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Thich Nhat Hanh is changing the way I think and feel about the church. Honestly, I don’t much like “The Church.” Haven’t for a long time. It is getting more and more difficult for me to love Jesus and follow “the way” of Jesus, “the way” of grace and peace, and at the same timeContinue reading “Thich Nhat Hanh and the church”

Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist monk, teacher (Thay), and lover of Jesus says, “When we look into and touch deeply the life and teaching of Jesus, we can penetrate the reality of God. . . . God made himself known to us through Jesus Christ.” In his book Living Buddha, Living Christ, Thay seeks the realityContinue reading “Solitude, Practice, and Becoming Christ”

I  ask myself how independent, as an individual, I really am on Independence Day. The overwhelming social and cultural pressure on the July 4th holiday is not to be independent or to think independently, but to conform. And that conformity tends to be packaged in a very small box and labeled “patriotic.” Our word patriotContinue reading “Independence on Independence Day?”

Here’s an odd sounding idea for you: Mindful Eating. Think of it in terms of the spiritual side of the Slow Cooking movement that’s been so popular the past few years. In Living Buddha, Living Christ, Thich Nhat Hanh describes the practice of being completely in the present moment when you eat. I can hearContinue reading “Mindful Eating and the Kingdom of God”

Touching God sounds like an absurd idea. People commonly claim that God has touched them, but I can’t remember anyone claiming he or she has touched God. I wonder, why not? If we claim God is alive, and if we are alive, why don’t we claim to touch God? In Living Buddha, Living Christ, BuddhistContinue reading “Living Buddha, Living Christ, Touching God”

I have a guest voice for you today. I think you’ll like what she has to say. Straight and narrow – deep and wide by Val Gonzalez The slender, stony track, perilously steep, led to a constricted gate in a rock wall. My shins were bruised, my knees skinned, my entire attention focused on eachContinue reading “Straight and Narrow–Deep and Wide”

In his book Living Buddha, Living Christ, Thich Nhat Hanh quotes Psalm 46:10, “Be still and know that I am God.” Then he says, “‘Be still’ means to become peaceful and concentrated. The Buddhist term is samatha (stopping, calming, concentrating). ‘Know’ means to acquire wisdom, insight, or understanding. The Buddhist term is vipasyana (insight, orContinue reading “Looking Deeply”

On a trip to Mt View last weekend, I took along a mindless page-turner to help me relax and wile away the hours on the front porch of the Inn at Mountain View. Michael Crichton’s Timeline, is a novel about time travel in which four contemporary researchers are transported back to the late 14th century.Continue reading “The Coercion of the Past”

Living Buddha, Living Christ is the title of a book written in 1995 by a Vietnamese Buddhist monk named Thich Nhat Hanh, who has a world-wide following as a voice for peace. Very early in the book, he says that his “path to discovering Jesus as one of my spiritual ancestors was not easy.” NobodyContinue reading “Living Buddha, Living Christ”

This morning I read again the final paragraph of James Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” a story about a melancholy Irish professor, who thinks his marriage is one thing and finds that it is really something else. It is a story about the disillusionment of romantic fantasies. “The Dead” is one of Joyce’s best-known stories,Continue reading “The Dead”