Hopeful Thinking

Celebrate when you are disappointed.  I always get champagne when I’m really, really disappointed by something that hasn’t gone like I wanted to or when a sudden change comes along I wasn’t expecting.  I think I started doing it because I prefer to defy my anxiety and depressive tendencies by my actions rather than medicate them.  That could very well be a fool’s errand, but it’s what I’m going with for now.  I’d rather attempt to view the gaping hole caused by the absence of whatever I was expecting to come as an invitation for the thing that is supposed to come.  Not a gaping hole of disappointment but a portal for what’s truly best for me to come.   How many of us have lost out on a job only to get an offer from an even better one?   Would it have hurt to raise a glass to losing that first job?  It might have made it suck a little less.  Would it be so bad to transform some disappointments into hopefulness?  Sure, take your ...

We love to dwell on the negative.  It's so safe, and familiar, the negative.  And loyal.  It's something we can rely on to mitigate our disappointment in advance.  But thinking that way sets up a paradigm.  It fosters a negative stream of consciousness that lives up to your low expectations.  It is the darker side of the self-fulfilling prophesy. We quote maxims like, self-fulfilling prophesy , and mind over matter , and we empirically examine, and prove, the Placebo Effect.  We prove to ourselves in each strata of our world that we believe in the idea that our mind can control our experience.   Mind over matter.  We say it like we believe it, but we don’t live it.  We acknowledge after the fact that we manifested, or at least predicted, our discomfort, Oh man, I knew that was going to happen!, but we don’t think about The Future in relationship to what we are thinking in The Present, the Now.  We say we believe, but we don’t, e...

I have questioned for many years what form the church should take in our world of today.  In previous times church attendance was compulsory.  The law and/or society determined what was appropriate action for your salvation.  Social order was maintained in a push-pull environment of Obedience vs. Damnation.   Do what we say or you’re going to hell .  That’s a strong argument.  Especially if you believe it. But today, there are pockets of religious freedom that have arrived on the planet.  Islands of struggling justice filled with people trying to build for themselves a practical idealism.  The mass awakening to the belief that we are all inherently free is only a few hundred years old, remember. The demand for freedom and equality as we know it today is only visible in the last half of the last millennium.  And after those short few hundreds of years of fighting for a voice we have very nearly won.  Unless you look at it from a p...

This is an essay required by the Unitarian Universalist Association to begin the process toward ordination.  It asked for a description of my history and my ministerial aspirations. At six years old I was asking strangers what they thought happened to them when they died.  Not out of morbidity, but a deep spiritual curiosity.  My curiosity and fascination with world spirituality has only increased over time.  I think I have been a form of clergy my entire life.  Always listening for good advice so I could share it.  Offering a shoulder and a hopeful thought as needed.  When opportunities like this came I always felt at my best; like I intuitively knew what I was doing or at least understood my mission.  In my early teens I wanted to be an advice columnist.  Later, into my high school years I decided it was the role of psychologist I sought.  But it didn’t feel quite right and I left college during my first semester.  I knew I was...

We are all from somewhere.  Fitchburg, Massachusetts is my hometown and that's where I have centered my work.  I have made Fitchburg my career, you might say.  But Fitchburg is like almost any town.  It has people who love it and people who love to complain about it.  It has community services with low budgets and high need.  It has a struggling downtown with a formerly vibrant past.  And Fitchburg is like its people.  Struggling, but hopeful.  I am here to nudge that hope along.  Not just for my town's sense of hope.  But maybe your hope, too.  It could happen. It's time to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable," as 19th century journalist Finley Peter Dunne once wrote, in a roundabout way.  And I am here to comfort the afflicted.  I am.  It's part of my job.  I may only be in seminary now, but I've been in ministry my whole life.  Not religious ministry.  The ministry of ministerin...

What would you like to do with today?  Assuming that all things are possible, what would you like to do with possibility of a day?  Will today be the day that you turn left instead of right?  Will today be the day where you learn to forgive someone that has wronged you? What will your prayers be like today? What will you ask for?  Will you ask for help, or will you ask to know ?  Would you have the courage to ask the Universe, "What would you have me know today?"  This is a powerful question.    What would you have me know? The question itself is a covenant with Spirit. It is, in essence, a promise. A promise we may not even realize we are making as we ask that enormous question.  It is a pact with God which states I am here, listening.  But then, for what should we be listening?  Is it a sound? A voice?  Words?  Or might it be a flash of internal intuition so quick, arriving so fast, that the burst of idea comes ...