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On the evening of Valentine’s Day, the holiday of love, 200 people gathered to unite under the desire to disarm hate.  Prominent members of different religious communities spoke in response to the hate they have encountered. They each spoke with power and conviction, pushing for unity across all traditions while remaining firm in their beliefs.  The common thread across all speakers, was that we need to get to know one another. Without getting to know one another, common misconceptions are held which further drive apart communities. Tree of Life Rabbi Jeffrey Myers suggested that we get rid of the word hate and replace it with “H”. Rabbi Myers said (paraphrased), “violence is a manifestation of H speech.  It is these words that grow into actions. In order to address H, we must remove the root.” In reflecting on these profound words, I must agree. I believe the root of the problem is the heart.  I am reminded of a verse from the Hebrew Bible, “As water ref...

Each week, I look forward to a new episode of  On Being  to download and accompany me to my local Planet Fitness. Lured by the promise of hearing a new installment of Krista Tippet’s show, I muster the discipline to dutifully pound the treadmill for fifty minutes. As I provide my aging muscles a modest work out, I also exercise—often  strenuously—my imagination, my empathy, and my spirit. Tippett’s interview with poet Claudia Rankine (aired January 10, 2019) provides a perfect example. The two women held a candid, powerful conversation about the pain—often invisible to white people—that is woven into the everyday reality of people of color in this country. They did this in a way that avoided rancor, blame, and bitterness, even as they dove into a fraught topic—one that often divides people rather than bringing them closer together. Rankine shared passages from her 2014 book  Citizen: An American Lyric , a collection of poems that gives voice to and documents the cu...

In a society in which we feed ourselves on goals accomplished, problems solved, and questions answered, how do we handle unresolved loss? How do we bear the weight of grief that does not find closure? Krista Tippett interviewed Pauline Boss in an episode of On Being that aired on December 13, 2018. Boss is a family therapist who coined the term “ambiguous loss” to describe the type of loss associated with situations such as divorce, mental illness, aging, a death without a body to bury, or immigration. Boss and Tippett talk about these types of personal grief as well the societal grief associated with genocide or slavery, the suffering that is built into the DNA of a race, religion, or nation that is transmitted through generations. Pauline Boss discusses the fact that grief cannot always find closure. We do not all progress through the stages made popular by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross until we reach acceptance. We cannot expect people to package up their grief and put it away b...

As I am reading Robert Atkinson’s book “The Story of our Time; from Duality to Interconnectedness to Oneness” I am pondering the importance of meaningful conversations, such as Krista Tippet’s “civil conversations” that need to take place in order to widen the stratosphere of the mind across the globe and make the knowledge of our common humanity a realization throughout all strata of society. If we compare the four billion years of the history of our solar system to the distance of a mile, we see homo sapiens appearing 200,000 years ago, which is equivalent to less than an inch within this mile. During this span of time our ancestors came to successively see themselves as members of a family, a tribe, a village, a city, and a nation. The process of nation building has ended, and our world has in the past century and a half shrunk to a global village. We all breathe the same air, and we have become literally inter-connected economically, financially, scientifically, as well as thr...

I must share today that, despite the joy we all feel this morning, I’m often burdened with the sense that we just haven’t made enough progress in the more than 50 years since Reverend King left this world.  Legal segregation has largely been eliminated, voting rights are clearly established in our statutes and diversity has been recognized as fundamental to good business and progressive education, but discrimination and racial prejudice in many forms still persists in our society. In a world where there’s still so much to be done to achieve Reverend King’s dream, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and pessimistic. First, our political climate is one of the most divisive in recent memory.  How can we make progress toward unity and understanding when we so often talk past one another from the comfort of our echo chambers?   Second, our country is led by a uniquely and sometimes startlingly coarse executive who regularly gives voice to racial and ethnic bigotry.   ...

In a program first broadcast on April 12, 2018, Krista Tippett interviewed Michael Longley, a poet from Northern Ireland.  Although recorded live in 2016—in Belfast—the program was not aired until two years later to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement which had brought to an end the worst of the sectarian violence that had plagued that land for so many years. The “Troubles” were the backdrop for much of Longley’s poetry, as they were for other Irish poets of the time, among them Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, but they were rarely the subject of his poetry, at least not directly.  No, the subject of his poetry was—in Tippett’s memorable phrase—“the vitality of ordinary things precisely in the face of what is hard and broken in life and society.” Longley’s celebration of the “vitality of ordinary things” was (and is) his way of celebrating what is most human about us.  Those things that we are tempted to call the “little things” of “ordina...

Photo by Alexandra on Unsplash Krista Tippett is constantly expanding my mind and soul to new meaning about theology and about humanity.  In her book, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery of Art of Living , here is what Tippett says in her second chapter called "Words: The Poetry of Creatures:" "The words we use shape how we understand ourselves, how we interpret the world, how we treat others.  From Genesis to the aboriginal songlines of Australia, human beings have forever perceived that naming brings the essence of things into being.  The ancient rabbis understood books, texts, the very letters of certain words as living, breathing entities.  Words make worlds.  We chose too small of a word in the decade of my birth -- tolerance -- to make the world we want to live in now.  We opened to the racial difference that had been there all along, separate but equal, and to a new infusion of religions, ethnicities, and values.  But tolerance ...