Fall Leaves

I love this time of year! Autumn. I could just stop there. Say no more. Breathe. Take it in. I don’t know just what it is about this season that enlivens me. Maybe the change in temperature (and in humidity here in the south). Maybe the breeze. Maybe the impending prospect of October’s bright blue weather. High school and college football. Harvest moon and Halloween.

Maybe my mysterious connection with autumn comes from the annual childhood return to school and friends, becoming socially engaged again, and teachers who not only taught me to love learning but who genuinely cared about me as well.

Autumn also brings memories of transitions. My mother and my wife’s father both died a few autumns ago. So there is also loss and, thereby, grief memories during this season of wonderfully mottled colors and decaying foliage.

But all of it feels right.

Delight. Hope. Loss. Change. Transitions. This is that time of year for me when all those things seem most natural. What looks like, and in many ways is, death and decay are beginning the long process of becoming re-formed. New. But not in the sense of the way they were new before. Rather, completely new, as in different. Similar perhaps, but also differently new.

Embrace it! (Or die forever). I wonder if this is what Jesus meant when he talked about eternal life he came to bring – life in all its fullness.

What does this autumn look like, feel like, within your own body? Within your own spirit? Within your own soul? May you be re-newed by this holy transformation.

I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.

Isaiah 43:19 (NRSV)

Facing our Demons

This post links to a sermon from this past Sunday at Trinity UCC, Concord. It raises the question for me of where problems with authority really lie. Sometimes the problem is with the authority itself. Jesus challenges the notion that authority is a matter of office. Rather, he demonstrates that the more authentic authority is compassion.

I give thanks for the help of Bonnie Schell in the delivery of this sermon about changing our attitudes toward mental illness.

Click the link below and you will be re-directed to fileswap.com where the audio should begin in a few seconds. Scroll over to the 21:45 minute/second mark to begin the sermon based on Mark 1:21-28.


Trinity UCC Worship January 29, 2012 

In the Beginning

With which beginning do I start? Do I begin with the beginning of my conscious spiritual journey, or maybe with my family of origin, or perhaps with the beginning of last week? So many beginnings. So many endings.

I first conceived of blogging Living Dying Wisdom almost two years ago after a doctoral class in Wisdom as a Way of Life. It was a class at...Wisdom University no less. With that class I fell in love again with the pursuit of wisdom. For the philosophers of Ancient Greece, this pursuit was rooted in a daily contemplation of one's own death. So as I pursue a doctor of philosophy degree in wisdom studies, my writings here are about that broad process.

I serve a local United Church of Christ in Concord, NC as Senior Pastor. It is a small congregation of about 80 in worship each Sunday. We are an Open and Affirming church. This means we welcome, affirm and support all people, and specifically include Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual and Transgender persons in the full life of our congregation. We also believe taking the bible seriously means it cannot always be taken literally.

Posts here may reflect my work with the congregation, its ebb and flow of living and dying, as well as the movement of my own personal journey into the daily contemplation of death.