I was teaching my kung fu class the other day working with one of the students.  He was having a difficult time with one of the movements I’d shown him a few weeks earlier.  He just wasn’t getting it.  I told him to just move naturally.  “You can tell when you’re moving correctly,” I told him, “It just feels right.  It’s totally natural.  When you feel off balance, when you feel awkward, it’s a sign you’re doing it wrong.”  As children, we move naturally, and then, somehow, we forget how to move, how to breathe. And then I asked him if he practiced every day.  He answered...

I have always been interested in science. Of course I wasn’t interested enough to major in physics or anything. I’m way too lazy to do that. I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid. That much math would have made my brain implode. Still, I found it interesting enough to read many books and essays on the subject. And you can’t be interested in astronomy without at least a passing knowledge of physics if you want to understand anything. So when my son brought home a science magazine back when he was in high school many years ago and I saw there was an article about current theories in physics,...

I can think back to a time when times were really bad for me. My wife had asked me to leave my home and kids and I found myself living in a tiny trailer in Hawthorne, and not the nice part of Hawthorne either. I was still disabled and living on California Disability Insurance. My employer had fired me because my back was hurt and they didn’t want the potential insurance claims from a re-injury. I was broke all the time. I had bills to pay. I was fat because I was not able to get out and get any exercise, and because I was so damn depressed. I had lost everything. I really only had one friend...

Religious imagery turns a lot of people off, I think. I mean, here we are in the 21st century, having gone to the moon, having seen the earth from outer space, having explored the realm of string theory, and then thinking of the deity as a blue-skinned woman with many, many arms, if you happen to be Hindu. Those two don’t seem to go together so well. It’s hard to think of yourself as a rational citizen of an earth, enlightened by science, and believing in those ancient images of winged angels and such. At least I know that I was, in my youth, put off by the Hare Krishna followers who appeared...

My mother used to drive my family crazy. Often we would go to great trouble to find a gift for her that was just perfect, something we knew that she wanted very much. And we would scramble to find the money to buy the gift, or work our fingers to the bone to make the gift. And she would love it. And she would place the gift in a place of honor in the house and admire it. And then, as soon as someone came over to the house and admired her gift, she would give it away to them. And, well, this hurt quite a few feelings. But my mother could never understand this. Gifts were meant to be given away,...

I attended a lecture a couple of weeks ago about teaching children to follow their intuition.  We don’t do that a lot.  Think about the last time you just “had a feeling” about something.  I once drove to Arizona for the holidays and the trip there was a disaster.  The car broke down in Indio.  I was stuck there for hours.  This is not unlike being in purgatory.  You know, the funny thing about that ill-fated trip to Arizona was that I had a funny feeling something was going to go wrong on the way. From time to time in my life I have had those feelings. I’m sure all of you have....

Well, today is Christmas Eve. And this day always brings images of Mary and Joseph coming into the little town of Bethlehem looking for some place to lay their heads and for Mary to give birth to the child who would grow up to change the world forever, or at least as long as there are people here. It’s a beautiful story; it really is. I hope it’s true, or at least most of it. Of course there are a lot of historical problems with the story. And this all stems from the simple fact that the only sources we have for this story come from two of the gospels, Luke and Matthew. Mark and John...

Now this is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about. When his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found with child through the Holy Spirit. Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man, yet unwilling to expose her to shame, decided to divorce her quietly. Such was his intention when, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her. She will bear a son and you are...

It must have been really hard for John the Baptist. The first we hear of him in any of the books after his birth is some thirty years later when he is out in the wilderness ranting and raving and calling for the people to repent, to change their way of seeing the divine. But something he said must have hit a chord within the people because they came. Maybe they came because they thought he was a little weird and they wanted to see the weird guy ranting and raving in the hair shirt eating the locusts with honey. But a lot of them stayed. So we can guess that a lot of those people felt the same emptiness...

The Advent season to all that believe in the story of Jesus is a very special time, not only as a celebration of the birth of a poor itinerant preacher from Nazareth. It is a celebration of hope. And the meaning of this celebration goes back far beyond the birth of Jesus. We all know that Jesus was most probably not born on December 25th, or anytime during the winter for that matter. It is fairly accepted by most scholars of church history that the holiday, or holy day, which celebrates his birth was selected arbitrarily to coincide with various holidays practiced by non-Christians during...