New Address…

My blog has moved to www.thebeautifulpath.org

Thank You…

for visiting my blog. I have recently moved its contents to

http://www.thebeautifulpath.org

and encourage you to visit there.
Thank you.

I believe…

that its time for the politicians to be politicians and the saints to be saints. My money is on the saints.

On the Morning After…

the winners will celebrate, the losers will evaluate, and the problems will remain the same. We’re in debt more than our entire economy can pay and spiritually living off the fumes of a morality we’ve decided to jettison. The bill collector is here and we’re stuck fumbling around our pockets trying to find something besides lint.

You’d think that someone would be seeing all of this and saying “This is nuts, we can’t live like this.” Yet the word on the street is still “There’s more of everything and less of whatever you feel might restrict your inhibitions.”  Just one step farther, Just one more denial of reality. A little more bending of the natural order should do the trick. Walk towards the deep end and just hope that somehow, something, technology, the economy, a new discovery, will help us grow the legs we need to keep from drowning.

It won’t work, of course and it doesn’t make a difference who proposed what. Over the flow of human history the natural order of things cannot be denied any more than building cities along the ocean can prevent storms. Something will have to give and deep down inside we know its true even as we do our best to pretend its not really happening.

There is, however, a way but its not a political, economic, or social way out of all of this mess. We have to be transformed, each of us, from the inside out by something larger than ourselves because politics, economics, and social tinkering are just too small to do the job the way it needs to be done. There is simply no god less than God who can make this happen.

Of course this path, this way provides no money for people building the useless junk they say we need to be happy, It also provides few followers for the peddlers of utopian politics. So the larger world, so invested in its delusion will will fight back, hard.  It’s difficult too because we’ve all been so bent out of shape by all of this that getting back even to some semblance of right will take much effort.

Yet it can be done. .

Come unto me all you who are burdened and heavy laden, Jesus says, and I will give you rest. That, according to Jesus, is where the real fix starts, the real change begins, and the substance of what you were looking for emerges.

Find this and you’ll leave the morning after for the morning that never ends.

A Little Post Election Help…

How to remove bumper stickers from your car. Because nothing says “I don’t have a life” more than last year’s election stickers on your car. If your car is actually held together by bumper stickers you can ignore these helpful hints.

Wisdom…

The one thing needful
(From the spiritual diary of St. John of Kronstadt, “My Life in Christ”)

What do I need? There is nothing on earth that I need, except that which is most essential. What do I need, what is most essential? I need the Lord, I need His grace, His kingdom within me. On earth, which is the place of my wanderings, my temporary being, there is nothing that is truly mine, everything belongs to God and is temporal, everything serves my needs temporarily. What do I need? I need true and active Christian love; I need a loving heart which takes compassion on its neighbors; I need joy over their prosperity and well-being, and sorrow over their sorrows and illnesses, their sins, failings, disorders, woes, poverty; I need warm and sincere compassion for all the circumstances of their lives, joy for those who are joyous and tears for those who are in tears. Enough of selfishness, egoism, living only for oneself and acquiring everything only for oneself: riches, pleasures, the glory of this world; enough of spiritual dying instead of living, grieving instead of rejoicing, and carrying within oneself the poison of selfishness, for selfishness is a poison that is continuously poured into our hearts by Satan. O, let me cry out with King David: Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire besides Thee. My flesh and my heart fail, but God is the strength of my heart. Grant me, O Lord, true life, dispel the darkness of my passions, disperse their power with Thy strength, for with Thee all things are possible!

Never…

let something as mundane and temporary as an election take you away from your enduring Kingdom, your lasting Hope, and your Eternal joy. One day the world will be as God meant it to be and so will we. Change happens, God and his purposes endure.

We Live in a Culture…

of anecdote, a life lived away from a larger narrative. Yet a larger narrative is a kind of stability that keeps us from faddishness, from having our lives jerked from one compelling but temporary story to another. It’s very hard to live a life of all exceptions and no rules, a life of individual moments without a larger explanation.

We live in a world of human drift because a story that feels good at a particular place in time might not have the wisdom, the strength, and the insight to last, leaving the one who lives it constantly on the move from one unsatisfying narrative to another. Left unchecked it can give birth to a world weary cynicism, a life where one believes nothing because everything else has failed to be enduring.

In this sad place there is, however, an invitation. Restless hearts can find a rest in God if they listen to their cynicism and emptiness and hear within it the call to a larger and more enduring story. Anecdotes come and go, truth remains, and Jesus said “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

Some Pre-Halloween Humor…

Tonight…

we watch the TV while somewhere else the storm rages. It’s quiet here in this part of the country. No ocean, no hurricanes, no lights, camera, action. Minnesota is far away and safe from all of this, tucked at the top and the middle of everything.

Sometimes its good to live in fly over country. No, we don’t get the TV weather coverage they’ll get in New York.  We can have two feet of snow and 60 mile per hour winds and the networks will give us 20 seconds tops. Yet there is a quiet here away from the coasts that pays us back for not being in the eye of whatever happens to be the current storm.

We’ll keep you in our prayers, all of you who are hunkered down in the face of the winds. We know lousy weather here in the upper Midwest and we sympathize more than you know. And when the time comes we’ll roll up our sleeves and help as we can because that’s what we do.

Yet if the bright lights and tall buildings are in New York City, and they are, there are times when its better not to be in the center of everything. Tonight is such a time. Storms come and go, but tonight everything is quiet in fly over land.