Ithaca Is The Journey

ISBN: 978-1-4343-3434-3

Let another's evolution from Catholicism to Quakerism, with multiple spirit-riches accruing along the way, serve to deepen your appreciation of how far or wide or deep your own evolution has taken you, and of what is at the secret heart of it. 333 pages.

Firm Grounding

My life has richly ranged,
including ten years in a controversial religious order
of a controversial world religion.
Born and bred Catholic,
after high school to the seminary for a decade,
then at 31 to the world beyond both.
Never will I not honor my Catholic and Jesuit roots--
foundation to stand on and soar from,
truths vital if not final.
Another time for reasons for parting,
now's for thanksgiving to the embedded, undergirding, all-spanning Great Mystery
for my richly ranging lifetime's firm grounding.

March 1990

Now Here

Travel light years through space
and never find God--
conceived, that is, as somewhere out there.
Moving beyond spatial notion to grounded experience
marks religion's maturing.
No where equals now here.
Meet the moment that greets you
and find God.

July 1987

After Long Gypsying

Quakers' solitary dogma: Light within each illuminating life if allowed to,
Voice within each guiding life if listened to.
From such experience of attentive communion,
as naturally as roaring stream down mountain
flows action for justice and peace.
It takes more than an attractive theory however enticing
to lure a spiritual gypsy from his eclectic contentment.
It takes fellow pilgrims of spirit
within which both kinship of vision and elemental kindness are experienced.
If I'm right in reading the signs,
after long gypsying I'm coming home.

December 1988

Even Our Own!

Imaging God descending to Earth to take on lowly flesh
demeans Earth and flesh terribly.
How not then see Earth (and the universe by extension)
as necessarily subordinate and incomplete,
at best moonlight to a lording sun?
Native peoples around the planet--
untrammeled by peculiar theology,
demeaning dualistic paternalistic theology--
can help us here (if we let them)
see Divinity everywhere present,
Earthbodies everywhere radiant,
even our own!

July 1990