thought exercise on Permanence

Before Seattle resident Edith Macefield died at age eighty-six in 2008, she refused to sell her house to developers for the $1 million they had purportedly offered. Macefield wanted to die at home. Se...

One of the great lies humans have been told is that if we gain enough power and influence, we can be remembered and make a lasting impact. In his short poem Ozymandias , Percy Bysshe Shelley highligh...

There are real and very important differences between what we now call values and the virtues as they had traditionally been understood. Let me put it this way. A value is like a smoke ring. Its shape...

The biblical narrative begins and ends at home. From the Garden of Eden to the New Jerusalem we are hardwired for place and for permanence, for rest and refuge, for presence and protection. We long fo...

Father Greg Boyle, founder and director of Homeboy Industries in East Los Angeles, has put together a team of physicians trained to remove the tattoos of ex-gang members. The Service is crucial for th...

Have you ever heard of "Stein’s Law"? Named after University of Virginia economics professor Herbert Stein, it states: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." Do you...

In his book Flesh: Bringing the Incarnation Down to Earth , Hugh Halter opens with an unlikely scenario: taking his teenage daughter to get her first tattoo. While watching his daughter get “inked...

Patience is love for the long haul; it is bearing up under difficult circumstances, without giving up or giving in to bitterness. Patience means working when gratification is delayed. It means taking ...

Presence is experienced as a unitary whole. Think, for example, about the experience of sitting on the top of a hill, far from the polluting lights of a city, gazing at a dark, starry sky. Unless you ...

Tolerating absence is, in essence, trusting presence—even when the one who is present to us is not physically present. Think of the two-year-old gradually loosening his clinging grasp to the leg of hi...

The world is full of presence. Every moment of life is crammed full of potential encounters with people and things that are present to us even though we may not be present to them: the presence of a c...

I saw a live podcast a few weeks ago, and the host, actor Dax Shepherd, gave the audience a couple minutes to ask questions. One young woman in the front row asked him, “How do you get through the har...

The educator Parker Palmer writes, “Wholeness doesn’t mean perfection: It means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.” When Palmer speaks of wholeness, he doesn’t mean a perfectly function...

The word perfect comes from the Latin perficere, per (complete) and ficere (do). Something considered perfect is that which is completely done; it exists in a state of completion, wholeness, perfectio...

The mystery of perfection as an aspect of beauty is its transcendence. It points to a glory beyond itself. I knew that when I held my children, I didn’t simply cradle flesh and blood. I held a living ...

In this brief excerpt, the French Catholic Francis de Sales reflects on how his meditations on eternity consistently elevate his spirit: I never think upon eternity without receiving great comfort...

Martin Heidegger said that being is presence. Whatever else this means, it suggests that in some way presence is a basic property of simply being. Everything that exists has presence by virtue of its ...

We all live between two worlds. We are planted here on earth while our hope is in heaven. We are given work to do in temporary soil that, we’re told, has the potential to spring up into unending fruit...

The more complicated the landscape, the more the wanderer relies on patience. The more confusing the scene, the more tolerant his outlook becomes. He not only has an awareness of his own ignorance, bu...

Barbara Brown Taylor recounts her first experience with caving, the exploration of caves that are not prepared or made easily accessible for inexperienced explorers. Her guides gave her a bit of helpf...

The word resilience derives from the Latin term resilire , which means “to recoil or rebound,” and made its debut in the English language in 1627. The first entry in the Oxford English Dictionary...

A committed person is giving her word and placing a piece of herself in another person’s keeping. The word “commitment” derives from the Latin mittere, which means “to send.” She is sending herself ou...

In 1997 Gary McPherson studied 157 randomly selected children as they picked out and learned a musical instrument. Some went on to become fine musicians and some faltered. McPherson searched for the t...

The bottom line is this: never grow complacent. Never grow tired of learning. As soon as we stop learning we lose the capacity to grow and mature in our work and our relationships. This continual lear...

In this short excerpt, the scholar and Anglican clergyman N.T. Wright discusses the famous “weight of glory” passage in 2 Cornthians 4:17: For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an ...

My wife, Ruth…was one of those who could lighten heavy hearts, especially mine. I will never forget when she announced what she wanted engraved on her gravestone, and for those who have so respectfull...

These days, a common trick people use to remember someone they’ve just met is to save their first name along with the place where they met them—like “Matt PTA,” for example. I recently realized I stil...

In this short excerpt, noted Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas describes the integral link between peace and time: Peace takes time. Put even more strongly, peace creates time by its steadfast ref...

Chesterton observes that when we grow up we tend to think that repetition as a sign of deadness, “like a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe were personal it would vary, if the sun we...

I have been pondering the nature of presence and encounter since first reading Martin Buber’s I and Thou as a university student. His assertion that “All real living is meeting” struck a deeply resona...