When Christ returned to heaven, He withdrew His physical presence from our sight. He didn't stop being with the disciples but by the ascension fulfilled His promise to be with us to the end of the...
Children—and then adults—with a firm foundation of joy also have the capacity to make positive contributions in the world. It starts with play and exploration. When a child has a firm foundation of jo...
The living human community that language creates involves living human bodies. We need to talk together, speaker and hearer here, now. We know that. We feel it. We feel the absence of it. Speech conne...
Mother’s Day is complicated for a pastor. Among the happy families that are celebrating, there are children who were abused by mothers, mothers who lost lost a child, and women suffering from inferti...
Psalm 22:, Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34, Hebrews 2:12
Ancient lens What’s the historical context? A Structured Complaint The Psalmist organizes his complaint against God in three sections. The first two sections dramatize the complaint (vv. 1-11 and...
This prayer may be offered with or without the congregational response. It may be voiced by one or more people. Holy God, Wisdom of the Ages, thank you for the great gift of education. Thank you fo...
God of nations and Lord of all creation: You were there at the beginning of time and at our beginning, and You will be there at the ending and when we finally come home. There is no time You are not t...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
Place is a quintessentially human concept in that it is part of our creatureliness. E. Casey, who has done the most comprehensive work on the philosophy of place, notes that “to be in the world, to be...
Now, in our lifetime, scientists are finding ever newer evidence for what some religious people called presence in the very organizing energy of the universe—from fractals, to holograms, to electro-ma...
Entering a place that is new to us, or seeing a familiar place anew, we move from part to part, simultaneously perceiving individual persons and things and discovering their relationships, so that, wi...
In his excellent book, An Unhurried Life, Alan Fadling describes the challenge of experiencing God’s presence, even in the relatively slow world (in comparison to our own) of the fourteenth-century: ...
Isaiah 30:15, Psalm 46:10, 2 Corinthians 4:18, Romans 8:26, John 14:26, 1 John 16:7
The other thing that helps me deal with my compulsion to control things through my direct involvement and my fear of missing out is what Henri Nouwen has called “the ministry of absence.” Jesus modele...
There are people who do not live their present life; it is as if they were preparing themselves, with all their zeal, to live some other life, but not this one. And while they do this, time goes by an...
To inhabit a place is to dwell there in a practised way, in a way which relies upon certain regular, trusted, habits of behaviour. Our prevailing, individualistic frame of mind has led us to forget th...
I still believe that all spiritual life consists of practicing God’s presence, and that anyone who practices correctly will soon attain spiritual fulfillment… There is no sweeter manner of living in t...
John 1:14, Matthew 9:36, Luke 19:10, John 15:15, Mark 10:45, Philippians 2:5-7, 1 John 4:9-10
The ways Jesus goes about loving and saving the world are personal: nothing disembodied, nothing abstract, nothing impersonal. Incarnate, flesh and blood, relational, particular and local. The ways em...
The sense of Presence! I have spoken of it as stealing on one unawares. It is recorded of John Wilhelm Rowntree that as he left a great physician’s office, where he had just been told that his advanci...
You might know that I put my personal cell phone number in the back of a couple of books I wrote. When I told my publisher what I wanted to do, they said, “Are you crazy?!” I thought for a minute and ...
The simple truth of our being gets lost in the metanarratives we spin. We become the fictions we live. Consequently, our way of being in the world is so false and unnatural that our presence is thorou...
Physical health doesn't exist apart from the health of other things. Health ultimately involves the community, and the community ultimately involves the place and natural life of that place, so th...
It is a spiritual disaster for a man to rest content with his exterior identity, with his passport picture of himself. Is his life merely in his fingerprints?