On Tuesday, October 26th we held a dedication of the Reflection Room at Swedish/Edmonds, where I work as hospital chaplain. It has been a two-year process to get the room built, decorated and dedicated as “A place to worship, reflect, meditate, pray, seek, or just be.” I could write page after page about everything that’s in […]
Category: Abundance
Spirituality and Discernment
Newly returned from the 1st annual Leadership Institute on Group Discernment, I am filled once again with the awareness of how hard it is to do discernment right if we aren’t grounded in God when we begin. Discernment is defined as “separating apart” – distinguishing between God’s movement within us and movements that aren’t of God. In my own mind, I have come […]
Worship without Sacrifice
(The conversation on how we can lower barriers to faith communities continues on my other blog.) Mohandas Gandhi made a list of 7 deadly social sins that I got from Sojourner’s Magazine. 1. Politics without principle; 2. Wealth without work; 3. Commerce without morality; 4. Pleasure without conscience; 5. Education without character; 6. Science without humanity; and 7. […]
Fighting Against, Standing With, or Building Bridges?
I promised earlier that I would talk about steps we can take towards making our faith communities more welcoming of people who don’t fit the majority profile, whatever that may be in a particular community (I was talking specifically about liberal Quakers and class when I said that, but now I want to broaden it out a […]
Crucifixion Faith Is Incomplete
The last three months of my blogging life have turned out to be an exploration of different facets of abundance. In November, I explored it from the individual perspective and concluded that a person’s ability to experience abundance doesn’t seem to have much to do with how much money or “stuff” we have at our disposal. In December, I looked at whether […]
Gratitude Is An Attitude
We chaplains and spiritual directors are supposed to maintain strict confidentiality, and this rule has come about so that we may protect those we serve. At the same time there are groups of people whose voices are rarely heard, and part of their disenfranchisement and suffering arises from being voiceless. Part of my calling to empower and give voice to the […]
Does Church Matter?
As I have come to experience God’s abundance this past month, I have also sensed that my faith community, my Quaker meeting, isn’t a natural place for me to explore abundance. (In fact, I almost wrote a piece entitled “Would someone please give my Meeting some Prozac?” before I determined that my musings on that belonged in a different forum.) As […]
Two T. Rexes and a Blankie
Here is a story about community: One day a couple of years ago, I was in a bad mood because my daughters had left toys and stuff all over the house, once again. I even found their toys and stuff in the bathroom, and I was starting to get very angry. As I bent down to pick up the toys by the […]
Be Careful What You Pray for…
On 12/5 I wrote about my new spiritual discipline of practicing gratitude and praying that my desire for things that aren’t simple would fade away, that those things would become undesirable to me. I also prayed that I would become more aware of God’s abundance in life. As many others do, I close my prayers by saying “amen” – let it be so. […]
Money, money, money…
I must confess that I started my work at the Recovery Cafe (see 12.5 blog entry) with some misgivings about the cliches that seem to me to emanate from 12 Step environments and all the Saturday Night Live-type routines that have grown out of them. Maybe the program is a bit simplistic and ritualized? Maybe as a Quaker […]
Susanne Kromberg's Musings 