Photo by Tino Rischawy on Unsplash I want to talk today about something that, I believe, is very important every day, but so many people forget, and this is the importance of kindness. My granddaughter Lucy is here today, and I don’t want her to accuse me of being boring, so I am going to start with a short story that makes the point. The Hummingbird’s Gift High in the branches of the Great Oak lived Pip, a tiny hummingbird with a very big heart. While the other hummingbirds

Photo by Shapelined on Unsplash Many scientists believe that human beings are predisposed to seek out and search for a higher power that is the source of creation. Author, Dr. Dean Hammer, in his book, “The God Gene – How Faith is Hardwired into our Genes” even suggests that spirituality and religious belief are evolutionary attributes that help people deal with all the challenges of life. Dr. Hammer is a molecular geneticist. To be sure, archologists have evidence of religio

Photo by NEOM on Unsplash I want to tell you a story today about a really interesting man I studied about in seminary in Berkeley so many years ago. His name was Jiddu Krishnamurti. He was born in 1895 into a Hindu Brahmin family in Mandanapalle, which is in the southeastern part of India. The Brahmins were and are considered the highest caste in India. (The word Brahmin is not to be confused with the word Brahma – the creator god of the Trimurti (Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva).

Photo by Dawid Zawiła on Unsplash When I was 22 and started going to sea aboard commercial merchant vessels as a junior officer, I sailed aboard tankers carrying various petroleum products to ports on the coasts of the United States, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. The tankers I sailed on in those days carried about 20,000 tons of a product such as gasoline or jet fuel which translates to about 7 million gallons. Now 7 million gallons of gasoline or jet fuel has a lot of

During the past several decades, there has been a growing interest in Native American culture and, in particular, there has been interest in their religious experience and spirituality. Why this is so is complex, but probably one of the key reasons is that there is a crisis of spirit in American religious life. Aside from the ever-popular hellfire and brimstone religions of the religious right, mainstream religions have lost their meaning to many Americans. As I have suggeste