The Daily Edify

After a long hiatus, we're back with a new episode today about home. I share a bit more about my sabbatical during spring/summer and a visit to Holy Wisdom Monastery (Madison, WI) in particular. While there, I learned a beautiful rendition of the Lord's Prayer that I recite and then discuss for a moment.

Feedback? I'd love to hear from you at [email protected]. Thanks for listening, friends. You are loved and never alone!

Today's episode is about grace. We read Denise Levertov's lovely poem, "The Avowal," and reflect on a mantra I've come to cherish recently: "Grace has brought me safe thus far and grace will lead me home" (drawn from the  hymn, "Amazing Grace"). 

Feedback? I'd love to hear from you at [email protected]. Thanks for listening, friends. You are loved and never alone!

Today's episode is about the juxtaposition yesterday of Ash Wednesday and Valentine's Day. I mention a helpful article from the Atlantic written by Esau McCauley, and the book by Brian Doyle, "One Long River of Song." 

Feedback? I'd love to hear from you at [email protected]. Thanks for listening, friends. You are loved and never alone!

Glad to be back after a hiatus, friends! 

Today's episode is about light and darkness. They are not oppositional, but complementary forces with a symbiotic relationship. It's the Advent theme our church focused on in December and is generative for our spiritual lives, especially in these humdrum days of February. I reference Barbara Brown Taylor's book, "Learning to Walk in the Dark," Simon and Garfunkel's song, "The Sound of Silence," and invite us to consider all the goodness that comes to us in the dark (as well as the light). 

Feedback? I'd love to hear from you at [email protected]. Thanks for listening, friends. You are loved and never alone!

Today's episode is about the spiritual practice of blessing - especially with our words. We begin with the most famous blessing in the whole Bible from Numbers 6:24-26 - "The Lord bless you and keep you..." We need to receive this blessing ourselves and then share it with others and with all creation. Our words don't confer, but reveal the blessing that's already there. The late Irish priest and poet John O'Donohue defines blessing another person as “drawing a circle of light around a person to protect, heal, and strengthen them.” What might it look like to do that more intentionally in your life?

Feedback? I'd love to hear from you at [email protected]. Thanks for listening, friends. You are loved and never alone!

Today's episode, in anticipation of the Thanksgiving holiday, features a prayer by Ted Loder, "My Words Can't Carry All the Praise," from his book, Guerrillas of Grace. I hope you have a blessed holiday, friends.

Feedback? I'd love to hear from you at [email protected]. Thanks for listening, friends. You are loved and never alone!

Today's episode is about the concept of flow developed by Hungarian-American psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. A flow state is when you are so absorbed in what you are doing that you lose all sense of yourself, and time seems to fall away, and you are flowing into the experience itself. He wrote a book in 2008, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, to explain the concept in an accessible way. You can learn more from him in a TED talk he gave back in 2004 here. 

Feedback? I'd love to hear from you at [email protected]. Thanks for listening, friends. You are loved and never alone!

Today's episode is about a concept I first heard Arianne preach about several years ago in a sermon at the church we served together in Fort Wayne. The concept is "the cushion of the sea," and it comes from Arthur Pierson. The gist is that there's a layer of the ocean so deep that it remains undisturbed, completely calm, even when the storms and wind are churning the much more shallow waters above it. God's love and light and life are like that. God's peace is like that. It can be an anchor for us, as our lives and the life of the world are facing profound fear, anxiety and violence.

Feedback? I'd love to hear from you at [email protected]. Thanks for listening, friends. You are loved and never alone!

Today's episode is an invitation to tend to your own pain, as we reel from terror and war in Israel and Gaza in these very difficult days. We talk about what is ours to do, Richard' Rohr's line about pain ("If we don't transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it") and the call to engage in healing of ourselves, so that we can be more fully alive in the world. 

Feedback? I'd love to hear from you at [email protected]. Thanks for listening, friends. You are loved and never alone!

Today's episode is about the "eight wonders of life" that Dacher Keltner articulates in his new book, "Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life." He defines awe as the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world. Fascinating and practical stuff.

Feedback? I'd love to hear from you at [email protected]. Thanks for listening, friends. You are loved and never alone!