ORDINARY LIFE - Thoughts and Ideas to Help You Live a Happier Life

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Summary for December 22, 2019

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Dear Folks -

For those of you in the Houston area I remind you that there are five Christmas Eve services at St. Paul’s today. You can go to the St. Paul’s website to check how the details of each service - they are not the same. The four o’clock and six o’clock service are the ones that have the most attendance. Though there are overflow spaces provided if you want a seat in the sanctuary, come early. http://www.stpaulshouston.org

This past Sunday, Holly Hudley and I co-taught. We called the presentation “Holding Hands in the Dark.” This past Sunday fell on the day following the longest night in our hemisphere. So we talked about the role of “the dark” in doing spiritual work. In the dark we can’t see. Of course, in our time, some folks can’t see that it is dark The moment, however, that we begin to see that we are blind, we are not. Holly told the moving story of the “lost boys” of the Sudan and how they made it to safety by holding hands. I talked about the wonderful complex paradoxical situation we are in of needing to do the work of “putting ourselves into God’s story” and how it is only when we are open to the Sacred that our fears are put aside. Though we are meant to live life boldly, beautifully and bravely, our culture is encased in a culture of fear. We can use that fear to point us toward Sacred Mystery.

That is a very brief summary of the talk we offered this week in Ordinary Life. Though we did not follow it closely, I am going to include the text from which we spoke. The audio version is very different and some of what we said will make only limited sense if you don’t view the presentation slide.

You can read or download the text from which we spoke, view the presentation slides, listen to the audio of the talk and/or watch the video of the talk using the links below.