Ed Hays's blog

Karen Armstrong, the author of several excellent books on religion, makes an intriguing observation when she says that for many people religion has become just another consumer item or service. How many people use their religion to undergo a transformation, and how many expect attending church or synagogue will provide them with a little moral uplift?

My heart is cold today, O God,
I feel no burning desire,
no zeal to pray or be with you.

My heart is frozen by the chill of emptiness—
sluggish and stalled.

The question “Where Have I come from?”
rises up and haunts me;
lingering, it floats like a flower
in the backwaters of my mind.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, may I look with love on all.” That was written many years ago. Today I have the rare opportunity to amend what I’ve previously written. The person you see daily in your mirror is you, the most important person in the world.

A Psalm of Icy Awareness

The earth around my home
is now locked in a winter wrap
of bone-chilling snow and ice.

A new year should breed dreams. Psychologist Sheelagh Manheim writes about her father who in 1938 at the age of seventy-four fell deathly ill with bronchitis. Burdened with financial problems from the Great Depression, he nevertheless went out and planted a row of redwood trees.

O you who showered sacred stars
on the tiny town of Bethlehem,
I thank you for guiding artists’ brushes
to create cards of beauty,
bursting with blessings.

That God so loved creation to become incarnated, embedded in the flesh of one of us and in all created things, is too joyously wonderful to comprehend. This significant decision of the Creator to enter into this earth by plunging into all that it means to be fully human has profound implications.

“The root of religion,” said Rabbi Abraham Heschel, “is what to do with awe, wonder and amazement.” Wonderful insight since from the root of wonder and awe grows religion, even if you are not religious. From that same root of wonder grows the flowering plant of prayer and adoration of God.

Comfortable and well-worn are my daily paths
whose edges have grown gray
with constant use.

My daily speech is a collection of old words
worn down at the heels
by repeated use.

Life is perpetual communion. First, you are constantly in communion with your feelings, thoughts, and yourself. Further, you are endlessly in communion with others in conscious and unconscious ways. You are also in living communion with the created world in which you are immersed, even if you, like most of us, view creation simply as stage scenery for our little human dramas.

When I finish praying apart from others,
as the final word of prayer
drifts away beyond reach of ears,
I listen for the Great Amen.

Adopt a Guide

Bookstores are adoption agencies, bringing together not parents and children, but rather readers and authors. Good booksellers can tell simply by the glint in a reader’s eyes if that person is hungry for spiritual wisdom and will take good care of the author they adopt. Bookstore adoption counselors over the years have learned how to recognize those best suited for this or that author adoptee.

O spirit of God’s eternal springtime heart,
grant me the virtue of elasticity.

Make my heart as boundless as my Beloved’s heart,
which at this moment is creating
new galaxies and infant suns.

May I join you, cosmic congregation of galaxies,
as you dance with delight before our God.
You spin and leap with brilliant bursts of light,
never tiring of your sacred circle-play.

Taoist Tradition

We are born gentle and weak. At death we are hard and stiff. Green plants are tender and filled with sap. When they die they are withered and dry. Therefore the stiff and unbending are the disciples of death. The gentle and yielding are the disciples of life.
Lao Tzu
from the Tao Te Ching

Death is the greatest terrorist! So feared an enemy is death that we avoid thinking about it, unless forced to do so as when attending a funeral. We even find the word death unspeakable, and so replace died with “passed.” In prayer, we refer to the dead as the “deceased” or “departed.”

The road home, O God, seems long
and at times is difficult and painful.

Grant me a holy communion, a compani9onship with others,
as I journey homeward to you.

I live in times of great trial:
an age of change sits at my door.

Primeval Religious Wonder

Because the distance between us and our closest star, Proxima Centauri, is so vast, we measure it not in miles but in the speed of light. Proxima Centauri is only 4.2 light years away! A light year is the distance light travels in one year: 5,787 trillion miles!

I unite myself with ancient memories that sleep within.
Ancestors of long ago whose fears have left their fingerprints upon me,
remind me of my holy communion with that river of humanity
that flows through my soul.
May this flame be my autumn sacred fire.

A Speed Limit for Life
When I was a kid during the Great Depression, a popular free entertainment for my family — except for the cost of gas which was only ten cents a gallon — was going for a drive in the Nebraska countryside. Driving out of the city we enjoyed looking at the corn, the other crops, and the colorful wildflowers along the highway.

Inside this visible world is another hidden world, the subatomic world. The term used to describe what happens inside this subatomic world is quantum vacuum. Amazingly, 90 percent of each atom is empty space, a vacuum. And the electrons and particles inside each atom appear to be whirling around as they come forth from “nothingness,” only to again disappear back into it.

Fear of Being Out of Control
When you feel you are in control, you feel reassured and comforted, even if it is an illusion. We see an example of this in the common fear of flying. In America, only a few hundred people at most die in airplane crashes each year, while over forty-four thousand die in motor vehicle accidents!

Starving with a Full Pantry
One of my favorite authors, G. K. Chesterton, in his preface to Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, summed up my belief about wonders when he wrote, “The world will never starve for wonders, but only for want of wonder.” Paradoxically, this insightful sentence was used as an inscription in 1944 on the General Motors Building at the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition.

Jazz Up Your Life
Our lives are crowded with old routines that we play out each day note for note just as we have done for countless yesterdays. Daily habits, of course, make life easier since no thought is required to do the next task, but habits also deaden. So consider improvising on your daily life.

The Womb of Wonders
The Englishman Richard Blechynden ran the tea concession at the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. On one very hot Missouri summer day, not a single fairgoer stopped to purchase a cup of hot tea at his stand.

Turn on the light -- and wonder

The next time you flip a switch and an electric light comes on, pause to wonder. As you turn on that light, what you are witnessing is matter being liberated into energy.

In these summer days when you next enjoy eating watermelon, recall a saying of the followers of the Prophet Mohammed: “A watermelon produces a thousand good works!” This Islamic saying originated when watermelons were mostly eaten out-of-doors so, their seeds dropped to the ground to become the source of countless new watermelon plants.

Living Deliberately
Henry David Thoreau said that the reason he went off to live alone in a small hut near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, was “to live deliberately.”

Psalm of the Miraculous Holy Waters

Jerusalem’s sacred pool at Bethesda,
whose hallowed waters healed the sick,
O Lourdes’ miraculous spring
whose waters wondrously cure cripples,
O Ganges, holy river of Hindu India,
whose primal waters wash away sins,
what can you offer this poor pilgrim,
homestuck and hungry for healing?