Bill Ellis

Anybody Want to Dance?

2010-03-13T00:09:00Z

This one is for Michelle Meech , whose graduation from seminary and impending ordination as a deacon has been on my mind recently. I am a person who loves to think about the great large sweep of things, historic trends, where humanity is headed, that sort of stuff. Because it is Lent I was recently thinking about the various ways of understanding where this strange experiment in evolution provisionally entitled Homo Sapien is going. Some folks believe we are slowly but surely getting better and better,...(read more)

Fire and Light

2010-02-10T00:06:00Z

With Beth having fun in Mexico, I have volunteered to lower the standards of the VTH by publishing an extra post or two. Here is a poem I just ran across that got me to considering what it takes to express our spiritual perspective. Woulds't thou know my meaning? Lie down in the Fire See and taste the Flowing Godhead through thy being; Feel the Holy Spirit Moving and compelling Thee within the Flowing Fire and light of God. Mechthild of Magdeburg (1210-1297?) It is short poems like this one I discovered...(read more)

Read Any Good Books Lately?

2010-01-25T17:05:00Z

I have made myself way too busy in the last month, and have neglected more important things. My need to check in with the VTH finally overcame the intertia of administrative stuff and has led me to write about a book I just finished. I realize this isn't necessarily the venue for book reviews, but it is a Virtual Tea House, and people talk about what they have read over tea, don't they? Anyway, I recently finished Karen Armstrong's latest book "The Case for God." It is well worth the read. For those...(read more)

Another Thought on Music

2009-12-08T22:49:00Z

John Cage was a 20 th Century American composer whose work exhilarated, enraged and even befuddled audiences for more than half a century. His definition of music as “the organization of sound” led him to experimental constructs of all kinds, and his style influenced not only the symphonic composers of the era, but also people like Frank Zappa, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono. His most controversial work was 4’33”, a composition in three movements lasting four minutes, thirty three seconds, during which...(read more)

Play It Again, or Don't Think Twice, It's Alright

2009-11-04T22:43:00Z

A long time ago in the midst of strife and warfare and strife caused by warfare part of a generation dared to imagine a new world of peace and harmony, and dared to believe that it could be realized not only in some supernal realm where burdened souls take refuge from intractable facts, but in this world, right here. And they wrote songs expressing this hope, and we all sang them, and in singing them we too dared to hope. Now those same songs are being used by huge companies to convince us to buy...(read more)

Knockin' on Heaven's Door

2009-09-23T17:59:00Z

I have this vague memory that we have discussed this on the VTH before, so stop me if you have heard this (no wait, you can't, I am blogging) but recent events here at the Cathedral in Spokane have led me to think once again about my funeral. I enjoy this by the way; it is very comforting, encouraging and even relaxing to ponder the way I want to celebrate my death. We have had a couple of really good and meaningful funerals here the past month, and I am more and more appreciating how important it...(read more)

The Big Boo Boo (It really was a big one)

2009-07-22T22:56:00Z

I just got back from the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, which is doubtless of little interest to lots of visitors to the VTH. But, as is my wont, I began to ponder things as I was returning home. Even in the Episcopal Church it turns out that there are at least a few people who still feel the need to pit scripture against science, that is to say there are those who really truly believe that there is some kind of battle going on in this world between the bible and what we can discover...(read more)

It was the Ribbons, Ribbons, Ribbons

2009-06-01T16:14:00Z

I just got back from Haiti, and I have decided to go with more of a "stream of conciousness" post than my usual style. Aristide's expressed hope that Haiti could rise to the level of "Poverty with dignity" has not yet been realized. Everywhere you look there are "dwellings" that hardly deserve the name. Cinderblocks, banana fronds, discarded wood, rusted out corrugated tin are standard home building materials. Indoor plumbing is rare, which hardly matters because there is no sewer system anyway....(read more)

I Don't Know, Maybe it was the Roses

2009-05-11T17:21:00Z

Well, I am off to Haiti next Tuesday. I don't know quite I why am going except that I am part of a cathedral that is seeking to develop an international outreach, and a couple of members have been in Haiti and really, really wanted us to get started there. Then it turned out that the people in the village we are going to really, really wanted to have the priest come, and so, there it is. In other words, in spite of how I opened this post I know exactly why I am going to Haiti, because I agreed to...(read more)

resurrection

2009-03-25T18:16:00Z

Well, it is getting on toward that time of the year when the folks in the spiritual tradition I share begin to concentrate on death and new life. Here are a few observations for those who might be interested. For a long time the Church in its various forms has been telling us all that the central miracle of Easter was the resuscitation of the corpse of Jesus, which has historically been identified as The Resurrection. He was dead, and then for a short time after death he resumed living as he had...(read more)

My Latest GST (Grand Sweeping Theory)

2009-03-03T00:24:00Z

I am not much for grand theories of everything. Marx had one, Hegel had one, Freud had one, and sooner or later all of them more or less went by the boards. I am not quite up to the standards of those three, and so any grand sweeping theory I have is more or less doomed from the outset. Nevertheless, here on the Virtual Teahouse, I am going to offer yet another Grand Sweeping Theory. Because I work in what is called a "liturgical" church, we observe various seasons; the one we are now in is Lent,...(read more)

What Was the Question Again?

2009-01-30T19:04:00Z

In a recent exchange of comments about another blog Beth wondered if perhaps I might compose something on the work of Douglas Adams, author of "The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," an English radio program that became a series of books, unless it was the other way around. "The Guide" is more than a bit like Dr. Who on acid, which I suspect is exactly the effect Adams desired, and therefore any attempt to make sense of these books is a clear violation of their spirit, and not to be countenanced....(read more)

Choose Ye This Day

2008-12-17T17:32:00Z

Beth's Advent blog stimulated a really good discussion that I could not resist joining, and it inspired me to expand on my thoughts. The question that arose was how can we know what is true or absolute, and how can we separate the truly sacred texts from those that aren't. The answer I have come to over my life is that we can't know what is true or absolute, and we can't separate the "truly" sacred texts from those that aren't. The best we can say is that my texts are sacred for me and your texts...(read more)

Spiritual Leadership and the Re-humanizing of our World

2008-11-03T17:08:00Z

This post is part of a synchroblog of Christian writers on the topic of leadership. When I think about spiritual leadership from the perspective of the Christian tradition I find myself in an odd place. I begin with the conviction that it is not possible to construct a meaningful leadership model directly from the teachings that are attributed to Jesus. I say "attributed to" quite deliberately, because modern scholarship has convinced me that we really don't know what Jesus said, and frankly I think...(read more)

The Spirituality of Politics and the Politics of Spirituality

2008-10-22T23:25:00Z

Beth's recent blog inspired me to offer a few thoughts of my own on the connection between spirituality and politics. Here they are. These days most of us can see the difference between religion and spirituality. Some of us, like me, believe the two can be distinguished but not completely separated, while others think they are both distinct and separate from one another. That question is for another time. For now it is enough to note that they are not the same thing . I begin in this rather tedious...(read more)