Spiritually Present/Absent

Where no “you’’ exists apart from where you take your place in the wide world, there is no one to be offended and no one to be afraid.

Faith: Between Spiritual Ground and Sky

All our characteristics, even those that we view as most essential – including our spiritual gifts – are perhaps just functions of something that is both foundational to them and greater. Our best gifts and characteristics seem to approach this something, yet stand far from it.

Faith is a dim sense of the all-rightness of our connection to the foundation and our place beneath the greater canopy. Faith is a whisper, as soft but relentless as autumn leaves, that it’s somehow perfectly okay for us to live and move and have our being rooted in the context of a reality that is more than we can understand.

The Waking
by Theodore Roethke

An Original Faith: Love

Scripture tells us to love others; but have you loved those you’ve loved because scripture told you to? Written words can be wonderful and inspiring, but we would testify poorly to our love if there were no more to it than obedience to something external to us. We do not love our children because the Bible tells us so.

You might say that love’s testimony is given first hand or it’s just hearsay. If we loved each other in no more than a spirit of obedience, no one would feel loved and no one would be loved.

Love precedes the written word. The spirit has been moving over the waters for a very long time.

Catch the drift; ride the wave. Be more than a student of religion. No religion? No problem. Be more than a student of your narrower desires.

There is a self with each of us that is more than self referential; those with ears to hear also find themselves with lips to speak and hands to act.

There is an original faith.


Original Faith: Finding the Interfaith Soul of Progressive Religion and Spirituality will be available to order at this site and on Amazon next month.

An Original Faith

Communication about religion and spirituality usually refers to beliefs. This is fine for purposes of discussion among those with shared beliefs, but it’s a source of endless disagreement with others.

Interestingly, as a group, the founders of religions – figures like Moses and Muhammad, Jesus and the Buddha – don’t seem to be renowned for their fervent religious beliefs. Instead of arguing for convictions based upon the words of others, they appear to have spoken from out of direct experience.

“They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.” Mark 1:22

Everyone can’t found a religion. And yet the fact that the founders of religions speak from direct experience suggests that there may be more to a vital and energetic spiritual life than simply believing what we’ve been told.


The Word truly received comes to be spoken with one’s own breath. It borrows one’s own voice with resounding speech and actions.

There is a self with each of us that is more than self referential.

There is an original faith.

Available here and on Amazon next month: Original Faith: Finding the Interfaith Soul of Progressive Religion and Spirituality

Spiritual Energy

There is boundless energy even for disagreeable tasks if you forget about your disagreements with them.