Before I came to First Parish as a ministerial intern, I worked for one and a half years as a receptionist and newsletter editor for Congregation Beth Israel-Judea in San Francisco. I joined the High Holyday choir and was officially proclaimed by the rabbi, in front of 600 people, as an “honorary Jew.”
I remember the [...]
Are you as scared as I am? What are we going to do? How are we going to survive this transition?
I speak not of the Y2K bug, the threat of terrorism, and all that goes along with the turning of the year, the century, and the millenium. These are perhaps more serious concerns than the [...]
Reading from Thomas Merton, Thoughts In Solitude (1956)
In our age everything has to be a “problem.” Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.Sanctity in [...]
Reading from The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dosteovsky[A man seeks advice from a monastic elder.]
“I love mankind,” he said, “but I am amazed at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons. In my dreams I often went so far as to [...]