Once upon a time God said, "I'm bored because I don't have anything to do. I want to play with my friends." And because God is God, as soon as the words were spoken, God's friends were there. When God saw them all gathered, God said, "I've been bored because I haven't had anything to do....

Once upon a time, a girl named Ramona and a boy named Roberto had a wonderful dog. They named the dog Feliz because he was so happy when they came home from school each day. He bounded toward them, barking and tail wagging madly. His sandy brown coat was sort of wavy around the shoulders but...

It is easy to pray when the sun shines And we are grateful for another glorious day of being. It is hard to pray when wind and rain and thunder Plague our every step and spoil our every plan. It is easy to be virtuous when life goes well And our existence is a journey from bliss to beauty and back.

The other day I was driving on an expressway. These days expressway driving seems a frantic enterprise. Near one of the exit ramps, one of the highway denizens, a behemoth "semi" had pulled over onto the berm. The driver had emerged and was gathering some wild plants along the side of the road.

Most of us look for love in only the most obvious places, and as a result, most of us come away disappointed. Its as if we are still grade school kids, counting valentines as a measure of what matters. The love that matters is not typically the subject of sonnets or love songs....

A well-known poem by Robert Graves speaks of butterflies—their "honest idiocy of flight," "lurching here and there by guess and God and hope and hopelessness." Any number of quotations sound this way, and so, I think do we. But privately. Publicly we speak the civilized language of human beings...

I was working with a group of young people at a Safe Schools conference in Boston. They were discussing how to tell their parents they were gay or lesbian. Many of them had suffered harassment, brutality, and ostracism by their peers, and they worried about how to protect their parents from the...

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...

Do not live too far in the past or the future. Live now. In each moment expect a miracle: ten kinds of birds at the feeder, and the tracks of a fox in the snow. Pick up a magnifying glass and scrutinize that crocus. See the pollen at the center of the daffodil, life's dust, death-defying life. Be...

Blackmail, blacklist, black mark. Black Monday, black mood, black-hearted. Black plague, black mass, black market. Good guys wear white, bad guys wear black. We fear black cats, and the Dark Continent. But it's okay to tell a white lie, lily-white hands are coveted, it's great to be pure as the...

I wasn't flattered when one of my daughters confided that she had thought of me as "The Big There-There" when she was three years old. If I remember correctly, I was in the middle of a phase where I was hoping to reassure myself that I still had a fertile mind as well as a welcoming bosom. Now,...

We are people of all ages who enter this space bringing our joys and our concerns. We come together in hope. We greet each other warmly with our voices and our smiles. We come together in peace. We light the chalice to symbolize our interdependence and our unity. We come together in harmony. We...

Left: Some of us are struggling with sorrow or grief, but are afraid to reach out for help. Right: Some of us are sick of ourselves and others, but don't know what to do about it. Some of us just want to be ourselves, but it seems that other people won't let us....

Blessed are the heavens, for they declare the power of creation. Blessed is the earth, our beloved home, for she is a planet of plenitude. Blessed are the waters thereon, for they gave rise to living things. Blessed is the land, for it is the source of life abundant....

All too often, we pace the geometries of our walled gardens, Believing we are traversing the whole of creation. With spirits of discovery, let us uncover the mysteries nested in our routines, With the eagerness of children, let us seek out the secrets unfolding in our peripheral vision. Let us...

We create a web of life. This is finally the time to let go of that crazy notion that we can live separate and aloof from one another We create a web of life. This is the time at last that we can come home to each other, to our mutual belonging. We create a web of life....

Praise the sun, the moon, the stars,...