Praise be for our connection. Help us to learn from each other.

Every year, I tell the congregation not to worry about mistakes because there aren’t any; there is only us, telling an old story about love getting born into this aching world.

May I always remember that Tango, like life, is a dance of the people. It’s meant to be shared, not practiced in isolation.

We can’t always predict which choices will wind up having a huge impact on us, whether it's bringing home a stuffed animal or taking a particular train to Oxford Circus.

We could see the main path to the swimming hole ahead, but we had to pick our way through sand spurs to get there. Behind us were rattlesnakes. What did the youth do? They started playing.

Our family prays at mealtime to practice gratitude in our lives. I love that my children are taking it as their own, finding their own meaning.

It's an impulse of the human self to be known fully, and that’s almost never possible unless we risk the conversations that help us see past our initial impressions.

In real life, we can only place the pieces, one by one, and see what kind of picture we create. Sometimes we turn out to have chosen the wrong piece. Sometimes the picture is wildly unexpected.

The most important lesson pottery has taught me is to not be attached to the final product—the process matters more than the product.

When I was a kid I liked to skip stones on lakes. If I threw a flat stone at the correct angle and with enough speed and energy it would kiss the surface and leap into the air again and again. If we have too much stuff in our lives, our attention skips from one object to another without really...

One of the potential spiritual lessons of sports comes in its ability to connect people—to each other as well as to a team of strangers. Not too long ago, I was in a workshop in which we were discussing “peak experiences,” those mystical, transcendent experiences of what Abraham Maslow would...

I wonder Did God’s heart (I mean the love-mushy, endearing part of God) That part The heart that I don’t really believe in as a thing, With pulses... ANYWAY Did that heart Did it Break just a little; When God realized "Oh no— They have made leaves into underpants!" If God says things like...

I want not dainty bone china-cupped, oh-so-polite, pinky-extended sips, but guzzle-by-the-gallon, drink-from-the-fire-hose- two-hundred-eighty-psi- Niagara-Falls volumes, and inch-thick slices of hearty multi-grain-hard-crusted- with-stick-in-your-teeth-seeds-bread (none of that bland supermarket...

I vote we let the artists win the ones covered in paint from their last attempt to smuggle across the beauty of a bowl of fruit the 14-year-old rapper learning to spit throwing life's chaos on the rhythm wheel uncovering the shapes that live on after the next break I say we let the food bank...

Sometimes I offer to make a deal with God. “I’ll tell you about my resistance to prayer,” I say, “If you’ll explain the Holocaust.” God declines to comment, and the lawyers make their prepared statements on his behalf. I kind of hate when he does that. I love God best, I confess, when I...

We are all dying, our lives always moving ­toward completion. We need to learn to live with death, and to understand that death is not the worst of all events. We need to fear not death, but life— empty lives, loveless lives, lives that do not build upon the gifts that each of us has been given,...

I grew up as the heavily-committed eldest child of an American Baptist minister in the 50's. Committed, that is, to self-preservation, staying out of trouble with our small town and my family, and having fun within safe parameters, namely, church activities. I never felt particularly committed to...

Singing the Journey uses our Six Sources as organizing themes, as shown in the sections of the Table of Contents. “The Living Tradition we share draws from many sources,” so come with me now on a short spiritual romp through these six sections as I draw only from the song titles in each section...

A one-paragraph newspaper article describes a subway platform during the morning rush hour at Grand Central Terminal. A train pulls in; a well-dressed woman gets off. Before the doors close, the woman realizes that she is holding only one of her leather gloves. She looks back into the train and...