Sunday

 Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates.

At the first gate, ask yourself, ‘Is it true?’

At the second ask, ‘Is it necessary?’

At the third gate ask ‘Is it kind?

~ Sufi Saying

“Since you alone are responsible for your thoughts, only you can change them.” -Paramahansa Yogananda

 "It is important to cultivate compassion for our own suffering, we begin to also be more accepting of others and to realize that they too have the same struggles."

-Rabbi Jeth Roth

 We can, however, define our experience of God, recognizing that what we call “a God experience” may well turn out to be a subjective delusion, but I do not think it is, at least not in most cases. So when I try to make sense of what I believe is my experience of the transcendent, I use three concepts. I experience God as “the Source of life” empowering me to “live fully.” I experience God as “the Source of love” freeing me to “love wastefully,” by which I mean to love without stopping to count the cost; without pausing to determine whether the recipient of that love is an appropriate recipient. I experience God as “the Ground of all Being,” who gives me the courage to be all that I can be.

 If that is what God means to me then I worship this God by “living fully, loving wastefully and being all that I am capable of being.” My mission as a Christian is not “to convert the heathen” as we once asserted, it is rather to assist in the task of helping all people “to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that they are capable of being.” This is a Christianity grounded in a radical understanding of humanity.

The reason I call it Christian and the reason I claim my identity as a Christian is that when I look at Jesus, I see in him a life fully lived, a love wastefully given and the courage to be himself in all circumstances, even when people are seeking to make him their king on Palm Sunday or when they were seeking to put him to death on Good Friday. So Jesus is the human life through whom the meaning and the presence of God is mediated to me. I can then join with St. Paul in the assertion that God was in Christ.

John Shelby Spong

 "Some day,

After we have mastered

The winds, the waves,

The tides and gravity

We shall harness the energies of Love.

Then, for the second time

In the history of the world,

Man will have discovered fire."

~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, French philosopher and Jesuit priest who trained as a paleontologist and geologist and took part in the discovery of Peking Man and Piltdown Man

 Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on that sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

-Dylan Thomas