those in need, to confront our own reservoirs of pain.”

I love this idea; it resonates with me deeply and points out a distraction. This is a religious lesson I want to embrace.

“When loss drains the dregs of the heart,” Chittiser writes, “the bells remind us that another day is coming and with it the grace we need to confront it. When fear captures us, the bells are there to remind us not to be afraid. When the past has disappeared from our sight, and there is not a glimpse of the future to be found, the bells remind us that the only way to deal with the future is to accept it and shape it.”

Like so many, I struggle with the cruelty and confusion of the world. My world does not revolve around power or money. Billions of dollars would destroy me and the world I want to be in and live in.

Politics has little to offer me at this point in my life. I plan to ring my bell around noon, in the middle of the day, and remind myself of what is good about the world and what I want to achieve in life.

There is nothing on my Iphone or any newscast that can come close to doing this important spiritual work. This is something I need, and something I want. I will, as usual, share the experience.

I have only met one President in my life, even though I worked for the Washington Post for a while. That was Richard Nixon, and we didn’t get to spend much time together. I don’t think he thought of me one way or another; he didn’t know me, and I had no reason to believe he hated me.

I felt sorry for him. I didn’t hate him. He seemed so lonely.

This is why I’ve been surprised and a little hurt to learn that Donald Trump, my President,  hates me. I have to be honest, he doesn’t know me and wouldn’t know my face if a picture were put under his nose.  But he seems to hate everything about me.

I don’t hate him; I don’t know him, and I’m not very good at loving people or hating them.

Loving is better.

I’m a bit surprised to learn day by day that he hates me and just about everything about me.

He hates Woke People – he hates feminists, any mention of the slavery of African-Americans, or diversity, the Native American slaughters,  and the sanctity of America’s complex and often bloody history. I’m afraid that’s me.

My grandmother, a seminal figure in my life, instructed me always to tell the truth. Lying was a sin, she said in Yiddish – “zindin” (to sin), and the sinner was “zinkiker.”

My grandparents didn’t believe in Hell, most Jews don’t – but the older Jews I grew up around believed that if you lied, God would strike you with a bolt of lightning or something even worse, although that was never mentioned and left to the imagination. It scared the hell out of me.

I decided not to lie.

My president hates giving money to people for good – only the woke do that – and he thinks all immigrants are vicious beasts. I come from a family of beasts, and they were not hateful, just weeks away from dying in a Russian jail. America saved them, and thus me.

My President talks a lot about loving Jews (those who love Israel, which he assumes all Jews do), but thinks Nazis who march against Jews are often good people. I don’t think he likes Jews like me very much.

People who like Jews don’t generally invite Nazi’s over for dinner and a catch-up.

And of course, he despises anyone who votes for Democrats as evil and murderous radicals. He hates anyone who has any reservations about Jews killing tens of thousands of children, mothers, and fathers. That’s me.

He hates sissies like me who don’t wrestle, kill bears, play football or talk yo bro talk. I am stubborn, but not what you would call tough. I can’t name a single human that I hate.

On top of all that, I was a reporter for many years and loved it, and never told a lie about anyone.

My President loves anyone in the MAGA movement, and MAGA people love him; they think he is warm and funny and tells it like it is. Maybe so. This confuses me because  I have a good number of friends who are MAGA people, and they don’t hate me at all. They are very good to me, and I value their friendship.

And I am grateful to them for not hating me. One of my friends even forgave me for not wanting to go rabbit hunting in the Adirondacks with his pal. We like talking to each other.

I could ask the President to meet me for a beer at a restaurant with sports games on the TV.

But I don’t drink beer, I’ve never had one. I doubt we will end up loving each other.

I don’t know what we would talk about. I don’t think he would like Shaboozey, my favorite musician at the moment, or my wonderful hobby, taking flower photos. I see that he dislikes men who don’t conform to the bro stereotype. My father thought that I was a sissy also. I am not good at being macho.

A bro friend slapped me on the back, and I almost ended up in the hospital.

It’s a shame my President hates me. I always thought Presidents of both parties cared a little bit about me and would help me find a place to live if a storm knocked down the farmhouse and protect me from evil dictators. The truth is – honestly – it makes me sad to have a President that hates me. Sometimes I want to cry about it. We all need love, especially with someone who has so much power over us.

I liked the idea that they might take care of me if we were in real trouble; it was a nice thought. I thought they included me when it came to helping people like me when disaster struck, no matter what I was like or what I did, as long as it was legal.

That doesn’t seem to be happening anymore, not to people the President hates.

I always thought I was a good citizen; I paid my taxes, committed no crimes, and have worked every day of my life. Sometimes I voted for a Republican. More often Democrats. I don’t like politics much and have little to do with it. But I tried to be a good citizen and vote. I was never told this could be a crime.

I guess I have to suck it up. My President will be around for a while, and I’m not sure he or his successors will give up hating me. I plan to survive and live my life. I have a lot of faith. I don’t like it, though. I know from reading my history (yes, I read a lot of books now banned in schools) that hate only brings more hate.

Presidents should know that.

And I promise myself I will never be one thing if I ever become President (no chance, right?) – a “zinkiker.” Thanks, Grandma, I’m glad you made it before you ever had to be hated again.

It doesn’t feel good.

The Christian was required and created for one purpose and no other: “to be one more worker for the kingdom, one more transmitter of the divine Charity, the great spendthrift of God. From the first, writes Evelyn Wunderhill in “The Soul’s Journey.”

That, she wrote,  was Jesus’s request and command; it was the very purpose of Christianity. An amateur seeker, I grew up searching for faith, and the closest I came to it was Jesus Christ, whose message was simple and very powerful: help the needy; sanctity is helping those with nowhere else to go. Of all the dogma I read and heard of, that message made the most sense and deeply inspired me.

I did not come to worship Jesus as a God or feel comfortable with what Christianity has become in our time. But there is no doubt about Christ. He was the primary transmitter of the Devine Charity, the world’s first faith about helping those who need help and calling on others to do the same. If I couldn’t embrace Jesus as a God, I could embrace him as an inspiration.

He did not and does not need to be a God to me for me to be deeply touched by his straightforward message and try to follow it. That is as close to God as I need to get.

The brilliant spiritualist and mystic Wunderhill said Jesus was humanity’s sacred pattern. I love her message, too.  “He sets the standard,” she wrote, “showing what man is meant to be, revealing himself in every demand on our generosity, however homely, and by that demand alone and our response to it, separating the real from the unreal, the living from the dead.”

Christianity has a new standard; I can’t claim to know what it is, but I do know it’s not something I can follow. There is nothing Christ said that I can’t embrace and accept.

Many people who call themselves Christians have betrayed and abandoned him, but that is not the business of me or the mystic. I’m on my own. The spirit of the most potent message and messenger ever known in the world is not dead and will emerge when needed in one way or another. It’s getting close; I can feel it. Love is missed and in need of rescue.

He who altered the world will, in one way or another, return, not in Mosques and Churches and Temples,  I suspect, but in the hearts and souls of all of us who want a better and kinder way.

I no longer understand the core message of modern Christianity; I can only see that it has lost the way of the founder.  The sacred pattern for humanity is in the hearts and souls of the plain people, not any Church. How strange that the message of Christ would beat in my heart; a Jew turned Quaker into a mystic, all alone in a world of oddballs and fellow mystics.

I have to define my idea of faith and spirituality; it doesn’t fit into Christianity or any other faith right now. But isn’t that what mystics do?

I’m with Underhill, a passionate advocate of mysticism, life in reality, and truth.  She never lost faith in Christ’s message.

“The worth of men,” (and women), wrote Underhill, “is not judged by their admiration of its beauty, but by the perfection with which it is reproduced within their own lives. We are required to express that which we are shown in contemplation in action, not by our peculiar beliefs and punctual religious practices, but simply by the exercise of Rescuing Love. That is an incredible and timely goal, free of cruelty,  hate, and rage.

So, this spiritual work is undertaken without entirely realizing it; my job is to Rescue Love and take it back from the haters by doing Christ’s work—by loving others and helping them reduce their pain and fear. The mystic, Underhill says, has to come to faith by himself or herself, not the dogma of strangers.

I don’t need a church, a movement, or a label stuck in my head for this. I only need to be me and do good when I can find the need.

How does one “rescue” love?

I love the idea of Rescuing Love; it is precisely what our society needs and will, I believe, become a powerful movement in its own time. What a beautiful way to fight back.