I have previously recommended the book that is pictured above. Let me do so again. Listening To Your Life, by Frederick Buechner, is presented as a series of 366 daily meditations (the "additional" daily meditation, going beyond #365, is to take account of the fact that leap years do come around, periodically). The idea of this book is that you should read one entry each day. They're all dated, all laid out for you. Here, for instance, is Buechner's offering for today's date, September 14th:
The One Good Reason * September 14thTo anyone who is looking for good reasons for being a Christian, let me suggest the only really good one that I know. What does the faith mean by taking this man who was really a man, perhaps the only man, and calling him the Son of God, the Word of God, the Christ, all these metaphors so alien to our whole way of thinking? What is the reality about him other than the reality of his manhood that these metaphors are so clumsily, hopelessly, beautifully trying to convey? Just this, I believe, and it is much: that in this man there is power to turn goats into tigers, to give life to the half-alive, even to the dead; that what he asks of us when he says "Follow me" is what he also has the power to give, and this is the power of God that he has, that he is, and that is why men have called him the Christ.
As you can see, this reflection is pretty "religious," and is specifically "Christian." Since today is a Sunday, I am indulging myself by putting this out there.
In fact, however - and this reflects, undoubtedly, a personal predilection - I did not engage with Buechner's book on a "day by day" basis. I chose to read Buechner's book all at once. Having taken in the book that way, I found that the impact of the book was not so much "religious," or "Christian," in any "sectarian" way, but was deeply comforting in a "human way."
"Listening" to my life, to the degree that I was able actually to accomplish that, found me rejoicing in the fact of my life. What a gift, indeed, it has been to have been alive - and still to be alive, right now! Right now, when there is so much at stake, so much conflict and distress, so much going on!
Buechner knows what he is talking about. His personal engagement with the gift of his life comes through quite clearly, in every daily entry. It will also be found, I am willing to hazard, in every book he wrote - and he wrote at least forty books, and a lot of them are novels. Click right here for the list.
Buechner speaks to "political" issues, too, not just "religious" ones. Here's the entry, from Listening To Your Life, for July 4th:
Patriotism * July 4All "isms" run out in the end, and good riddance to most of them. Patriotism for example.
If patriots are people who stand by their country right or wrong, Germans who stood by Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich should be adequate proof that we'v had enough of them.
If patriots are people who believe not only that anything they consider unpatriotic is wrong but that anything they consider wrong is unpatriotic, the late Senator Joseph McCarthy and his backers should be enough to make us avoid them like the plague.
If patriots are people who believe things like "Better Dead Than Red," they should be shown films of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively, and then be taken off to the funny farm.
The only patriots worth their salt are the ones who love their country enough to see that in a nuclear age it is not going to survive unless the world survives. True patriots are no longer champions of Democracy, Communism, or anything like that but champions of the Human Race. It is not the Homeland that they feel called on to defend at any cost but the planet Earth as Home. If in the interests of making sure we don't blow ourselves off the map once and for all, we end up relinquishing a measure of national sovereignty to some international body, so much the worse for national sovereignty.
There is only one Sovereignty that matters ultimately, and it is of another sort altogether.
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