Convergence

Sometimes we don’t realize our connection until an event causes us to converge. We’re seeing America’s Buddhist moment. We may not know the names of the trekking monks, but we know Aloka, who’s showing us the value of a mascot, a team representative. We can converge around him–a dog.

I’ve had some memorable monastery moments: Abbey of Gethsemini in Kentucky; Glenstal Abbey in Ireland; Benedictine Sisters Retreat Center in Alabama; and Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Georgia. The Buddhist monks are introducing the monastic tradition to millions of Americans.

Aloka and friends remind me of E. Stanley Jones (1884-1973) who was elected a Methodist bishop in 1928, a position he resigned twenty-four hours later so he could continue to be a missionary in India, where he established Ashrams–places of interfaith spiritual retreat, focused on simplicity and silence.

From Gandhi: Portrait of a Friend, by E. Stanley Jones, 2019 (digital version)

Ich bin ein Minnesotan!

When life turns dark, I turn to biblical, world, or American history to remember moments of courage, clarity, and freedom. I recalled a time when US presidents gave short speeches filled with substance, rather than long speeches filled with self-promotional blather. Yesterday, I listened again to a nine-minute speech that made an indelible impression on me when I was 12, given by John F. Kennedy in Berlin on June 26, 1963, twenty-one weeks before he was killed. I’ve always thought it was his most powerful speech. Near the beginning and at the very end, he said, “Ich bin bin Berliner!” (“I am a Berliner!”) He invited free people everywhere to say those words with him. Click here to watch/listen.

Yesterday, I listened to a six-minute January 14 prime time speech by Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz. My immediate response was to say, “I am a Minnesotan.” Click here to watch/listen.

James M. Lindsay’s essay, “TWE Remembers John F. Kennedy’s ‘Ich bin bin Berliner’ Speech,” was published at the Council on Foreign Relations’ The Water’s Edge, published on June 26, 2013, the 50th anniversary of the speech. The article included this photo:

Our innate connection

“There is a deep relationship between the inner revolution of prayer and the transformation of social structures and social consciousness. Our hope lies in the fact that meditation is going to change the society that we live in, just as it has changed us.” – Richard Rohr

In order to see our innate connection with our human siblings and all creation, we need a contrast from the ridiculousness of our ordinary world …

… to the sublime of our extraordinary world …

Our fleeting, eternal connection

A Zoom meeting last night reflected on a 5-minute video about Havi Lev Goldstein, who lived less than 29 months, due to Tay-Sachs. Her Jewish family created a joyous Shabbirthday ritual for her, celebrated on the 57 remaining Fridays following her diagnosis. A life too brief. A pain too great to imagine.

A Zoom meeting at noon yesterday was a presentation by/conversation with Joe Elmore, now 94, a close friend for 53 years. On his last Sunday as my boss in 1994, the title of his sermon was “Blessing.” His first book was entitled This Fleeing Instant. He has been a long-time barrier-breaker.

This week, I’ve been pondering the mystery of connection, our connectedness with all creatures, great and small. Havi’s tiny life was too fleeting. But, considering the age of the Universe (13.8 billion years), the age of Planet Earth (5.4 billion years), and human earthlings (300,000 years), life here for all of us is very brief.

Our connection is both fleeting and eternal, which means each day is a priceless gift.

From “Life and death in ‘Fifty-seven Fridays,” by David M. Shribman, Jewish Journal of Greater Boston, June 2, 2024

Mendicant power

The Christian monastic movement, begun as a spiritual survival effort, became a silent protest against power (centered sometimes in empire, sometimes in church hierarchy). Alongside local congregations led by pastors/priests and sometimes supervised by bishops, monastic communities were formed, such as the Benedictines and the Jesuits.

Two orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, were known as mendicants (or beggars). They helped Europe survive famines, plagues, wars and church/state turmoils. At various points, they enabled reforms to occur within the church. Today, we’re seeing mendicant power at work in America as a group of Buddhist monks (and Aloka) are walking from Texas to the nation’s capitol. It’s the power of connectedness.

The response has been overwhelming. It’s a living example of how mendicant/beggar orders operate. The farther they walk, the more they are showered with gifts. They get more than they need, so everywhere they go they leave food and other excess gifts to help locals. A few folks fail to see the blessing and the lesson for the rest of us. They see them as doctrinally in error and in need of rebuke.

I sense in these Buddhist monks an innate connection to Jesus, who travelled a circuitous route from Nazareth to the capital city of Jerusalem, often drawing large crowds. Jesus was an itinerant rabbi, or teacher. He was famously escorted out of his home synagogue in Nazareth because he quit preaching and started meddling. Jesus was a mendicant, not a resident entrepreneur.

From “Buddhist Monks Walking for Peace Across America,” by Eric Stanley, Stay Inspired, January 10, 2026.

From alienation to connectedness

We know how alienation feels. We know how connectedness feels. Connectedness feels better.

Some mornings, I linger with my first read. Today’s CAC Daily Meditation by Brian McLaren, “An Intimate Origin Story,” gave me a focus for this week: moving from alienation to connectedness. Some excerpts:

In light of the Genesis story, we would say that the possibility of this universe overflowed into actuality as …. Light. Time. Space. Matter. Motion. Sea. Stone. Fish. Sparrow. You. Me. Enjoying the unspeakable gift and privilege of being here, being alive….

(E)verything everywhere is always essentially holy, spiritual, valuable, meaningful. All matter matters.

… the purpose of existence isn’t money or power or fame or security or anything less than this: to participate in the goodness and beauty and aliveness of creation….  

You are made from common soil … dust, Genesis says; stardust, astronomers tell us …. Together with all living things, you share the breath of life, participating in the same cycles of birth and death, reproduction and recycling and renewal. … different branches on the tree of life.

From “An Intimate Origin Story,” a Daily Meditation by Brian McLaren, Center for Action and Contemplation, January 12, 2026 (linked above). Photo by Sergey Kvint, untitled (detail), 2023.

On autonomy and community

The illusion of absolute autonomy

The leadership of the United States is exercising aggressive autonomy in international relations. The current president is hell-bent on “running” Venezuela, Greenland, and various other countries. Bless his heart. Lyndon Johnson tried running Vietnam.

“A Brilliant Start,” the Center for Action and Contemplation’s January 11 Daily Meditation by Richard Rohr, helped me see the illusion of trying to operate with complete autonomy: “There’s no such thing in the whole universe as autonomy. It doesn’t exist. That’s the illusion of the modern, individualistic West, which imagines the autonomous self to be the basic building block and the true Seer. “

The power of community

The January 8 issue of Progressing Spirit asks: “How do we hope when things in our world feel so hopeless?” Contributor Caleb Lines saw hope at a recent international humanitarian aid conference. “The reality is sobering: fewer resources, greater need, and more work to be done with far less certainty…. (but) The conference had more attendees than ever before. … a room full of deeply committed people refusing to give in to despair. … There was no denial of the crisis, but there was also no surrender to it.”

Lines said: “Luke 17:21 is often translated as, The Kingdom of God is within you, but a more accurate rendering is that the Kingdom is in your midst. … The dream of a better world … becomes real only as it takes shape between us. … Hope … is not naïve optimism. It is the discipline of learning to see what is already breaking through—and choosing to participate in it.”

From “Autonomy and Community: Toward the Greater Good,” by Lou Kavar, Emerging Spirituality Weekly, November 16, 2010.

On this rainy Friday night …

From cartoonist Teresa Burns Parkhurst, The New Yorker, January 7, 2026

In case you missed it:

Many ordinary people who are pushing back against ICE actions are being labeled “radical leftists.” One is a knitters’ group that knits together in front of an ICE building. (You gotta watch those knitters!) A friend said a few days ago: Thirty years ago I was a moderate Democrat. My views haven’t changed, but now I’m considered a “radical Socialist.” One group gaining momentum is Indivisible.

Father Ted, Mother Jones

This post is in honor of Charlie Hayes, who knew laughter is essential for life on Planet Earth. He absurdly started calling me Father Ted long ago. I can hear him saying, “It must be bad. Father Ted is quoting Mother Jones.” He would be right. I’m grateful to Don Manning-Miller, who forwarded a January 6, 2026 Mother Jones article that addresses the question: Why Venezuela, why Greenland?

Inae Oh wrote “A New Theory Explains Why (the US President) Keeps Threatening Global Takeovers.” Her thesis is spot-on: Neo-royalism challenges us to look beyond a century-old paradigm and see the hierarchical lens through which (the President) justifies domination. Here are a few excerpts:

Since the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and the ensuing claim by US leaders that “we’re in charge” of a sovereign nation…. (the President said) “Cuba looks like it’s ready to fall,” … implying that the island country was next on his takeover list. …

… a new theory … new-royalism … argues that … the world order as we’ve known …is disappearing. And in its place, a new order shaped by the private interests of individual men and their fiercest allies, not the interests … of a nation.

“Neo-royalism says that the state, the country, is not the key actor,” Abe Newman, a political scientist at Georgetown who co-wrote a paper coining the term, told me. “It’s groups of elites that are organized around political leaders. That system doesn’t play by the same rules.”

The photo is from Inae Oh’s Mother Jones article, cited above.

Up periscope

Sometimes I move into a silent “monastic mode” when I feel overwhelmed by the speed of our current administration’s activism. I wear a “string of solidarity” that was tied around my wrist in Selma by one of the Buddhist monks on their Walk for Peace. He was totally silent. I said just three words: “We are one.” Last week, the monks were reunited with one of their group who lost part of a leg in an automobile accident in Houston. They embraced in total silence.

I tend to retreat into history. When I was ten, I devoured the 1960 World Book Encyclopedia my parents bought for me. I read about the “Axis Powers” of World War 2. Unlike ChatGPT, I couldn’t “ask” the static World Book about the origin of the name “Axis.” Recently, I learned it came from a November 1, 1936 speech in Milan by Italy’s Benito Mussolini. He called the recent Berlin-Rome protocol “an axis around which all European States animated by the will for collaboration and for peace may collaborate.”

A new axis seems afoot, as regimes and oligarchies compete and/or cooperate, including China, Russia, and (now) the United States, in which leaders act in their self-interest within their spheres of influence. It feels like the US administration has changed teams, moving from the Allies to this new Axis, having “entered the portal,” like a promising college football player seeking the highest bidder.

As I raised the “periscope” from my retreat into silence, I found an insightful artifact: a lengthy, detailed September 17, 1935 report by the US Ambassador to Italy. Breckinridge Long relayed to Secretary of State Cordell Hull his conversation with Benito Mussolini, who responded to Long’s suggestion that Mussolini offer a compromise at an ongoing Geneva conference:

It is too late to talk of compromise. It is too late to withdraw any of my plans for operation in East Africa. I will proceed. I will not interfere with anyone. I do not expect anyone will interfere with me. But I will not permit interference. I have one million men under arms in Italy. I have a competent navy. I have an air force with a certain superiority. I will not permit interference from any source.

From “How Hitler found his blueprint for a German empire by looking to the American West,” by David Carroll Cochran, Waging Nonviolence, October 7, 2020.