I often wonder what became of my good friend Stanford Summers, who I first came to know through his evocative writings on education. One thing he said comes to mind a lot: �When we learn that God is not interested in religion but in life, then life will become the subject matter of religion.� When we met, he was a marvelous, informal street minister guru-guide to New York City�s art scene in the late sixties.  I went on several of his walking day tours with members of our youth program from Wilton, Connecticut. We visited art galleries, cathedrals and museums, attended concerts at the Fillmore East and matinee plays on Broadway.  Stan was a genius at informal public relations, once introducing us to Frank Zappa, as we shared luncheon sandwiches and talked with him in the social room of a Greenwich Village church.  Stan was director of Arts in Context, based at St. Clements Episcopal Church, but his ministry was on the street, adroitly guiding young suburban pilgrims through the cultural labyrinths of a great city � Bill Joyner

L I G H T

The religious moment flowers from the practical. � George Macleod

Dear Love, did you not guide us into this world? Did you not follow us as a dear loving friend all of our days, even into the darkness beyond all knowing, even into the innermost center of your own heart, restoring our confidence and stability. Please, even now, rest your hand upon us as time falls away, hold us as we stumble and cannot go on, and bring us at last to the eternal homeland of perfect love.  Amen

Some day, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will discover fire.  � Pierre Teilhard de Chardin  

Happy the man whose own soul does not accuse him, and who has never given up hope.  � Ecclesiasticus 14:1

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The end of time is the beginning of eternity and both are intermingled even now.  Relax within what is, let go of what is not.� � BJ

Religious man�s desire to live in the sacred is in fact equivalent to his desire to take up his abode in objective reality, not to let himself be paralyzed by the never-ceasing relativity of purely subjective experiences, to live in a real and effective world; and not in an illusion. � Mircea Eliade

I have walked with people whose eyes are full of light but who see nothing in sea or sky, nothing in city streets, nothing in books. It were far better to sail forever in the night of blindness with sense, and feeling and mind, than to be content with the mere act of seeing. The only lightless dark is the night of darkness in ignorance and insensibility. � Helen Keller

Arise and be doing, the Lord be with you. � I Chronicles 21:13

    2004   DECEMBER   DECEMBRE   DECIEMBRE   2004