just enough light

“…we write to make sense of out of chaos. Through our stories we come to find the patterns in a random universe and from those patterns we find comfort.” I read that statement this morning as I prepared to write today’s Lenten thought. The author, Laraine Herring, was writing about the importance of curiosity. If […]

While thinking about today’s entry, I had a flashback of a conversation 40 years ago with Dr. Culbert Rutenber. What a name. “Cubbie” as he was called was a past president of the American Baptist Association and retired faculty member of Andover Newton Seminary. In his retirement he had moved to Austin, Texas. He joined […]

I grew up Southern Baptist where once each month, on Wednesday evening, we gathered for a church-wide “business meeting.” The meeting included a host of reports from different groups and addressed all kinds of things having to do with money, budget, personnel, ministry projects, and whatever else needed congregational input or decision. When I joined […]

Yesterday I ended with the statement of how important AND limited our “containers” are. They are important because they provide a structure of our lives and our thinking. The container is made of the rules, regulations, and ideas of our early authorities. These gave us our start and allowed us to make sense of the […]

While working on my dissertation, oh that was a long time ago, I did some reading of “Conceptual Systems Theory.” This was a useful theory for understanding and explaining my research at the time. To my surprise it has also been helpful since then. My overly simplistic description: the theory describes of how our thoughts, […]

My Lenten discipline of writing something every morning has sort of crapped out. This is my first entry in two weeks. I have several good reasons, but at the bottom of my excuses lays the word “discipline.” Changes in my life, my schedule, and my attention prompted me to get away from the things I […]

One of the primary ways I settle for enhancing my container rather than exploring its contents is by clinging to demographics. Here’s what I mean. Demographics are the labels I use to identify myself and others. “I’m male, middle-aged, white, Christian, American, parent, spouse, psychologist, left-handed,” you get the idea. It’s mental shorthand. I don’t […]

“You only internalize values by butting up against external values for a while.”  –Richard Rohr, Falling Upward. The external values, the ones we absorb, adopt, and accept often without question during childhood, are the essential components that make up our container. They are the rules, traditions, group norms and symbols, loyalties, and memberships that help […]

So we spend the first part of our lives constructing our container of all the stuff of childhood and adolescence. We spend the next major part of our lives enhancing and promoting our container. This is our ego, our outward identity, the public self we want others to see and appreciate. It’s the material about […]

A bit more about the container of our lives. We spend the first part of our life building the container. Remember, the container consists of all the teachings, observations, lessons, and rules we internal to define ourselves and make sense of our world. Richard Rohr, one of my current favorite writers about the inner life, […]