AMERICAN PILGRIMAGE

Contemplating death and grief isn't what this Canadian couple had in mind when they journeyed to Sedona.

Yet beauty has a way about it?it can transition you with ease from rushing tourist to contemplative pilgrim.

Whatever faith-language you might use to describe or understand its power, beauty helps you surrender distractions and timetables and instead explore with gentleness what's really going on in your own heart.

Beauty invites you to expansiveness.

Indeed, natural beauty has the power to touch our spirits as do few other things.

It can work a near-magic in its ability to slow our minds, change our perspective, and reconnect us to the sublime realization that we are a vital, but comparatively small, part of a very large creation.

Our language struggles to express this; we resort to words like ?splendor,? ?majesty,? and ?grandeur??

but such nouns only trivialize the direct experience of nature's song which, if you ignore words and go up into the red rock mountains near Sedona, you will be able to hear for yourself.

by Mark Ogilbee and Jana Riess
from American Pilgrimage:
Sacred Journeys and Spiritual Destinations

Although Bonhoeffer had little time to devote to publishing after 1933, his role as spiritual guide is tied to books like The Cost of Discipleship (1937), Life Together (1938), and Letters and Papers from Prison ....

Like Bonhoeffer himself, these books can be interpreted in different ways.

To many, Bonhoeffer?s is a christocentric message that discipleship requires total commitment and that when Christ calls someone, ?he bids him come and die.?

To others, Bonhoeffer?s experiences in the resistance and in prison allowed him to glimpse a ?non-religious? Christianity that would appeal to a post-war world ?come of age.?

To others, Bonhoeffer is more spiritual than religious, a moral mentor for persons of all faiths or none.

What is beyond dispute is that Bonhoeffer?s reputation and influence continue to grow among theologians, lay Christians, and religious seekers.

Among the reasons for his popularity is the integrity represented by his life and death?an integrity between word and deed, thought and action that was as rare in his time as it is in ours.

Apart from the image of a theologian who prays and reads the Bible, what is most compelling about Bonhoeffer is the way he opposed the Nazi regime?unflinchingly, sacrificially and from the very first week of Hitler?s rule. ...

by Stephen Haynes
from Saints, Prophets, and Spiritual Guides:
"Dietrich Bonhoeffer"

Everyone knows the odd combination of longing and dread with which overworked people anticipate their work holidays:

--longing to be at leisure for a week or two
--dread at the pile of work that will await them when they return.

It's not worth it to take a vacation, more than one person has told me. I'd be better off not going away at all.

There is more to it than the dread of the accumulated work though.

A perverse momentum takes hold in some of us when we are in need of rest: we can't stop working.

We don't take it easy?we take it hard. It's as if we were afraid to leave the very thing from which we need a break. ...

by Barbara Crafton
from "The Lord's Picnic"