Hopeful Thinking

We have a lot of thoughts about the word “way.” In religious terms, it refers to a deliberately chosen life path, or religion. In spiritual discussions, it can mean the way of your soul’s (and theoretically, God’s) deepest intent for you. We use the former to help keep us on the latter. Thank you for my way. Thank you for the way before me and the way I have come. Thank you for signs. I am grateful for taking the time to read them. This is how I frame my prayers when I don’t know exactly what it is I’m praying for, other than to simply feel better. This is how I ask God to show me what I’m supposed to be seeing. All of us have and will experience hardship in our lives. What is your emotional fitness in preparation for them? Our emotional fitness determines our ability to cope with grief and sorrow when it inevitably comes. How we feel about things now will determine the way we choose to heal ourselves later, or if we choose to find healing at all. Feeling better helps us fi...

Praying gets a bad rap. Especially since it’s a fairly effective tool when used properly. For many, however, prayer is so deeply tied to negative feelings about organized religion. Hurt, rejection, judgement, compulsory words recited as punishment. These feelings become entangled with the word prayer and work against it. But the word itself is neutral from all that drama. It innocently floats above the goings-on unaware. It cannot be blamed for anything. It’s just a word. The word means simply, to ask. It is distinct from the practice of meditation in that prayer is an act of reaching out toward a Something we perceive to be outside of ourselves. It is a deliberate connection-making. Meditation is another part of the process in that it reaches inward, preparing the being within for the task of reaching out. Meditation calms the fervent physical body so that we are better able to define for ourselves the focus of our prayer. Quiet waters are clearer. All of us have to decide...

Throughout my life, my brother and sister and I have marveled at the extensive list of peculiar expressions our mother has used. They are traditional for our family in many ways. Always using the same expressions for the same situations over and over. They became a staple of our lives. They didn’t rise to the level of wise aphorisms or even pithy quotes. They were just things to say. For instance, every time we came home from an excursion to the grocery store or from the mall, as we arrived in the driveway, she would exclaim, “Home again, home again, jiggedy-jig!” For no reason in particular. Just something to say in the moment. But I virtually never pull into my driveway without at least thinking it. Sometimes, when I’m alone in my car, I actually say it out loud. It always sounds funny in my own voice. It should be hers, really. I loved this little ritual. It felt homey and safe. Familiar. The repetition made it all the more so. Home was safe in my family. As I’ve come to le...

It would seem to be baked into the fabric of American discourse to express our dissatisfaction constantly. Is complaint a useful part of our culture? What does it indicate about us? Why do we lean toward negativity as a preferred method of expression? Is that “just the way things are?” Why do most hockey enthusiast conclude fighting is a “part of the game?” How can that be? It doesn’t score any points. Certainly not with me. Protest is a crucially important facet of our culture. We have trained ourselves to recognize things which require either improvement or reckoning and we speak up about it. It is the backbone of our democracy. And, in principle, it is a very good thing. But like all good things, one can have too much of it. It typically goes right up my spine to listen to people complain. And it’s helpful here to note the difference between protest and complaint. I have no problem with protest. Complaining, however, rarely encourages a positive outcome. Yet that is the exp...

In preparing the opening words for a wedding recently, I happened upon a thought about blessing. I would say to those assembled, “If we had the power to bless this couple with all of the fruits of our knowledge and all that we’ve learned about love, we would. So the news is good, then. For we can.” I have thought about the power to bless for a long time. Who is entitled to it? How do they obtain it? Who decides they have earned it? Those three questions have no objective answers. My only conclusion is that it must be either all of us have the power to bless, or none of us does. And since I am an optimist, my faith tells me it is all of us. But what is the power to bless? What is a blessing? When the Pope, for instance, blesses an object, what about it is being changed? For the record, I definitely believe something about it has changed, but what? Is it in the molecules? The subatomic level? Or is it in the 99.9% of empty space inside each atom? My assumption is, in some way, it must ...