All posts filed under: Course Ideas

Caught Inside Myself

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Course Ideas / Creative

Some days I am smothered by the feeling that something isn’t quite right.  That feeling is like a manipulative family member- one who is gone for days, off in the world burning brightly, too brightly, who then crashes and returns, moping around the house in a flaunt of bitterness.  Disproven once again, he is nonetheless a fountain of answers and predictions.  He is quick to point out the proper way to slice a tomato, to […]

Drawn to the New

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Book Reviews / Christ / Course Ideas

As of this morning, I’ve very nearly completed reading Haruki Murakami’s novel 1Q84, my first encounter with his work.  Early on, say two hundred pages in, I happened to mention to a friend at work that I was reading the book, and they replied with the requisite question, “What’s it about?”  I knew it was going to be a good read when my immediate reaction was a blank stare and a smidge of resentment for […]

Ecstatic Swimming Lessons

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Christ / Course Ideas / Creative

I was sitting alone on a stone bench overlooking the harbor, sipping on a latte, as I took in the sights and sounds of a strange land- (I was on vacation)- when a young woman on a scooter whipped past and let fly a paper airplane.  Judging from the sparkle, it was made from a laquer-faced card stock.  This girl meant business.  Her face bore an inscrutable expression, like the facade of an abandoned bank […]

Filling Your Self Up

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Course Ideas / Creative

I am traveling this world with a brochure in my hand for this reality called Unity.  The paper has become old and wrinkled, now, and its so soft I can hardly feel it in my back pocket.  Its edges are slowly eroding, like the boundary of a warming glacier, the words fading through years of exposure and wear.  I can’t even remember where I found it. Each day is like a recognition game.  I encounter […]

Is Love Enough?

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Course Ideas

Faced with a world in which something has gone wrong, it is virtually impossible to encounter the madness and not attempt to envision a solution.  I’m not saying solutions shouldn’t be envisioned, but I think that in A Course of Love Jesus is saying, “Hey, look, if you were a fish on dry land, and your gills were burning, and you were undergoing a total metabolic catastrophe, and you were given the choice between letting […]

We Are One Heart

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Christ / Course Ideas

“Our heart is the light of the world. We are one heart. We are one mind.  One creative force gathering the atoms, establishing the order, blessing the silence, gracing the cosmos, manifesting the light of the heart.  Here we live as one body, experiencing communion, the soul’s delight, rather than otherness.” (CoL, 2nd ed., page 180, 20.4-20.6) This passage from A Course of Love always seems to reduce the vicissitudes of my life to a […]

Air Travel Unlearning

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Course Ideas

Last night I put on my air traveler temporarily delayed in a strange airport hat when one of those nebulous “mechanical problems” you hear about over the loudspeakers stymied the local maintenance crew for several hours.  We all know what most likely transpired…  A seatback got jammed slightly out of vertical, and despite the best efforts of three suddenly religious would-be body builders, the offending mechanism could not be convinced.  When the crackerjack troubleshooters finally […]

The Restoration of Perfection

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Christ / Course Ideas

Sometime around the third grade I must have read the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis.  Shortly thereafter I was at a friend’s house, and our game of Monopoly had basically ground down to that stage of painstaking, asymptotic approach to closure that takes three-quarters of the game play and offers one-tenth of the fun, when we began talking about whether or not our mental powers might be strong enough to forge […]

Stricken (The Descent of Grace)

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Course Ideas / Creative

This past week I was shaken by an acute pain in my heart-soul-being.  Like a fever in the body, it began as a dull ache, but ramped up into a full blown grippe.  It was an inner aching that shook me to the core.  If you have felt this, you will know the attending symptoms- the way a ghostly pallor slides over the world like a sticky film, the way we withdraw ourselves into a […]