Idle and Blessed

I both need and fear other people. I tend to skew towards the fear, though. My Myers-Briggs and Enneagram agree I'm "the most independent of all the types." I balk when people come too close. I get moody and feel stifled and tend to speed-walk in the other direction. When summer comes around, a hush settles over things. My noisy, peopled school year is on hold, friends leave town, and our clients at work do their yoga from the beaches or the rainforests. Just like that I can hear myself think again; I get out into the open air and start running longer distances. I plan hiking trips, and go home for once, and dream up ways to get out west. I have good friends. I love my people. But I was born 90% loner. A year ago I started training for my first ultra. There's nothing especially glamorous about running 50+ miles a week in the Georgia summer heat, except that being alone with yourself all those hours is a profoundly blissful experience. I learned more about myse...

Ethics without theology are rules without a foundation. I really believe that. Theology can't stop itself from telling us how to live, and we can't know how to live without listening to it. But I also believe, and this is a big deal coming from me, that ethics are not the point of religion . Morality is not the point of faith. Sometimes religion functions as a system of dos and don'ts. When that happens, our faith becomes a way to know we're ok. For those of us with weak stomachs, with overactive consciences, our faith hedges us in as protection from the storm of anxiety. We just want to know we're ok. There are probably people out there who can live their whole lives without the sinking feeling of guilt. There might be people who don't lay awake at night afraid they might be making mistakes, living in sin, saying the wrong words, singing the wrong songs, praising the wrong god. I am not those people. I am an ethicist, but it's deeper than that. ...