A Minister's Musings

I've recently returned to reading an old favorite of mine -- Beginning to Pray by Anthony Bloom .  He was the Russian Orthodox metropol...

On Saturday I was facilitating a conversation at the Spring Annual Meeting of the Ballou Channning District of the Unitarian Universalist As...

For those who were intrigued by my reference to Mr. Deity earlier in the week -- this is a web show that I absolutely love in which God -- a...

The journey is almost over; the practice is nearly complete.  We began at the Centering Bead and then prepared ourselves through four Enter...

The last part of the "journey" is the bead for Loving prayer .  This is more traditionally called "petitionary prayer" o...

Once again we return to our Breath Prayer . Some people have an aversion to set prayers they "have" to say -- even if they were th...

The third of the medium-sized beads brings us to Listening prayer, what in the east is called "meditation" and in the west is cal...

Three times during this prayer practice you return to your breath prayer, and each time you repeat it five times. That's fifteen opport...

In the religious tradition I serve few things would create such a firestorm as the suggestion that we ought to develop a regular practice o...

The five beads in between each of the medium-sized beads are for what I called in Simply Pray "breath prayers." These are two lin...

I'm taking a break from the series I've been writing exploring the prayer bead practice I originally described in my book Simply Pra...

Having centered ourselves, and taken the time to enter this time of prayer we now arrive at the first of the four medium-sized beads and th...

Open my heart, that I might live and love more fully and deeply in you -- you who created me, you who redeem me, you who sustain me. Amen. ...

So far we've taken two "steps" from our Centering Bead toward the first of our four major prayer beads; we've taken two s...

Open my ears, that I might hear your voice in whatever form it takes -- especially those I might rather not hear. Continuing the process of ...

The next four beads are for entering into the prayer practice. You could recite the "melt me/mold me/fill me/use me" prayer that I...

The journey begins with the large bead on the circle, and the practice begins with getting centered. We come to our time of prayer from what...

In the Christian scriptures, the book of Luke (11:1), there is a record of an exchange between Jesus and his disciples. It says, "One d...

I was recently talking with an old friend with whom I'd long been out of touch. At one point in the conversation he said that he envied...

When Shakespeare had Macbeth describe life as "a tale told by an idiot: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," he could hav...