WHEN WAS I truly happy? The happiest time of my life dovetails with the time when I felt the most stress and suffering. With the loss of both my job and my first marriage, 1991 was my Annus horribilis and my most blessed year. That year I discovered what it was to be loved and to love through the lens of God's compassion and forgiveness.
Stealing from the title of Dickens' book A Tale of Two Cities (1859) Watershed's story could be equally called A Tale of Two Wisdoms: God's Wisdom and Human Wisdom (1991-2015). I tell this story not in order to disparage the intellect or learning from a human point of view but rather to show how we might have used these two wisdoms incorrectly. Why and how wisdom gets expressed in our lives is what I have in mind.
During a recent Watershed Worship and Discernment service, I confessed my Golden Calf: my creative use of language, my gift of teaching and speaking. The occasion for this confession was Tyler's comment that sometimes what we are overwhelmed by, even obsessed by creatively, can be a gift from God - an expression of our true vocation. To surrender oneself to that creativity seems not the creation of a Golden Calf but rather an enthusiastic response to the divine call. There is an important truth in Tyler's comment that our gifts are from God and that we ought to give ourselves to our vocations as an act of worship.
Lovers of books often complain that we read too slowly and wonder if we will ever take the time and effort to master the The Art of Speed Reading. My difficulty is that sometimes, strike that - often, that I need to acquire the Art of Reading Slowly to integrate what I read. I don't do that nearly enough. My habitual approach is to read a book with my mind and my hand outstretched to the read. I read distractedly often merely to get the basic gist, get through to book, and then add another book to my growing list
HAVE YOU EVER been so swallowed up in something unfair happening to you that you couldn't find your way out of it? The Italian poet Dante Alighieri found himself the victim of vicious politics in 13th century Florence. Eventually he would write an epic poem about it—The Divine Comedy. Here is an imagined journey on what might have been on Dante's mind as he wrote his poem. One after another they rose to expose me. Libel and barbs of betrayal dripped from their venomous lips. The president's gavel scarred his lectern as he called out, "Order!"