Piloting Faith: An (Almost) Daily Meditation

Knowing, and Still Refusing to Know

Rev. Cameron Trimble — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 08:01:55 GMT

“To know what we are doing, and to know that what we are doing is destroying our life, and still to go on doing it: can this be called anything but madness?” — Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

This summer was the hottest ever recorded in the lower 48 states. It wasn’t just a feeling—NOAA confirmed it.1 From June to August, the average temperature was 74.4 degrees Fahrenheit, three degrees above the twentieth-century average. August also set a new record for heat.

Just five days after NOAA released these numbers, the Environmental Protection Agency said it would remove federal limits on greenhouse-gas emissions from coal and gas power plants.2 Consider these two facts together.

We know the planet is getting warmer, and we know the reasons. Burning coal, oil, and gas releases greenhouse gases that trap heat. We can measure carbon dioxide in the air and rising ocean temperatures. We see glaciers shrinking and sea levels rising. We can even predict more extreme heat. The real question now isn’t about what we know, but what we do with that knowledge.

Many wisdom traditions warn about a spiritual danger: seeing the truth clearly, but then living in a way that lets us avoid responding to it.

The Hebrew prophets called this attitude hardness of heart. They cared less about whether people had the right facts and more about whether that knowledge changed how they lived.

The Buddha taught that ignorance, or avijjā, is a root cause of suffering. But in Buddhism, ignorance isn’t just missing facts. It’s failing to see reality clearly enough to stop doing things that cause suffering.

We have more climate data than any people before us. Satellites track the atmosphere, ocean buoys record warming seas, and supercomputers predict possible futures. Scientists study ice cores and tree rings to learn about past climates. We can see the planet’s temperature change almost as it happens. Yet, we can still choose not to turn this knowledge into wisdom.

The Trump administration explained its decision this way. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said removing the power-plant rules would save hundreds of billions in compliance costs, boost energy production, and help meet rising electricity demand. Coal and utility groups said earlier rules threatened grid reliability and made electricity more expensive for consumers.

But economic arguments can’t change physical reality. Carbon dioxide keeps trapping heat, no matter what regulations cost. The atmosphere doesn’t negotiate, vote, or react to political messages. It only responds to chemistry and physics.

That fact is spiritually clarifying. People often spend a lot of energy coming up with reasons why we can’t change. It’s too expensive, too disruptive, or too hard politically. We might think someone else should act first, or that technology will fix things later. But the atmosphere keeps taking in whatever we put into it.

Maybe this is the point where knowledge turns into responsibility. When we know our actions cause harm, it’s morally different to keep doing them than if we didn’t know.

That doesn’t mean moving away from fossil fuels will be easy. Millions of people rely on today’s energy systems for their jobs. Communities need affordable electricity. A fair transition must support workers, low-income families, rural areas, and people whose lives depend on coal, oil, and gas.

But just because it’s complicated doesn’t mean we should do nothing. We know enough to start taking action.

Maybe this is the deeper question behind climate change. It’s not about having enough information, but about whether we’re willing to let what we know change us. Knowledge that doesn’t shape our choices isn’t wisdom yet.

We’ve measured the heat and know where most of it comes from. Now we face the harder challenge.

What will we let that knowledge ask of us?

We are in this together,

Cameron

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Reflection Questions

What truth do you already know that has not yet changed the way you live?
When does complexity become a legitimate reason for moving carefully, and when does it become an excuse for avoiding responsibility?
What would it mean for your knowledge about the changing climate to become wisdom expressed through the choices you make?

A Prayer for the Day

A Prayer: Give Us Wisdom for What We Know

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Holy One,

We have learned so much
about this beautiful Earth.

We can measure the warming seas,
watch glaciers retreat,
trace carbon through the atmosphere,
and see storms gathering from space.

Do not let knowledge end in knowing.

Give us courage
to be changed by what we see.

Where we have caused harm,
teach us repair.

Where change carries a cost,
teach us to bear it together.

Where fear tells us
that another way is impossible,
awaken our imagination.

May knowledge become wisdom,
wisdom become courage,
and courage become care
for this living world
we share.

Amen.

Spiritual Practice: Let One Thing You Know Change One Thing You Do

Most of us don’t need to hear another climate statistic right now. So, skip researching climate change for now. Instead, pick one thing you already know.

Maybe you know that burning fossil fuels warms the atmosphere. Or you might realize that your food, travel, investments, energy use, or political choices have effects you can’t always see right away.

Write down one sentence: I know that __________.

Then, underneath it, write: Because I know this, I will __________.

Make sure your second answer is something small enough that you can actually do it.

You could change how you travel this week, look into where your electricity comes from, move some money toward a climate solution, plant something, reach out to an elected official, support a local resilience project, or find out what climate risks your community is preparing for.

What matters most is not which action you choose, but that you start turning what you know into how you live.

At the end of the day, look back at your two sentences. Notice how it feels when something you know starts to become something you actually do.

There’s an old name for that shift: Wisdom.

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Upcoming Events That Might Be of Interest…

My team and I launched a new experiment we are calling “The Commons.” It’s an online space centered around communities of practice: groups of people who share a common concern, set of problems, or passion for a topic, and deepen their knowledge and expertise by interacting on an ongoing basis. Join the community here.

September 17, 2026, 7-8:45pm ET - I will be joining Jackie Sussman for an online session on practicing eidetics as a part of our “Reclaiming the Power of Imagination” monthly series. Eidetic Imagery is a powerful tool for pastors, denominational leaders, coaches, and spiritual directors working with others, and for individuals seeking deeper integration and healing in their own lives. Jackie is a psychotherapist, author, and leading expert in Eidetic Image Psychology, and has spent over forty years helping leaders and individuals unlock creativity, uncover hidden strengths, and move through limiting patterns. During this session, she will lead a live Eidetic process shaped by mythic imagery, offering a direct experience of the work. REGISTER HERE.

October 6, 2026 - 7-8:30pm ET, ONLINE EVENT - Matthew Fox and I are teaming up again to launch a series called Journeying with the Mystics. The mystics have always emerged in times of uncertainty. They appear when old certainties are crumbling, when institutions no longer provide easy answers, and when people find themselves longing for a deeper experience of the Sacred. Join us for an 18-session exploration of the teachings of St. John of the Cross, Thomas Merton, Hildegard of Bingen, Kabir and Rumi, Meister Eckhart and more. This is more than a lecture series. It is an invitation into a living spiritual journey. REGISTER for the first session HERE!

October 18-21, 2026 - PREACH! 2026 Conference- I’ll be co-hosting PREACH in Minneapolis with Church Anew, a new gathering for preachers, storytellers, worship leaders, and spiritual communicators navigating what it means to speak with clarity, compassion, and courage in a changing world. If you’ve sensed that the preaching moment has changed and are longing for thoughtful community and renewed imagination for this work, I hope you’ll join us.

November 10, 7-8:30pm ET - I’ll be joined by theologian, writer, and professor Dr. Debra Rienstra for a special ONLINE conversation on Refugia Faith. In ecology, refugia are small places where life survives amid disruption, pockets of resilience from which life can eventually regenerate and spread. Debra invites us to consider what this might mean spiritually in an age of climate instability, political turmoil, institutional decline, and profound uncertainty. What if our congregations, communities, relationships, and even our own lives could become refugia, places where courage, compassion, beauty, wisdom, and possibility are protected and cultivated for whatever comes next? I hope you’ll join us for this timely and deeply hopeful conversation. REGISTRATION COMING SOON!

Fun Things My Friends Are Up To…

I get to work with such amazing, creative people. This section is my way of celebrating them—no paid promotions, just joy in what they’re creating.

Become more comfortable talking to others about creation care and more confident acting on solutions. Join Blessed Tomorrow + Faith Training on 9/26. Register: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/fBrgjj76QemIfWeSP2bJRQ

My dear friend, Rev. Shawna Bowman has just launched a new podcast with musician Jennifer Knapp called “My Wise Friend Podcast.” They talk about it this way: “You might know Jennifer from her years as a touring musician and songwriter, weaving stories and songs together across the country. You might know Shawna from their work as an artist, speaker, and community leader exploring the intersection of spirituality, justice, and creativity. While our daily work looks different, we share a deep love for real talk, deep questions, and finding wisdom in unexpected places.” I am so excited about this! I hope you will check it out and support them. https://www.patreon.com/cw/mywisefriendpodcast

I’m delighted to celebrate the upcoming release of Wisdom Church: Abundant Life for Aging Congregations by my colleague, Rev. Dr. Anna Hall. Rather than seeing aging congregations as communities in decline, Anna invites us to recognize them as communities rich with wisdom, purpose, and possibility. Her book offers a hopeful vision for moving beyond anxiety about the future and embracing the unique gifts of older adults as beloved children of God. If your congregation is navigating these questions, this is a resource well worth reading. You can preorder the Kindle edition now, with delivery on August 17: https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Church-Abundant-Aging-Congregations-ebook/dp/B0HBXGYTWC

Every Monday, 12pm ET - ONLINE WRITING GROUP - My dear friend, Meryl Marshall-Daniels, is leading a writing group open to all. This is a simple and spacious writing circle for people who want time to listen inwardly and put words on the page without overthinking, performing, or polishing. Meryl offers a prompt designed to invite reflection, imagination, and attunement to what is already alive within you. The practice honors writing as a way of listening, of letting images, memories, questions, and insights surface in their own time. Learn more here.

If you are a leader or member of a congregation looking for consulting support in visioning, planning, hiring or staffing, please consider Convergence.

Subscribe now

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/national-climate-202608

https://apnews.com/article/epa-power-plants-trump-coal-gas-climate-cac1c2c75f8656d8eaf5f0a240edae15

The Cruelty Is in the Fine Print

Rev. Cameron Trimble — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 08:02:48 GMT

“The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.” — Dorothy Day, The Catholic Worker, February 1946

Photo by Simon Ray on Unsplash

The Trump Administration named it the One Big Beautiful Bill Act,1 which was a clever choice. Long before anyone could read through the hundreds of pages of tax and spending details, we were already told how to feel about it.

Big.

Beautiful.

Now, the details hidden in the fine print are starting to affect people’s lives. It isn’t beautiful.

Changes to SNAP are making it harder for people to get food assistance.2 Medicaid changes will eventually mean millions fewer people are covered. Health insurance will cost more for many families. New work requirements and eligibility rules will force people to keep proving they deserve benefits they once already qualified for.3

We knew a lot of this before the law passed. The Congressional Budget Office predicted that households with lower incomes would lose resources, while those in the middle and at the top would gain. They also projected $211 billion less federal spending on food assistance by 2035 and $1.2 trillion less on Medicaid, with 13.1 million fewer people on Medicaid by then.

So let’s stop acting as if the suffering we’re seeing now is just an unlucky surprise. It was always part of the plan.

This is where we need to be clear about what’s right. A hungry person is not just an idea. Someone with diabetes who can’t afford insulin is not just a line in the budget. A parent choosing between groceries and a medical bill is not just a matter of efficiency.

When the government chooses policies that make it harder for people with less money to get food and health care, while giving more to those who already have more, people of faith and conscience should ask if we’ve lost sight of care for the common good.

Work requirements need a closer look because they sound reasonable. Most of us agree that people should work. Work can give dignity, purpose, community, and the means to live. But many people who get public benefits already have jobs. Others care for children or elderly parents. Some are sick or have disabilities. Some live where it’s hard to find steady work. And the systems for proving eligibility require paperwork, reports, and dealing with complicated bureaucracies.

The CBO found that SNAP work requirements did not increase employment much, but they did cut benefits more than they raised earnings. For Medicaid, past work requirements didn’t do much to boost employment either. The CBO also found that some people with jobs lose benefits just because they miss paperwork.4

Bureaucracy can make cruelty look clean.

Nobody has to say, “Take food away from this person.” The system says: Documentation incomplete.

Nobody has to say, “Let this person go without health care.” The letter says: Eligibility terminated.

Responsibility is abdicated through forms, deadlines, computer systems, and case files. Then we tell ourselves that no one chose this outcome. But someone did create these rules.

An ancient spiritual temptation hides here: dividing human beings into those who deserve compassion and those who do not.

Poor people have faced this kind of judgment for centuries. If you’re hungry, you have to prove you tried hard enough. If you’re sick, you must show you couldn’t have prevented it. If you need help, you have to prove you deserve it before getting any.

Dorothy Day rejected that whole way of thinking. Her Catholic Worker communities fed people simply because they were hungry. Anyone at the door didn’t have to prove they were worthy. Human dignity always came first. She wisely reflected: “The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.”5

That doesn’t mean the government has endless resources. Budgets require real choices. Taxes have effects. Programs should be checked for how well they work. Fraud needs to be dealt with.

But this law challenges the idea that America just can’t afford to help vulnerable people. The same law that cut future spending on Medicaid and SNAP also lowered taxes for the wealthy in ways that add shocking sums to the federal deficit. The CBO found that resources go down for those at the bottom and up for those higher on the income scale.

No unavoidable shortage forced these decisions. We decided who would bear the cost. That’s the real moral issue. A society shows its values not just by what it celebrates, but by whose suffering it is willing to accept.

In the coming months, we’ll hear stories about people losing food assistance, health coverage, and access to care. There may be so many stories that it becomes hard to pay attention to them all.

Don’t let that happen. See the person. Listen to their story. Notice who is paying the price. Then ask the question that spiritual traditions have always asked of every empire, government, congregation, and human heart:

Who is being asked to suffer so that someone else can have more?

The answer will reveal a lot about who we are now, and whether we’re willing to change.

We are in this together,

Cameron

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Reflection Questions

When you hear that someone needs public assistance, what assumptions do you make about why they need it or whether they deserve it?
Where do you see suffering hidden behind bureaucratic language, statistics, or claims of economic necessity?
Who is being asked to bear the cost of the choices our society is making, and what responsibility do you have toward them?

A Prayer for the Day

A Prayer: When There Is Enough

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Holy One,

There is enough.

Enough food to feed the hungry.
Enough medicine to tend the sick.
Enough wealth to shelter the vulnerable.
Enough abundance for every child to flourish.

What we lack is not enough.

What we lack is the courage to share.

Forgive us when we hide our choices
behind numbers and forms,
when we call hunger efficiency
and abandonment discipline.

Keep before us the faces
our policies would make invisible.

The child who is hungry.
The elder who needs medicine.
The parent doing the impossible math
of rent, groceries, and care.

Break open whatever in us
has learned to tolerate their suffering.

Give us hearts tender enough to care
and courage strong enough to act.

May our common life become
an expression of our common humanity.

Amen.

Spiritual Practice: Follow The Cut

Pick a part of the law that impacts people in your community. Start by learning about it, not by forming an opinion. Keep going until you meet someone affected.

If you focus on SNAP, visit your local food bank and ask staff how changing eligibility rules might affect them. If you look at Medicaid, find out which hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, or health centers in your area rely on Medicaid payments. If you are part of a congregation, ask if people are already coming for help with food, medicine, insurance, or medical bills.

Take time to listen before you decide how to help. After listening, respond to a real need you discover. You could donate to a food pantry, help someone with an application, support a local health clinic, call your elected official about what you learned, or ask your congregation if its fund is ready to help more people.

The goal is not to use charity instead of public policy. A food pantry cannot take the place of SNAP, and a church fund cannot replace health insurance.

The aim is to bring policy and people closer together.

Large systems make suffering easier to tolerate when we never have to see who bears the cost. So follow the cut. Find the person. Learn their name if they want to share it. Listen to how the policy feels from their point of view.

Then ask yourself what love calls you to do.

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Upcoming Events That Might Be of Interest…

September 14, 7-8:30pm ET ONLINE EVENT - I’m delighted to share that Dr. Margaret Wheatley is releasing a newly updated edition of her beloved book Perseverance: A Companion for the Journey this October. Written for those committed to serving the world with compassion in difficult times, the book offers daily wisdom and practical guidance for navigating grief, anger, exhaustion, and uncertainty while remaining rooted in love, courage, and presence. Meg and I will be in conversation to explore what perseverance looks like in this moment of history and how we can sustain ourselves for the long work ahead. I hope you’ll join us for what promises to be a deeply meaningful conversation. REGISTER HERE.

Fun Things My Friends Are Up To…

I get to work with such amazing, creative people. This section is my way of celebrating them—no paid promotions, just joy in what they’re creating.

If you are a leader or member of a congregation looking for consulting support in visioning, planning, hiring or staffing, please consider Convergence.

Subscribe now

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1/text

https://abcnews.com/US/millions-dropped-fromsnapfood-assistance-funding-faces-september-uncertainty/story?id=136386092

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/aca-medicare-work-health-insurance-cost-rise-2027-rcna597069

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62105?

Dorothy Day, “Poverty and Precarity,” The Catholic Worker, February 1946.

The Other September 11

Rev. Cameron Trimble — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 08:01:47 GMT

“Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth.” — Swami Vivekananda, World’s Parliament of Religions, September 11, 1893

Photo by Alessandro Chitarrini on Unsplash

Most people around the world remember what happened on September 11, 2001. But not many know about September 11, 1893.

On that day, a thirty-year-old Hindu monk named Swami Vivekananda spoke to thousands at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago. People from many faiths—Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Muslims, Zoroastrians, and others—gathered for one of the first major meetings between Eastern and Western religions.1

Vivekananda stepped up to the podium and began with five words: “Sisters and Brothers of America.” The crowd broke into applause.

That greeting held a deep meaning. Vivekananda was not there just to tolerate others. He saw them as family. He told the crowd that his Hindu tradition taught “both tolerance and universal acceptance.” He also warned what happens when religion loses that spirit. “Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism,” he said, had filled the Earth with violence and blood.

He spoke those words on September 11.

Thirteen years later, on September 11, 1906, about 3,000 Indians met in Johannesburg to protest a discriminatory registration law from the Transvaal government. The law would force Indians to register, give fingerprints, and carry ID documents or face punishment. Mohandas Gandhi was there.2

The people who gathered that day promised to resist. They would not follow an unjust law and would accept the consequences, but they refused to fight oppression with violence. Gandhi later saw that meeting as the start of satyagraha, holding firmly to truth, a way to resist injustice without losing the humanity of either the oppressed or the oppressor.

Another September 11.

Then came September 11, 2001.

Nineteen terrorists hijacked four planes and killed 2,977 people in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. They took the lives of people who boarded flights, went to work, served breakfast, answered phones, and started what they thought would be a normal Tuesday. Firefighters, police officers, and other first responders ran toward the collapsing buildings while thousands ran away.3 Tomorrow marks twenty-five years since then.

For those who lost loved ones, twenty-five years does not make the loss part of history. Some children grew up without parents, and some parents have spent a quarter century without their children. Survivors still feel the effects of that morning. Many first responders and recovery workers became sick and died years later because they rushed to help when they were needed most.

But remembering is not just about the past. Our memories shape us. What we remember, how we remember, and the stories we tell about what happened become part of who we are.

After September 11, 2001, grief and fear spread across the country. Some of that fear led to war, torture, and surveillance. Muslim Americans and people thought to be Muslim faced suspicion, harassment, and violence. The deaths of nearly 3,000 innocent people became linked to the deaths of many more innocent people far away.

This is why those other September 11s feel so haunting. One hundred eight years before the attacks, Vivekananda stood before people whose religions often viewed each other with suspicion and called them sisters and brothers. Ninety-five years before the attacks, people facing racial oppression chose to resist without hatred. Then, in 2001, religious fanaticism turned strangers into enemies and planes into weapons.

These three September 11s show three very different ways we might respond to difference, fear, and power.

We cannot choose the history we inherit, but we can choose what we carry forward from it. Twenty-five years later, fear still tempts us to see strangers as enemies. Political and religious leaders still find it easier to control people who are afraid. Violence still offers the tempting idea that if we defeat the right people, we will finally be safe.

Vivekananda and Gandhi offer us different visions forward. Neither taught people to be passive. Gandhi resisted injustice with great discipline. Vivekananda urged religious traditions to let go of claims of superiority. Both knew we can face what is wrong without letting hatred shape who we become.

Today, bells will ring and names will be read. Families will gather around photos of people they still miss. May we remember with them. And as the bells ring, maybe we can hear another voice from another September 11, speaking across 133 years:

“Sisters and Brothers of America.”

Those words were an invitation back then.

They are still an invitation now.

We are in this together,

Cameron

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Reflection Questions

What has remembering September 11, 2001 formed in you over the past twenty-five years: grief, fear, compassion, anger, courage, suspicion, or something else?
Where are you being asked to resist something that is wrong without allowing hatred of another person to take root in you?
What would change if you genuinely understood people across religious, political, racial, or national differences as sisters and brothers?

A Prayer for the Day

A Prayer For Remembering

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Holy One,

Today we remember
the lives taken,
the courage offered,
the families forever changed.

Hold those whose grief
still carries their names.

And hold us,
lest memory become a weapon.

Where fear breeds suspicion,
teach us compassion.

Where grief hardens into hatred,
keep us tender.

Give us courage
that does not require an enemy,
and strength that refuses
to become what it opposes.

May the dead be remembered.

May the living choose peace.

And may our remembering
make fewer graves.

Amen.

Spiritual Practice: Remember Someone You Never Knew

Today, almost 3,000 names will be spoken. Pick one name.

You can look up the names at the 9/11 Memorial. Avoid picking someone well-known. Just let a name stand out to you.

Take a few minutes to learn about this person. Find out their age, where they lived, what job they had, who they cared about, and what others remember about them. Let the number 2,977 turn into a single person for you.

Now, think more broadly. Pick someone whose life changed after September 11. This could be a Muslim American who faced hatred, a soldier sent to Afghanistan or Iraq, an Afghan or Iraqi civilian, a first responder who became sick later, or a refugee forced to leave home because of war. You do not need to make their experiences equivalent. They aren’t.

Just let both lives stay in your thoughts, without feeling like one person’s pain takes away from the other’s.

Take a moment to sit quietly and think about them. This is a small way to resist seeing others as enemies.

Vivekananda saw sisters and brothers in a room full of different faiths. Gandhi learned that you can stand up for what is right without hating others. Both knew something we are still learning: seeing another person’s humanity does not make us less committed to truth or justice. It makes our commitment even stronger.

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Upcoming Events That Might Be of Interest…

Fun Things My Friends Are Up To…

I get to work with such amazing, creative people. This section is my way of celebrating them—no paid promotions, just joy in what they’re creating.

Starting again on September 7 for every Monday, 12pm ET - ONLINE WRITING GROUP - My dear friend, Meryl Marshall-Daniels, is leading a writing group open to all. This is a simple and spacious writing circle for people who want time to listen inwardly and put words on the page without overthinking, performing, or polishing. Meryl offers a prompt designed to invite reflection, imagination, and attunement to what is already alive within you. The practice honors writing as a way of listening, of letting images, memories, questions, and insights surface in their own time. Learn more here.

If you are a leader or member of a congregation looking for consulting support in visioning, planning, hiring or staffing, please consider Convergence.

Subscribe now

https://parliamentofreligions.org/1893-chicago/swami-vivekananda-on-the-world-stage-of-the-parliament-of-the-worlds-religions/

https://www.gandhiheritageportal.org/es/eventcontentdetail/OA%3D%3D/NzQxOQ%3D%3D

https://www.911memorial.org/visit/museum/exhibitions/in-memoriam

What Is Your Feed Doing To You?

Rev. Cameron Trimble — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 08:01:26 GMT

“From experience he knew that some thoughts left him sad while others made him happy, and little by little he came to perceive the different spirits that were moving him.” — St. Ignatius of Loyola, Autobiography, no. 8

Photo by Brecht Corbeel on Unsplash

Yesterday, Australia introduced a proposal called “My Feed, My Way.”1 The idea is straightforward: social media companies would need to let users choose whether an algorithm decides what shows up in their feeds. People could also pick to see posts only from accounts they have chosen to follow. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese put it like this: “We have an opportunity to shape technology for the better, rather than let it shape us.”

The pickle, of course, is that technology is already shaping us. Your feed doesn’t just show you the world. It watches how you react. Each time you pause on a video, click a headline, watch something again, comment in anger, look at a photo, or share something with a friend, the system learns more about what grabs your attention. Then it gives you more of that.

The algorithm doesn’t care if what grabs your attention makes you wiser or more afraid, kinder or more resentful, connected or lonely. It’s just built to keep you engaged.

Five hundred years ago, Ignatius of Loyola became curious about what moves us, but for a different reason. While he was recovering from a serious battle injury, he started to pay close attention to his own inner life. He saw that some fantasies gave him pleasure at first but later left him feeling restless and empty. Other thoughts affected him differently. They opened something inside him and left him with more peace, generosity, and a greater desire for life.2

Ignatius became fascinated by this difference. Over time, his observations turned into what we now call the discernment of spirits. This is the practice of noticing what’s happening inside us and asking where those feelings are leading. He described consolation as experiences that draw us toward more faith, hope, love, and life. Desolation, on the other hand, pulls us toward isolation, agitation, hopelessness, and feeling smaller.

It was never just about feeling good or bad. Grief can help us love more deeply. Anger can make us notice injustice. Something that feels good can make us more self-absorbed. Something hard can help us become braver. Ignatius cared about where these feelings were leading. He wanted to understand what a certain feeling or impulse was doing to someone, and who they were becoming by following it.

I wonder what Ignatius would think about our phones today. Now, we spend hours in spaces made to stir up our feelings. A headline makes us angry. A photo makes us envious. A video scares us. A post confirms what we already thought about people we don’t like. Another gives us the quick thrill of being agreed with. Before one feeling even settles, we’re already scrolling to the next. I do this too.

Lately, I’m more interested in what happens if, instead of just asking if something online is interesting or true, I ask a more personal question: What is this doing to me?

After twenty minutes of news, am I more ready to engage with the world, or just more afraid of it? After scrolling through social media, do I feel closer to others or oddly less than them? Is my anger helping me notice something important, or is it just being triggered again and again because it keeps me clicking?

These are questions an algorithm can’t answer for us. They require us to pay attention and reflect. That’s why I don’t think we should just give up on technology. Algorithms have helped me discover writers, ideas, music, news, humor, and people I’m glad to have found. Technology can make our world bigger. But anything that can shape our attention so strongly deserves our attention in return.

Australia’s proposal might give people more control over what shows up on their screens. That seems worth looking into. But no law can do the deeper work for us. We still have to learn to notice what is shaping our inner lives.

Ignatius believed that real freedom needs this kind of attention. Not every desire should be satisfied. Not every fear should be trusted. Not every anger should be fed. Not every impulse inside us should decide what we do next. The algorithm is getting very good at figuring out what moves you. You might want to know that too.

So next time you put down your phone, pause for a moment before picking up something else. Notice what’s left inside you. Pay attention to your body, your mood, and how connected you feel to the world and to others.

Then ask: What is this doing to me?

Your answer might help you decide if you want to keep giving it your attention.

We are in this together,

Cameron

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Reflection Questions

What kinds of content reliably capture your attention, and what might that reveal about your fears, desires, wounds, or longings?
When you leave social media or the news, what remains in you? Do you feel more connected and capable of engaging the world, or more anxious, angry, envious, or powerless?
What deserves more of your attention than it is currently receiving?

A Prayer for the Day

A Prayer For the Wisdom to Notice

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Holy Mystery,

Our attention is scattered
across a thousand invitations.

Gather us back.

Beneath the noise,
help us hear what is moving within us.
Beneath the urgency,
help us recognize what is true.

Teach us the difference
between the voice that opens the heart
and the voice that closes it,
between anger that awakens courage
and anger that consumes,
between sorrow that deepens love
and despair that convinces us to disappear.

When the world pulls at us,
return us to ourselves.

Return us to the faces we love,
to the ground beneath our feet,
to the suffering that needs our hands,
to beauty we have been moving too quickly to see.

May our attention become devotion.

May our devotion become love.

And may our love make us free.

Amen.

Spiritual Practice: The Ignatian Scroll

Today, don’t change how you use technology. Instead, pay attention to its aftertaste.

Three times today, when you finish scrolling social media, reading the news, or watching videos, put your phone down and wait thirty seconds before doing anything else.

Then complete this sentence: “After spending time there, I feel…”

Don’t analyze the answer or try to make it spiritually impressive. Restless counts. Amused counts. Angry, energized, connected, jealous, informed, frightened, inspired, numb—all of it counts.

At the end of the day, look at your three answers.

Ignatius believed that freedom begins when we become conscious of what is moving us. So don’t immediately redesign your digital life. Just ask yourself: Do I want more of what this is cultivating in me?

Your feed is studying you all day long. For today, study it back.

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I get to work with such amazing, creative people. This section is my way of celebrating them—no paid promotions, just joy in what they’re creating.

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https://www.pm.gov.au/media/my-feed-my-way

Ignatius of Loyola, The Autobiography of St. Ignatius Loyola, no. 8.

Pay Attention Before It’s Too Late

Rev. Cameron Trimble — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:01:49 GMT

“I have posted watchmen on your walls, Jerusalem; they will never be silent day or night.” — Isaiah 62:6

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Sometimes we avoid thinking about certain possibilities because it would mean admitting the world is less stable than we hope. The integrity of the upcoming midterm elections might be one of those issues. President Trump has spent years raising doubts about mail voting and is now pushing for more federal control over how mail ballots are distributed, even though courts have questioned if the executive branch has the authority for this. We do not know what will happen in November, but we already have enough reasons to pay attention.

A whistleblower told Congress about a new system designed to screen mail ballots before they are sent to voters this fall. The report says the system was rushed, not tested enough, and set up in a way that if one sampled ballot has a problem, thousands of ballots in the same batch could be rejected and returned to election officials.1

In the 2024 election, about one-third of American voters used mail-in ballots. In some states, mail voting is the main way people cast their votes. Military families, rural voters, Native Americans who live far from polling places, elderly and disabled people, and people from all political parties rely on it. Nothing catastrophic has happened yet, but the red flags are waving in our faces.

A federal judge has blocked the new Postal Service requirements from taking effect, ruling that the executive branch lacks authority to rewrite election rules. The Trump administration is appealing and has now asked the Supreme Court to allow the restrictions to take effect immediately.2 Meanwhile, ballots have already begun going out in North Carolina, with other states soon to follow.3 The system may never operate as currently designed. Courts may stop it. Congress may intervene. Public scrutiny may force another course.

This is precisely when attention matters. People often wait until something goes wrong before realizing that the warning signs were real.

The Buddhist tradition has a word for another way of living: appamāda. It is usually translated as heedfulness, vigilance, or diligence. It means being aware of the results of our actions before those results cannot be changed. The Buddha considered it so important that his final recorded teaching was an instruction to remain heedful.4

There is nothing frantic about heedfulness. A careful person does not panic or shout that everything is lost. Instead, she notices smoke and calmly looks for the fire. She notices the crack in the dam. She listens when the engineer says the bridge isn’t safe. She listens when someone inside an organization risks their job to say that something is wrong.

That is where we are now. The question before us is not whether the November election has already been corrupted. It hasn’t happened. The real question is whether we are noticing the things that could make it harder to have a fair and trusted election.

The Postal Service has historically had a wonderfully boring role in American elections. It delivers the mail. That boringness is a virtue. Mail carriers do not need to know how you vote. The Postal Service does not decide if you can vote. States run elections, and postal workers just deliver the envelopes.

The new system would give the Postal Service a gatekeeping role it has never had before, even while federal courts are still deciding if the executive branch has the power to set these rules. That deserves debate regardless of which party we support.

Democracy relies on thousands of systems most of us hardly notice because they usually work well: county election offices, poll workers, voting machines, envelopes, barcodes, databases, postal trucks, and people sorting mail late at night. There is something special about how ordinary all of this is. Millions of people who do not know each other work together so someone else can vote.

When something puts that process at risk, being careful means we should not wait until Election Day to pay attention. Call your representatives. Pay attention to the court cases. Learn how voting works in your state.

If you want to vote by mail, ask for your ballot early and send it back as soon as you can. The USPS recommends mailing your completed ballot at least a week before the deadline.5 Help someone else make a voting plan. Volunteer as a poll worker. Support organizations protecting voting access. And resist the temptation to become cynical. Cynicism tells us the system is already rigged, so nothing we do will make a difference.

Being careful tells us something very different. Something valuable is at risk. That is why we need to pay attention.

We still have time. That is not a reason to relax. It is a reason to act.

We are in this together,

Cameron

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Reflection Questions

Where in your life have you ignored warning signs because acknowledging them would have required you to act?
How do you distinguish spiritual vigilance from anxiety or fear?
What is one concrete action you can take now to strengthen the institutions and relationships upon which your community depends?

A Prayer for the Day

A Prayer For Keeping Watch

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Holy Mystery,

Keeper of all that is fragile and precious,
Keep watch with us.

When the first smoke rises,
give us eyes willing to see.
When a warning is spoken quietly,
give us ears willing to hear.
When fear tempts us to look away,
steady our hearts.

Guard us from the sleep of indifference
and the fever of panic.

Make us awake but not afraid,
watchful but not consumed,
clear-eyed and rooted in love.

Bless those who tend the quiet machinery
of our common life,
and especially those who see danger
and find the courage to speak.

When something precious is vulnerable,
do not let us wait for its breaking
before we remember our love for it.

Make us heedful.
Make us faithful.
Make us brave enough to act
while there is still time.

Amen.

Spiritual Practice: Protect Something Before It Breaks

Choose one thing in your life that you usually notice only when it stops working. It could be your local library, election office, watershed, neighborhood association, public school, congregation, friendship or even your own body.

Learn something about what keeps it functioning. Who does the invisible work? What pressures is it facing? What does it need in order to remain healthy? Then do one thing that strengthens it.

For this election, that might mean checking your voter registration, learning your state’s voting rules from its official election office, volunteering as a poll worker or helping someone you know make a voting plan. But carry the practice beyond November.

Heedfulness asks us to stop waiting for crisis before we become attentive to what sustains us.

Love something while it is still whole. Protect something before it breaks.

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Upcoming Events That Might Be of Interest…

TODAY!!!! September 8, 2026, 12:30 - 1:30pm ET, ONLINE EVENT with NY Times Best-Selling author and journalist, Sarah Wilson!!! Sarah has just published her latest book I Eat The Stars: How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World. Join us for this one hour conversation where we will talk with Sarah about how we face collapse, how we find beauty and who we can become in these challenging times. Scholarships are available. REGISTER HERE.

TODAY!!!! September 8, 2026, 7-9pm ET, ONLINE EVENT - I’ll be hosting a powerful online gathering on The Black Madonna: Sacred Wisdom for a World in Crisis with Matthew Fox, Alessandra Belloni, and Christena Cleveland. We will explore the Black Madonna as a symbol of resilience, liberation, sacred feminine wisdom, and healing in a fractured world through conversation, story, music, and spiritual reflection. If you feel drawn toward a deeper encounter with the Divine Feminine and the ancient traditions that continue to nourish movements for justice and wholeness, I hope you’ll join us. Learn more and REGISTER HERE.

Fun Things My Friends Are Up To…

I get to work with such amazing, creative people. This section is my way of celebrating them—no paid promotions, just joy in what they’re creating.

If you are a leader or member of a congregation looking for consulting support in visioning, planning, hiring or staffing, please consider Convergence.

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Associated Press, “Postal Service work to comply with Trump’s executive order is rushed and sloppy, a whistleblower contends,” Sept. 1, 2026. https://apnews.com/article/midterm-elections-postal-service-mail-voting-7f7cf4fdf2e9cf369ae96f96fbda03f2?

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-administration-renews-supreme-court-bid-limit-mail-in-voting-2026-09-06/

https://apnews.com/article/mail-voting-ballots-trump-north-carolina-36353407257c253179dec1eaa1254f61

https://accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an10/an10.015.than.html

https://about.usps.com/postal-bulletin/2026/pb22694/html/cover_005.htm

Wendell Berry Has Gone Home

Rev. Cameron Trimble — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 08:03:10 GMT

“Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.” — Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”

Wendell Berry passed away this week at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. He was ninety-two. His daughter Mary confirmed his death and said, “There’s not enough I could say about him to do him justice.”1

I understand that feeling myself. Berry has been a companion to me for years. He was a poet, novelist, essayist, farmer, activist, and teacher. I would also call him a theologian, even if he never used that title. He spent his life asking important questions about how we live on this Earth, how we treat each other, what our economies say about our values, and whether we can see creation as a gift instead of just a resource. Berry’s theology had dirt under its fingernails.

After spending years studying, traveling, and teaching elsewhere, he came back to Kentucky and settled on a farm near Port Royal. He stayed there, farming, writing, raising a family, walking the same woods, and watching the same river. Many years later, he said life there moved “from one revelation to another,” because the place was still “inexhaustibly beautiful and wonderful.”

From his small part of Kentucky, Berry saw something our culture still seems to miss: we cannot separate the problems facing people from what we do to the Earth. In his 1970 essay “Think Little,” he wrote about war, racism, and environmental destruction, and said that “the separation of these three problems is artificial.” He believed their common source was “the mentality of greed and exploitation.” More than fifty years later, that sounds less like a comment and more like a prediction.

Berry saw industrial culture separate things that should stay connected. Food lost its link to soil. Consumers lost touch with farmers. Wealth lost its tie to responsibility. People lost their connection to the places that support them. He also believed Christianity often lost its connection to the material world.

In The Unsettling of America, he said modern industrial society is built on “radical disconnections” between body and soul, marriage and community, and community and Earth.2 His life’s work was putting the relationships back together.

He famously wrote, “Eating is an agricultural act.”3 With those words, dinner becomes a kind of theology. The food on our plate connects us to soil, water, weather, farmers, animals, labor, transportation, and choices about how we treat the Earth.

Berry thought Christianity should make us pay attention to those relationships. In a 2004 interview, he said that if Christians really believed the scriptures teach we live by God’s breath and exist in God, the effects on our economy would be “just devastating.” He argued that faith should lead to “an entirely generous and careful economic life.”4

If the world shares in the breath of God, then no decision is just about economics. How we farm matters. How we work matters. How we spend money matters. What we take from the Earth matters. What we throw away matters.

Berry also learned something important from Buddhism. He once said that learning about the Buddhist idea of Right Livelihood filled “a huge hole” in the Christianity he knew. Your spiritual life cannot be separated from how you make a living or what your work asks of the world.

His prophetic voice was sometimes fierce because he saw what exploitation leads to. “Exploitation leads, with perfect logic, to exhaustion,” he said.

We know that exhaustion now. We see it in soil worn out by industrial farming, in warming oceans, and in mountains stripped bare. We see it in tired workers and parents, in communities that have lost their strength, and in lives focused on consuming but never feeling satisfied.

Berry didn’t give us a big plan to fix everything. His answers were always local. Grow something. Get to know your neighbors. Care for a place. Protect the soil. Make things with care. Accept limits. Do work that doesn’t harm the things life depends on. And when despair came, he went outside.

In “The Peace of Wild Things,” Berry admitted that he too sometimes woke at night frightened about the world and his children’s future. His response was to go where the heron fed and the wood drake rested. There, beneath what he called the “day-blind stars,” he could “rest in the grace of the world.” He wasn’t running from reality. He was returning to a reality bigger than despair.

That may be the Berry teaching I need most now. He spent decades warning us about what was coming, lived to see much of it happen, and kept planting anyway. He kept farming. He kept writing. He kept loving one particular place. He kept insisting that another way of living remained possible.

He also left us with a message that feels almost like a blessing for this moment: “Practice resurrection.”5

Wendell Berry has returned to the Earth he loved. Now his work belongs to us. And there is still planting to do.

We are in this together,

Cameron

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Reflection Questions

What place has formed you, and what responsibilities come with belonging to that place?
Where in your life have you accepted exhaustion of yourself, other people, or the Earth as simply the price of getting what you want?
What would it mean for you to “practice resurrection” in the particular place and community where you live?

A Prayer for the Day

A Prayer For the Grace of the World

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Holy Mystery,

Today we give thanks for Wendell Berry.

For the Kentucky soil he loved, the words he gave us, the questions he would not stop asking, and the stubborn hope that kept him farming, writing, protesting, planting, and paying attention.

We give thanks for a life that reminded us that creation is not scenery. It is our home.

Forgive us for the ways we have forgotten.

We have treated soil as dirt, forests as timber, mountains as minerals, animals as commodities, and people as labor.

We have built economies that exhaust the very lives upon which they depend.

Teach us another way.

Help us become faithful to particular places and particular people. Teach us to know where our food comes from and where our water goes. Give us the patience to repair rather than discard, to cultivate rather than consume, to stay long enough for a place to become beloved.

When despair for the world grows in us, lead us back to the living world.

May we find still water.

May we notice the heron.

May we remember the stars.

And having rested for a while in the grace of the world, may we return to the work that love requires.

May Wendell Berry rest now in the Earth he loved.

And may those of us who remain become worthy members of this beautiful community of life.

Amen.

Spiritual Practice: Practicing Resurrection

Berry’s spirituality was never primarily abstract. He kept returning to the particular: this farm, this river, this meal, this neighbor, this patch of soil.

So today, don’t try to save the world. Choose one small piece of it to love. Go outside and walk slowly through the place where you actually live. Leave your phone behind if you can. Don’t count your steps. Don’t listen to anything. Don’t turn the walk into exercise.

Pay attention.

Find one living thing you normally pass without noticing. Perhaps it is a tree, a creek, a patch of weeds, a bird, a garden, an insect, or the soil beneath your feet. Stay there for a while.

Ask yourself what you actually know about it. Do you know the tree’s name? Do you know where the creek begins or where it goes? Do you know what birds live near your house? Do you know what grew on this land before your neighborhood was built? Do you know whose ancestors lived here before yours arrived? Let curiosity become relationship.

Then ask a more Berry-like question: What does this place need from me?

Maybe the answer is nothing dramatic. Pick up some trash. Plant something native. Learn where your food comes from. Support a local farmer. Repair something instead of replacing it. Meet a neighbor. Use less poison on your lawn. Sit outside long enough to notice who else lives there. Or perhaps the answer is simply to love the place more consciously.

Berry spent a lifetime teaching that care grows from affection. We protect what we have learned to love.

Before you go inside, stop once more. Look around. This is not the environment. This is where you live. And for whatever years you are given here, you belong to it.

Practice resurrection by helping something live.

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Upcoming Events That Might Be of Interest…

September 8, 2026, 12:30 - 1:30pm ET, ONLINE EVENT with NY Times Best-Selling author and journalist, Sarah Wilson!!! Sarah has just published her latest book I Eat The Stars: How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World. Join us for this one hour conversation where we will talk with Sarah about how we face collapse, how we find beauty and who we can become in these challenging times. Scholarships are available. REGISTER HERE.

September 8, 2026, 7-9pm ET, ONLINE EVENT - I’ll be hosting a powerful online gathering on The Black Madonna: Sacred Wisdom for a World in Crisis with Matthew Fox, Alessandra Belloni, and Christena Cleveland. We will explore the Black Madonna as a symbol of resilience, liberation, sacred feminine wisdom, and healing in a fractured world through conversation, story, music, and spiritual reflection. If you feel drawn toward a deeper encounter with the Divine Feminine and the ancient traditions that continue to nourish movements for justice and wholeness, I hope you’ll join us. Learn more and REGISTER HERE.

Fun Things My Friends Are Up To…

I get to work with such amazing, creative people. This section is my way of celebrating them—no paid promotions, just joy in what they’re creating.

If you are a leader or member of a congregation looking for consulting support in visioning, planning, hiring or staffing, please consider Convergence.

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https://apnews.com/article/wendell-berry-obit-d20b66bb8a1d298153f760f30662a4f7

Wendell Berry, “The Body and the Earth,” in The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (Sierra Club Books, 1977), p. 143

Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating,” originally published in What Are People For? (North Point Press, 1990).

Wendell Berry, interview with Rose Marie Berger, Sojourners, July 2004.

Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” Farming: A Hand Book (1970); later collected in Collected Poems: 1957–1982, pp. 151–152.

When Did You Stop Feeling Fully Alive?

Rev. Cameron Trimble — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 08:00:51 GMT

“I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.” — Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

A statue of St. Francis of Assisi (CNS photo/Gregory A. Shemitz)

This week I spent three meaningful days with the leaders of the Franciscan Federation at their annual board retreat. We focused on important strategic work, making decisions, developing plans, and considering questions about the future. But, this work always felt connected to the spiritual tradition that called us together. Each morning, we started with prayer.

One morning, we meditated on a short letter Saint Francis wrote to Anthony of Padua. Anthony was a gifted scholar and teacher, and Francis gave him permission to teach theology to the friars. But he included one condition:

“I am pleased that you teach sacred theology to the brothers, providing that…you do not extinguish the spirit of prayer and devotion during the study of this kind.”1

Do not extinguish the spirit of prayer and devotion…

Francis wasn't warning Anthony against learning. In his Rule, he had offered the same warning to friars engaged in ordinary work: whatever you are doing, do not allow it to “extinguish the Spirit of prayer and devotion.” His concern was not theology. His concern was what happens when our work, however worthy, consumes the interior life.

The same thing can happen to an entire life. We can know a lot about things we no longer truly experience. We might count our steps but forget the walk itself. We might take a photo of the sunset before really seeing it. We can keep up with news from everywhere but hardly notice what is happening inside ourselves. We can spend hours watching other people’s lives on screens and end the day feeling oddly distant from our own.

I don’t think this is just about lacking discipline. Much of modern life is built to capture our attention and turn it into profit. Our devices are made to keep us hooked. Workplaces expect us to always be available. Our economy relies on us always consuming. Even rest is sold as something to help us work better.

Feeling exhausted by all this does not mean we are weak. We are living in systems that expect people to act in ways we were never meant to. Francis offers us language for what the exhaustion feels like spiritually.

Something is being “extinguished.” We see it in diseases of despair. We see it in people numbing themselves inside technological ecosystems designed to keep them scrolling. We see it in our estrangement from the natural world and in the strange loneliness of societies where people are digitally connected almost constantly. We see it in ourselves when we realize that we have spent another week managing life without quite inhabiting it.

Now, these systems are starting to break down. In ecology, politics, the economy, and society, many structures built on constant growth are hitting limits they can’t avoid. This breakdown is scary. But when things fall apart, it can also reveal beliefs we have accepted for so long that we thought they were just the way things are. One of those assumptions is that a good life is primarily a productive life.

Francis imagined a very different reality. For Francis, creation was not just raw material. It was about relationship. Sun, moon, water, fire, animals, land, and people were all part of one sacred family. Prayer was not separate from daily life. The world itself called for devotion. Being alive meant taking part in a creation already filled with God’s presence.

That kind of spirituality changes the question from “What can I accomplish with my life?” to “What is my life devoted to?”

Devotion is a beautiful word because it holds love within it. We give ourselves to what we care about. A parent is devoted to a child. An artist is devoted to beauty. A gardener is devoted to the earth and the seasons. A friend is devoted to another’s well-being. Devotion brings our scattered attention to a place where it can truly rest.

The American mythologist Joseph Campbell once told journalist Bill Moyers that he didn’t believe people were searching so much for the meaning of life as for “an experience of being alive.”2

I think Francis would have understood. Feeling truly alive often comes in moments when we feel close to the world around us. We might be laughing with someone we love, working with our hands, standing under the stars, singing with others, holding an animal, or walking in the woods and suddenly notice we haven’t thought about ourselves for a while. For a moment, we are simply participating.

Maybe prayer begins there. It may not start with words spoken to a faraway God, but with such full attention that life itself feels like communion.

The question I am carrying home from these Franciscan leaders is: How can I live rooted in the Spirit of prayer and devotion? How can I stay awake to the call of Life?

I wonder what your answers would be. What helps you lose yourself in the best way? What stirs tenderness in you? What brings back your sense of wonder? What reconnects you with your body, with others, with the Earth, or with whatever you see as Sacred? Those questions are worth taking seriously.

Maybe the task before us in this unraveling age is not simply to preserve the institutions we inherited. Maybe it is to become inspirited again.

We need to find our way back to lives shaped by devotion instead of distraction, by relationships instead of extraction, by participation instead of consumption.

Francis feared that even sacred theology could extinguish the spirit if we confused studying faith with living faithfully.

Eight hundred years later, his warning feels remarkably contemporary. Do whatever work is yours to do. Study. Build. Organize. Teach. Lead. Repair what can be repaired. But guard the flame.

Don’t get so busy managing your life that you forget to actually live it.

We are in this together,

Cameron

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Reflection Questions

What in your life is currently extinguishing your sense of aliveness, wonder, or connection to the sacred?
When do you feel most fully alive, not merely entertained, productive, or distracted, but deeply present to your own life?
What are you devoted to right now? Does the way you spend your attention reflect that devotion?

A Prayer for the Day

A Prayer To Rekindle What Is Alive in Us

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Spirit of Life, 

There is something in us that longs to be fully alive.

We feel it when beauty catches us unexpectedly, when laughter breaks through our seriousness, when we lose ourselves in music, when our hands touch soil, when someone we love looks into our eyes and we remember that we belong to one another.

We feel it when the world becomes more than background and we become more than people rushing through it.

Help us protect that aliveness.

We confess how easily we give our attention away. We fill silence before we have heard what it might contain. We hurry through moments we once prayed would come. We become so occupied with managing our lives that we sometimes forget to inhabit them.

Teach us the devotion Francis knew.

Not devotion as obligation, but devotion as love.

Help us recognize what deserves our finite days and our precious attention. Give us courage to loosen our allegiance to everything that keeps us distracted, exhausted, afraid, or numb.

Return us to relationship with our bodies, with one another, with the living Earth, and with the Sacred presence moving through it all.

And where the flame has grown faint, breathe gently upon it.
There is still life here.
Help us live it.

Amen.

Spiritual Practice: Follow What Makes You Come Alive

For the next twenty-four hours, pay attention to your aliveness. Notice when something in you opens. Perhaps you hear a piece of music and your body responds before your mind has time to explain why. Maybe you step outside and the quality of the morning light catches your attention. Perhaps a conversation suddenly becomes honest, or you find yourself laughing harder than you have in weeks.

Notice those moments. Then notice the opposite.

When do you feel yourself contracting? What leaves you depleted, scattered, numb, or strangely absent from your own life? Which activities swallow an hour and leave almost nothing behind? Which relationships consistently require you to become less yourself? What kinds of media leave your nervous system agitated long after you put the screen down?

Don’t judge any of it yet. Simply gather the information.

At the end of the day, sit quietly for ten minutes and remember the moments when you felt most alive. Write down three of them.

Then ask yourself: What were those moments trying to tell me about what I love?

This is where Francis’s word devotion becomes useful. Devotion is not merely religious intensity. Devotion is what happens when love organizes our attention.

Look at the three moments you wrote down. Is there something there that deserves more of your life? Maybe it is music. Friendship. Solitude. Animals. Prayer. Movement. Making things. Teaching. Gardening. Justice work. Sitting beside people who need someone to listen. Being outside long enough to remember that the Earth is alive beneath your feet.

Choose one and give it a little more room this week.

Francis’s warning was not simply, “Remember to pray.” It was more searching than that.

Whatever work you are doing, however important it may be, do not let it extinguish the Spirit of prayer and devotion.

So pay attention to yours. Then protect what keeps it alive.

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Upcoming Events That Might Be of Interest…

Fun Things My Friends Are Up To…

I get to work with such amazing, creative people. This section is my way of celebrating them—no paid promotions, just joy in what they’re creating.

If you are a leader or member of a congregation looking for consulting support in visioning, planning, hiring or staffing, please consider Convergence.

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Francis of Assisi, “A Letter to Brother Anthony of Padua,” in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, Volume I: The Saint, ed. Regis J. Armstrong, J. A. Wayne Hellmann, and William J. Short (New City Press, 1999), p. 107.

Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, ed. Betty Sue Flowers (New York: Doubleday, 1988), p. 5.

What Should We Never Let AI Do for Us?

Rev. Cameron Trimble — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 08:00:31 GMT

“The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention.” — Thich Nhat Hanh

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

No matter how you feel about him, Bill Gates understands technological change. He played a key role in the personal-computer revolution that changed almost every part of our lives. Now, he thinks we are facing another big shift, and this one could be even more disruptive. This past week he published an article that lays out his thinking.1

He isn’t saying that artificial intelligence is a bad thing. In fact, Gates thinks AI could make a huge difference in medicine, education, farming, scientific research, and access to expert advice. For example, a rural hospital could use AI to spot a stroke when there’s no specialist around. Farmers in poorer countries might get advanced advice about weather, soil, and disease. Scientists could find new treatments because AI can see patterns that people might miss.

But this same technology could also wipe out millions of jobs, give more wealth and power to a few, make fraud and surveillance easier, and affect how children grow up. It could even replace some of the tough human relationships that help us learn and grow. Gates thinks this change could happen in just a decade, not over generations like past revolutions. Things are moving fast.

Gates says we need to start thinking about where we should not let technology go. He has an idea he calls Human Reserved, inspired by nature reserves. Just as we sometimes choose not to build on forests, drain wetlands, or mine mountains, we can decide that just because we can use something doesn’t mean we should. We set boundaries and say: This is valuable because we leave it untouched.

Gates asks if we should set similar boundaries in parts of our lives. He shares a story about his father, who had Alzheimer’s disease late in life. At some point, Bill Gates Sr. couldn’t always tell his caregivers when he was hungry, but they still knew. They had spent enough time with him to notice the small signs in his body and mood. One day, a smart robot might be able to do the same thing. Gates says it shouldn’t.

For most of the technological era, we’ve asked: Can we do it? Can we make it faster? Can we automate it? Can we make it bigger? Can we remove human work? Can we make it cheaper?

But with artificial intelligence, we need to ask a different question: Should we? That’s the spiritual question.

For thousands of years, our traditions have protected things that aren’t efficient. The Sabbath keeps one day free from work. Buddhist meditation keeps silence safe from being used for something. Indigenous traditions protect the bond with land from being just about ownership or use. Monastic communities keep prayer as a regular break from work.

Time after time, people have set limits around things we think are too important to give up for the sake of efficiency. Love isn’t efficient. Neither is friendship, raising children, grieving, sitting with someone who is dying, or listening patiently to a story you’ve already heard many times.

A computer program might sum up the story, but love listens again. This is why I think our conversation about AI needs to go beyond just technology.

Of course, we need engineers and computer scientists. We also need economists to think carefully about what happens when machines can do so much of our work. Governments should make policies before people lose their jobs, not after. Gates says we’ll need new institutions, better social safety nets, changes in taxes, international teamwork, and for the public to have a say in decisions that are now mostly made by tech companies.

But we also need poets, parents, and teachers. We need nurses, caregivers, artists, philosophers, spiritual teachers, and children. We need people who know what humans need to thrive, not just what machines can do. These conversations should start now.

Convenience is powerful. Once we get used to machines doing things for us, it can be much harder to take those tasks back ourselves.

I use AI every day and I’m amazed by it. It helps me research, imagine, organize, and notice connections I might have missed. I think it can really help people thrive.

But I don’t want AI to live my life for me. I don’t want a companion so agreeable that I forget how to handle tough friendships. I don’t want kids to miss out on the hard work that turns learning into wisdom. I don’t want machines making choices about people without anyone being responsible for what happens. I don’t want efficiency to be the only reason we decide what should stay human.

Maybe each of us needs a Human Reserve, a part of life where we consciously say: No. I’ll do this myself.

The future of AI will need big public decisions about money, rules, safety, and power. But another part of the future is shaped every day in our homes and relationships.

So maybe this week we start with one question:

What in your life is so precious that you would never want to automate it?

That might be where we start to protect what makes us human.

We are in this together,

Cameron

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Reflection Questions

What part of your life would you place inside a “Human Reserve,” something you want to remain fundamentally human even if technology could perform it more efficiently?
Where has technology genuinely enlarged your life, and where might convenience be quietly diminishing a human capacity you value?
What do you hope human beings will still know how to do for one another fifty years from now?

A Prayer for the Day

A Prayer For Human Wisdom

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Spirit of Love, 

We are creating powers
our ancestors could scarcely have imagined.

Give us wisdom equal to our ingenuity.

May the tools we build heal rather than diminish, widen possibility rather than deepen inequality, and give human beings more freedom to love rather than less reason to need one another.

Protect in us what should never be optimized away.

Our capacity to wonder.
Our willingness to struggle.
Our need for friendship.
Our tenderness toward children and elders.
Our ability to sit beside suffering without trying to make it disappear.

Teach us when to welcome the machine and when to turn it off.

Give courage to those building these technologies, wisdom to those regulating them, protection to those whose livelihoods will be disrupted, and a meaningful voice to those who rarely get invited into rooms where the future is being designed.

May we create a future worthy of the astonishing gift of being human.

Amen.

Spiritual Practice: Create Your Human Reserve

Sometime today, make a list of five things you do not want to outsource entirely to a machine. Don’t make this theoretical. Look at your actual life.

Maybe you want to write birthday cards yourself. Perhaps you want to keep reading books that require concentration rather than asking for summaries. Maybe you want to call people instead of allowing software to maintain relationships for you. Perhaps prayer, art, therapy, teaching, caregiving, cooking, discernment or writing belongs on your list.

Choose one. Then practice it this week without technological assistance. If you choose writing, begin with the blank page and stay there awhile. If you choose relationship, call someone without first asking AI what to say. If you choose learning, wrestle with the question before reaching for an answer. If you choose creativity, tolerate the awkwardness of making something mediocre. Notice what happens.

The frustration may be part of the practice. Human beings learn through resistance. We develop patience because other people don’t always understand us. We develop imagination because creation begins with uncertainty. We develop compassion because relationships ask us to encounter lives that cannot be optimized around our preferences.

AI may eventually become extraordinarily good at removing friction. Be careful about giving all of it away. Some friction is where the soul gets its grip.

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When The Mountain Came Down

Rev. Cameron Trimble — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 08:01:17 GMT

“All conditioned things are impermanent. When one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering.” — Dhammapada 277

A thangka showing the bhavacakra with the ancient five cyclic realms of saṃsāra in Buddhist cosmology. Medieval and contemporary texts typically describe six realms of reincarnation.

These past few days have been filled with heartbreak. Hundreds have died in Nepal, and thousands are still missing. Families wait for news about their loved ones as rescue workers search through mud, rubble, and ruined river valleys.

In the face of suffering like this, it is hard to know what to say. Sometimes words feel too small, and explanations can even hurt. Often, our first duty is just to grieve with those who are grieving.

Yesterday, Sufi mystic and teacher Sadhguru gathered with his followers for an event that was originally planned as a spiritual teaching. After the flood, it turned into a show of solidarity. Some pilgrims traveling with his Foundation are still missing.

At the gathering, Sadhguru talked about how fragile life is and how important it is to live fully while we can, echoing an old teaching from Tibetan Buddhism called the Four Reminders, or the Four Thoughts That Turn the Mind.

These ideas are not comforting in the usual way. They do not say that everything happens for a reason or that suffering is God’s will. Instead, they ask us to face the reality of being alive.

The first reminder is that human life is precious.

That teaching feels unbearable when so many lives have just been lost. Somewhere in Nepal, a family would give anything for one more ordinary morning with someone who is gone. One more cup of tea. One more argument about something inconsequential. One more chance to say, “I love you,” or “I’m sorry,” or simply, “I’ll see you tonight.”

We spend so much of our lives waiting for life to begin. We wait for work to calm down, for the kids to grow up, for the political crisis to end, or for when we finally have enough time.

The Four Reminders urge us to stop putting off being present.

The second reminder is about impermanence. Everything changes, even the things and people we love. Death does not wait for an invitation.

The Buddhist tradition does not ask us to contemplate death so that we become frightened of living. It asks us to remember death so that we finally become available to life.

Even mountains are impermanent. The Himalayas seem eternal to us, since our lives are short, but they are actually living geological systems. Ice shifts, rocks break, glaciers shrink, and rivers change course. Scientists are still figuring out how much climate change affected this disaster, but the warming Himalayas are making glacier hazards more dangerous and harder to predict.

Which brings us to the third reminder: karma. In Western culture, karma is often seen as a kind of cosmic payback: if you do something bad, the universe will get you back. But the real teaching is more serious. Our actions have consequences, and we help shape the future by what we do now.

The carbon we release matters. The forests we cut down matter. The energy systems we create matter. It matters if governments share scientific data, if communities have early-warning systems, and if neighboring countries work together.

Compassion cannot just stay as a feeling. Sooner or later, it needs to become action through engineering, policy, rescue teams, climate adaptation, shared data, and governments working together.

The fourth reminder is about samsara, the cycles of suffering we keep repeating because we cannot picture living in a new way.

Maybe this is where the teaching becomes most urgent for us. We know the climate is changing. We know the Himalayas are getting warmer. Millions of people live downstream from glaciers and mountains that are becoming less stable. Yet, countries that share these mountains and rivers are still caught up in political rivalries that make it hard to work together.

Water does not care about those divisions.

A flood that starts on one side of a border does not stop to show documents before crossing over.

Maybe the mountains are reminding us of something our politics often forgets: we already belong to each other.

We share the atmosphere. We share watersheds. We share the climate. More and more, our survival will be shared too.

The Four Reminders do not help us avoid grief. Instead, they invite us to go deeper into it, until grief turns into compassion.

Life is precious, so cherish it.

Life is impermanent, so be here for it.

Our actions have consequences, so take responsibility for what we set in motion.

Suffering continues when we keep repeating what causes it, so have the courage to make a change.

Today, families in Nepal are waiting for loved ones who may never return. They do not need spiritual explanations. They need our compassion, our prayers, our help, and, in time, a world that is willing to learn from this tragedy.

Tomorrow morning, most of us will wake up to another ordinary day. Let us realize what an extraordinary gift that is. And may we use it well.

We are in this together,

Cameron

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Reflection Questions

If you truly remembered that this life is precious and impermanent, what would you give more of your attention to today?
Where are you experiencing the consequences of choices, personal or collective, that were made years or generations ago? What responsibility does that create for the choices you make now?
What pattern of suffering in your life, community, or our shared world are you being asked to stop repeating?

A Prayer for the Day

A Prayer For Those Waiting in Nepal

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Holy Mystery,

Today our hearts turn toward Nepal.

We hold the families who are waiting for news, the parents searching for children, the children searching for parents, and all those sitting beside an empty chair wondering whether the person they love will ever come home.

We remember those who died.

Each one carried a whole world within them. They had people they loved, work left unfinished, plans for tomorrow, stories only they could tell.

May their memory be held tenderly.

Be with those searching through mud and rubble. Strengthen rescue workers, medical teams, neighbors, monks, spiritual communities, government officials and ordinary people who have become caregivers because the moment demanded it of them.

And be with those whose grief is only beginning.

May we resist the temptation to explain their suffering from a distance. Help us instead to accompany it.

The mountains remind us that we are temporary.

The rivers remind us that we are connected.

The changing climate reminds us that our actions travel farther than we imagine.

Give us the courage to live accordingly.

May our awareness of death make us more alive.

May our grief deepen our compassion.

May our compassion become action.

And may the suffering of this moment awaken in us a greater commitment to protect this beautiful, fragile world and one another.

Amen

Spiritual Practice: The Four Reminders For One Ordinary Day

After you read this, put your phone down and sit somewhere quietly for a few minutes. You do not need to meditate correctly. You do not need incense, special music, or an enlightened facial expression. Just sit.

Then move slowly through the Four Reminders.

Begin with precious life. Look around you. Notice where you are. Feel your body breathing. Think of one person you love. Let yourself register the astonishing fact that both of you are alive at the same time. Say quietly: This life is precious.

Then remember impermanence. Bring to mind something you love without frightening yourself with thoughts of losing it. Simply acknowledge that it will change. You will change. The people you love will change. Nothing gets to remain exactly as it is. Say: This will not last forever.

Then consider cause and effect. Think about one choice you will make today whose consequences will travel beyond today. It might involve money, energy, food, transportation, work, a relationship, your community, or the Earth. Ask yourself: What am I setting in motion?

Finally, consider the cycles of suffering. Notice one pattern you keep participating in even though you know it does not lead where you want to go. Perhaps it is overwork, consumption, anger, avoidance, resentment, compulsive news-checking, or silence when something needs to be said. Don’t condemn yourself for it. Simply ask: What would happen if I stopped feeding this?

Then get up and live your ordinary day. Drink the coffee. Feed the animals. Answer the email. Drive to work. Call someone you love.

The practice isn’t intended to make the day more solemn. It is meant to make the day more alive.

Somewhere tonight, someone in Nepal would give almost anything for one more ordinary Tuesday with someone they love.

We have been given ours.

Let us be here for it.

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What We Mean When We Call Someone “Illegal”

Rev. Cameron Trimble — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 08:03:07 GMT

“My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours. We belong in a bundle of life.” — Archbishop Desmond Tutu

In July, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 49,571 people. This was the highest number of immigration arrests in a single month during President Trump’s second term. More than half of those arrested had no criminal convictions or pending charges. Fewer than one in four had been convicted of a crime.1

Forty-nine thousand five hundred seventy-one.

When numbers get that large, it’s easy to lose sight of what they mean. One arrest feels personal. Fifty thousand becomes just a statistic.

But ICE does not arrest statistics. ICE arrests people.

One of those arrested was a 36-year-old Haitian man who worked as a cook and supervisor at a restaurant in Key West. He left Haiti after receiving death threats and was waiting for his asylum claim to be processed. His manager described him as a hardworking family man who had never been in trouble with the law.

Then he was gone. He had coworkers. People depended on his paycheck. Someone appreciated his sense of humor. Someone noticed when he didn’t come home. This is how a statistic becomes a person again.

The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber said we experience life in two main ways: I–It and I–Thou. We use categories to make sense of the world, but they can be harmful when they hide the real person in front of us.

Think about the word illegal. A visa can expire. Someone might cross a border without permission. A person may not have legal immigration status. These are all legal situations. But a human being cannot be illegal.

When we turn a legal label into someone’s identity, we erase who they are. We let our grammar do the moral work of disappearing them. We stop asking how long they have lived here, why they came, if their children were born here, who they love, who depends on them, or how many years they have tried to work through our broken immigration system.

The label makes us think we know everything we need to know. This is how dehumanization starts. Before people vanish from our communities, they vanish from our words. Neighbors are called “illegals.” Families become “cases.” People are called “removals.”

Then we add words like "our country," and "our communities," as if the borders were natural, as if anyone knew in advance who belonged where. We operate as if the cartographers hadn't drawn those lines through Indigenous lands, through geographies built by centuries of forced migration. The grammar of “illegal immigrant” can only exist inside a grammar of “legitimate citizen,” and that legitimacy was historically constructed through genocide and enslavement. The deportation regime doesn’t fall from the sky. It sits on a foundation.

We need to say clearly that what is happening is morally wrong. This does not mean countries should have no borders or immigration laws. It also does not mean everyone who enters or stays without permission should be allowed to remain. Immigration policy is complex, and good people will disagree about some parts of it. But just because it’s complicated doesn’t mean we can ignore what’s right and wrong.

A government can enforce laws without scaring communities. It can focus on real threats instead of going after people who have built lives here. It can respect due process. It can see that separating parents from children and removing longtime neighbors hurts more than just the person being deported.

Legal authority does not make every exercise of that authority just. Our own history should have taught us that by now.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu spent his life confronting a government that had made dehumanization legal. Apartheid had statutes, courts, police and bureaucracies. It issued documents. It created categories. It decided who belonged where.

Tutu answered that machinery with the ancient African wisdom of Ubuntu. A person is a person through other persons. My humanity is bound up with yours. Ubuntu does not ask whether we are connected. It tells us that we already are.

That is why removing someone from a community is never as simple as relocating one individual across a border. Human beings put down roots in one another. A parent disappears from a dinner table. A restaurant loses a cook. A congregation loses a member. A construction crew loses a coworker. A child waits for someone who isn’t coming home.

A web tears. When we become indifferent to that tearing, something tears in us too.

So what can we do? We start close to home.

Find out what immigrant families in your community are experiencing. Learn which organizations offer reliable immigration legal help. If a family loses a wage earner, help with groceries, rent, childcare, transportation, or school pickup. If your congregation has immigrant members, ask what support would actually help instead of deciding for them. Support journalists and advocates who track what happens to people after detention.

And speak up. When someone reduces a human being to “an illegal,” gently put the person back into the sentence. When elected officials celebrate arrest numbers without acknowledging the lives behind them, ask harder questions. Call members of Congress and demand that they finally do the difficult work of creating an immigration system that is orderly, humane and worthy of the people whose lives depend upon it.

None of us can personally repair decades of congressional failure. But we can refuse to let political failure become permission for further moral failure.

Nearly fifty thousand people were arrested in July. We cannot know all their names. But they have names. They have people who love them. They have histories, fears, favorite foods, inside jokes, responsibilities, regrets, dreams and people waiting for them to come home.

There is a person there.

A neighbor.

A parent.

A beloved.

A Thou.

Seeing them is where our spiritual work begins. Standing with them is what comes next.

We are in this together,

Cameron

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Reflection Questions

Where have you noticed language making it easier for you to think of a group of people as a category rather than as individual human beings?
What changes in you when you imagine one immigration arrest not as a statistic, but as an empty chair at someone’s dinner table?
Who in your community might need your presence, resources, voice or solidarity right now?

A Prayer for the Day

A Prayer: Keep Us Human

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Spirit of Love, 

Keep us human in a time
when people are being turned into numbers.

Do not let repetition make us numb.

When we hear fifty thousand,
help us remember one.

One parent.
One child.
One neighbor.
One frightened person wondering what comes next.

Hold those who have been taken from their families and communities. Hold the children waiting for parents, the spouses searching for information, the coworkers staring at an empty station, and the neighbors who are afraid that tomorrow someone will come for them.

Give courage to attorneys, advocates, clergy, organizers, journalists and ordinary neighbors who are standing beside them.

And give us the moral clarity to recognize cruelty even when it arrives carrying official paperwork.

Keep our hearts tender enough to grieve.

Keep our eyes open enough to see.

Keep our courage strong enough to act.

Remind us that another person's dignity does not diminish our own. Their flourishing does not threaten ours. Their humanity is bound up with ours.

May we become people who refuse to look away.

Amen.

Spiritual Practice: Put a Person Back in the Sentence

Pay attention to the language you encounter today. Notice words like illegal, alien, deportee, migrant, criminal, foreigner. Notice what happens inside you when you hear them. You don’t need to police every word or correct every person. Simply notice when language begins to obscure the human being it supposedly describes.

Then deliberately put a person back into the sentence. Instead of reading only about “50,000 immigration arrests,” find one person’s story. Learn their name if it is publicly available. Learn where they lived, what work they did, whom they loved, and what happened to them. Stay with that story for a few minutes.

Then do one thing that moves you from attention toward solidarity. Find a reputable immigrant-support organization in your community and learn what it needs. Perhaps they need money. Perhaps volunteers. Perhaps people willing to provide transportation, accompany someone to court, deliver groceries or help a frightened family understand where to turn.

Don’t try to solve immigration today. Make one relationship harder to erase.

Ubuntu teaches that we become human through one another. So practice becoming human today. See someone. Learn their story. And if they need someone beside them, stand there.

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She Farmed Happiness

Rev. Cameron Trimble — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 08:01:19 GMT

“If you see someone without a smile, give ’em yours.” — Dolly Parton

Photo by Wes McFee on Unsplash

The world became a bit less magical. Dolly Parton died yesterday. I never knew her personally, and most of us didn’t. Still, she was one of those rare public figures who felt like family. For over sixty years, she was part of our lives. We heard her on the radio, saw her in movies and TV specials, laughed at her jokes, admired her voice, and enjoyed seeing her at awards shows, always sparkling with rhinestones that could almost distract passing planes.

She was one of the great songwriters and performers of our time. But her death feels personal because Dolly gave us more than music. She shared something of herself. There was a warmth about her, a generosity that made people feel welcome, even through a TV screen. She seemed truly happy to be alive and glad that we were here too.

Maybe that’s why people from all walks of life loved her. Country musicians and drag queens loved Dolly. Evangelical grandmothers and gay men loved Dolly. Appalachian families and Hollywood stars loved Dolly. People who might not sit together at Thanksgiving could still agree on Dolly Parton.

I wonder how she managed that. It wasn’t because she hid who she was or lacked strong beliefs. Dolly was deeply rooted in East Tennessee, her family, her Christian faith, country music, and the culture that shaped her. She never tried to smooth out her edges to please everyone. She just didn’t need others to be like her to care about them.

These days, many things push us to look at each other with suspicion. We put people into groups before we even know their names. We judge their goodness by their politics, religion, race, sexuality, nationality, or where they live. We’ve gotten too good at deciding who deserves our care.

Dolly didn’t live that way. She was always herself and made space for others to be themselves too.

She didn’t just talk about kindness. She put it into action. Dolly grew up as one of twelve children in a family with little money. Her father, Lee Parton, never learned to read or write, and Dolly said this embarrassed him all his life. She loved him deeply, and years later, after she became wealthy, she turned one of his biggest struggles into a gift for other children.

She began giving away books. The Imagination Library started in her home county in Tennessee, sending free books to young children no matter their family’s income. The idea grew far beyond what she first imagined. Soon, books were arriving every month in children’s mailboxes in many countries. By the end of last year, the program had given away over 300 million books. Today, somewhere, a parent will open a mailbox and find a book for their child because Dolly Parton lived.

Her generosity went far beyond books. She supported children’s hospitals and medical centers. When wildfires hit East Tennessee, she helped families who lost their homes. She also gave to medical research, including work that led to the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. Much of her giving came from a simple idea: if you have something, find a way to share it.

Her nephew Bryan Seaver gave a beautiful description of her life yesterday. Dolly’s father had been a farmer. He farmed the soil. Dolly, Seaver said, “farmed songs and happiness.” It’s a wonderful way to describe a life well-lived.

All of us are farming something with our lives. Every conversation plants something in another person. The way we spend our money grows something. The stories we tell, the grudges we hold, the people we encourage, the institutions we support, the attention we give, and the kindness we show all become part of the field we leave behind. Over a lifetime, those small plantings add up.

Dolly’s field is enormous. Hundreds of millions of books sit on shelves because she lived. Children became readers because she remembered her father’s struggle. Musicians found courage because she opened doors. Families survived disasters because she shared what she had. Millions of people found comfort in her songs, and many others simply smiled when she walked onto a stage.

There is something spiritually meaningful in a life like that. Most of us will never have Dolly Parton’s money or platform. We will not record albums, build theme parks, or have our faces known around the world. But none of those things made her life generous. They just made her kindness reach more people. She paid attention to what she had and kept finding ways to share it.

Maybe that’s how we can tell if a life has been well lived. It’s not about how much we collect, but about how much life grows around us because we were here.

Today, though, I don’t want to rush to the lesson. Today, I just want to miss her. Grief deserves that much space.

When someone has brought beauty into the world for most of our lives, their absence changes things. We don’t need to have known them personally to feel it. Love has never cared much about those kinds of boundaries.

So today we can play her songs. We can laugh at her jokes. We can remember her big hair and those bright rhinestones. We can be grateful for a woman who was never embarrassed by where she came from and somehow made millions of people feel more comfortable being themselves. And we can feel sad. Grief is what happens when love suddenly has nowhere familiar to go.

Eventually, some of that love becomes gratitude. Some becomes memory. Some becomes imitation. We take whatever goodness another person’s life awakened in us and try to keep it moving through the world.

Dolly’s songs will keep playing. Her books will keep arriving in children’s mailboxes. Her generosity will keep moving through lives she will never see.

She spent eighty years planting. Now the field belongs to us. May she rest in peace. And when the grief softens enough for us to ask, maybe Dolly leaves us with one simple question:

What are we farming with our lives?

We are in this together,

Cameron

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Reflection Questions

Who has made your life larger, kinder, or more joyful simply because they were in it? What did they plant in you?
When you look at the field of your own life—your relationships, work, generosity, words, and attention—what are you cultivating?
What is something you have been given that you could now pass along to someone else?

A Prayer for the Day

A Prayer For a Life Generously Given

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Spirit of Love, 

Today we give thanks for Dolly.

For the music and the laughter,
the rhinestones and the stories,
the books placed into children's hands,
the families helped when disaster came,
and the countless acts of generosity
we will probably never know about.

Thank you for the particular gift of her life.

We grieve because something beautiful has left the world,
and we are grateful because something beautiful was here.

Hold those who loved her most closely:
her family, her friends, her colleagues,
and all those for whom this loss is not the death of an icon,
but the absence of someone they knew and loved.

And hold the rest of us too.

Teach us not to be embarrassed by our grief
simply because we never knew her personally.
Some lives reach us from a distance.
Some voices become companions.

Some songs find their way into places in us
that words alone cannot reach.

May Dolly's memory be a blessing.

And may her life remind us that generosity is never wasted.

Help us notice what we have been given
and become less afraid to give it away.

May we plant joy where there is weariness,
possibility where there is discouragement,
welcome where there is loneliness,
and kindness wherever the world has grown hard.

When our own lives are finished,
may something good still be growing because we were here.

Amen.

Spiritual Practice

Give Something Away

Dolly Parton’s life offers us a lovely spiritual practice for today: Give something away. Not something you no longer want. Give away something you value.

It doesn’t have to be money. Give someone an hour of your undivided attention. Give encouragement you’ve been meaning to offer. Give a book to a child. Give credit to someone whose work has gone unnoticed. Give a meal. Give forgiveness if you’re ready. Give someone the benefit of the doubt. Give a little more generously than is entirely comfortable.

Or, in Dolly’s honor, give someone a book.

There’s a beautiful connection there. Her father’s inability to read became one of the wounds Dolly carried from childhood. She could have simply grieved it. Instead, she transformed that grief into millions upon millions of books for other people’s children.

That is a particular kind of spiritual alchemy: taking something that hurt and refusing to let pain have the final word.

So you might ask yourself today: Is there something painful in my own story that could become a gift for someone else?

You don’t have to resolve it. You certainly don’t have to pretend the pain was somehow necessary or good. But perhaps some compassion has grown there. Some wisdom. Some tenderness toward people who struggle in ways you now understand. Give a little of that away.

Then tonight, listen to a Dolly song. Pour something you enjoy, turn up the volume, and let yourself miss her.

Grief needs ritual. Sometimes the ritual is a candle. Sometimes it’s prayer. And sometimes, thank God, it’s “Jolene” played much too loudly.

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What We Are Doing to Our Friends

Rev. Cameron Trimble — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 08:00:53 GMT

“The only way to have a friend is to be one.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is happening between the United States government and Canada is just…heartbreaking.

For most Americans, Canada has always been a constant presence. We share the world’s longest border. Our economies are closely connected. Families travel back and forth. We help each other fight fires. We share rivers, lakes, power grids, industries, defense agreements, sports leagues, music, culture, and even have friendly debates over which celebrities belong to which country.

Canadians came to our aid after September 11. When American airspace suddenly closed, the small town of Gander, Newfoundland, welcomed thousands of stranded passengers into homes, schools and churches. People cooked meals, offered showers, handed strangers the keys to their cars and made room for people they had never met. That’s what neighbors do.

Today, we are treating that neighbor like an adversary. The Trump administration has put 50 percent tariffs on billions of dollars’ worth of Canadian goods and is threatening even more tariffs on Canadian cars, auto parts, and steel. President Trump has told Canadian leaders to “fall in line.” His administration has asked for concessions that Prime Minister Mark Carney says would hurt Canadian industries and limit Canada’s ability to make its own decisions. Canada has refused. And Canadians are angry. I can’t blame them.

This weekend, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy called Canada’s resistance “foolish.” He also pointed out Canada’s weaker military as a reason why Canada could not win a trade war with the United States.

Think about what has happened to the relationship when an American cabinet secretary finds himself reminding our closest neighbor that we have the bigger military.

There is something deeply wrong with this idea of strength. It assumes that every relationship is ultimately a contest of leverage. If I am bigger than you, you should yield. If I have something you need, I should use your dependence to extract concessions. If you resist, I should make the cost of resistance painful enough that eventually you submit.

We recognize this behavior immediately when it happens in a family. We call it bullying. Sometimes abuse. We certainly don’t call it friendship. Yet countries can get confused about moral principles that seem obvious in everyday life.

There are legitimate trade disagreements between the United States and Canada. Friends disagree. Countries negotiate vigorously over their interests. Canada has policies the United States considers unfair, and Canada has its own grievances with us. None of that requires pretending one country is innocent and the other guilty.

Disagreement is not the same thing as domination. A healthy relationship leaves room for the other person to remain fully themselves. Maybe one of the real tests of power is this: Can I have power without needing you to be smaller?

The question applies to nations, but it also applies to marriages, workplaces, congregations, friendships and families.

Can I disagree with you without humiliating you?
Can I have more resources without using your need against you?
Can I be stronger without making you afraid of my strength?
Can I hear “no” without interpreting it as an act of disloyalty?
Can I love someone whose interests are not identical to mine?

Our wisdom traditions have spent thousands of years trying to teach us this. The Hebrew scriptures tell people not just to tolerate neighbors but to seek justice with strangers. Islam puts great importance on how we treat neighbors; teachings say Gabriel spoke so often about their rights that Muhammad thought neighbors might even become heirs. Buddhism teaches us to practice metta, or loving-kindness, that extends compassion beyond those who help us. Jesus taught that loving your neighbor is tied to loving God.

None of these traditions imagines relationship as weakness. They understand something empire repeatedly forgets: relationship is a form of strength.

For generations, the United States possessed an extraordinary kind of wealth that rarely appeared on a balance sheet. We had friends. These friendships weren’t perfect. They weren’t free from self-interest or past mistakes. But they were alliances built over decades through trade, cooperation, mutual defense, diplomacy, cultural exchange, and many everyday human connections. That kind of trust takes generations to build. It can be destroyed astonishingly quickly.

Canadians are already changing their travel plans and what they buy. Their government is working to build new economic ties so they won’t have to rely as much on the United States. Prime Minister Carney said something Americans should listen to: “America has changed, and … we will not return to our old relationship.” I find that truth terribly sad.

There are losses that tariffs cannot measure. You can calculate the price of a car after a 50 percent tariff. You can calculate the value of steel crossing a border. You can calculate exports, imports, trade deficits and currency fluctuations. There is no easy economic model for the value of a neighbor who trusts you.

Maybe that is a takeaway here. For a long time, our culture has confused strength with dominance. We admire the person who wins the negotiation, closes the deal, crushes the competition, and leaves the room with more than everyone else.

But there are victories that leave us poorer. If you win the argument and lose the friendship, what exactly have you won? If you extract the concession and destroy the trust, was it a good deal? If you become powerful enough that your neighbors begin organizing themselves to be safe from you, are you actually stronger?

These aren’t only questions for Donald Trump. They’re questions for us. Nations eventually express the values their people tolerate.

Maybe this is a moment for Americans to say something very simple to our Canadian neighbors: We see what is happening. We understand why you are angry. We know friendship does not require submission, and millions of us still believe that the great privilege of having good neighbors is not the opportunity to dominate them. It is the responsibility to become good neighbors ourselves.

Canada is not our enemy. May we stop behaving as though we need one.

We are in this together,

Cameron

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Reflection Questions

When you have more power than someone else, how does that power change the way you relate to them?
Where have you seen competition or the need to “win” damage a relationship that once depended upon trust?
What would it mean for you to become a better neighbor—to the people next door, to people across political or cultural divides, and to people beyond your country’s borders?

A Prayer for the Day

A Prayer To Teach Us to Be Good Neighbors

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Spirit of Love, 

You placed us in a world
where none of us survives alone.

Our rivers cross borders.
Our air ignores them.
Our economies intertwine.
Our histories overlap.
Our lives depend upon people
whose names we will never know.

Teach us to treat relationship as a gift
rather than an opportunity for leverage.

When we have power,
make us gentle with it.

When we have abundance,
make us generous with it.

When we disagree,
keep us curious enough to listen.

When we are afraid,
keep us from turning neighbors into enemies.

Forgive us for the times
we have confused dominance with strength
and winning with wisdom.

Bless our Canadian neighbors
and all those whose trust has been wounded.

May those of us in the United States
have the humility to recognize the harm being done in our name
and the courage to say that it does not represent the future we seek.

Across every border,
teach us again the ancient wisdom
that our well-being is bound together.

May we become trustworthy neighbors
in a world desperately in need of them.

Amen.

Spiritual Practice

Borrow a Cup of Sugar

There was a time when being a neighbor involved a certain amount of dependence. You ran out of sugar and knocked on someone’s door. Someone’s car wouldn’t start, so you asked for jumper cables. A storm came through and everybody emerged with chainsaws, extension cords, casseroles and opinions about how the power company should be run. Something important happens when we need one another.

So this week, instead of trying to become more self-sufficient, practice interdependence. Borrow something. Ask someone for help. Offer something you have without keeping score.

If you know your neighbors, knock on a door and have an actual conversation. If you don’t know them, introduce yourself. If there is someone nearby whose politics, religion, nationality, race, age or life experience differs from yours, become curious about their life before deciding what you think about them.

And sometime this week, reach across a larger border too. If you know someone in Canada, send them a note. Don’t defend American policy. Don’t explain what “most Americans” supposedly think. Don’t make them take care of our discomfort.

Simply say something like: I’m watching what is happening between our countries, and I’m sorry. I value the friendship between our peoples. I hope we find our way back to being good neighbors.

Then listen if they want to respond. The point of this practice is not niceness. It is remembering that interdependence is not weakness.

We live in an age that celebrates independence, leverage and self-sufficiency. But almost everything keeping you alive today arrived through relationship. Someone grew your food. Someone maintains the electrical grid. Someone purified your water. Someone made the medicine in your cabinet. Someone taught your children. Someone you will never meet helped create the device on which you are reading these words. We are already dependent upon one another. The spiritual work is learning to become worthy of that dependence.

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Too Much Thrust

Rev. Cameron Trimble — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 08:01:43 GMT

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” — attributed to Lao Tzu

Photo by Simon Moore on Unsplash

Years ago, I had just landed an airplane and was taxiing off the runway when another aircraft caught my eye. It was a small personal jet, sleek and beautiful, the kind of airplane that makes a pilot stop whatever she is doing and watch. It looked fast and fun and, frankly, very sexy.

The tower cleared it for takeoff. The pilot taxied onto the runway, lined up on the centerline, and advanced the throttles.

Almost immediately, I knew something was wrong.

The jet accelerated hard. As soon as the wings had enough lift, the nose jerked sharply upward. Instead of climbing steadily, it shot into the air. It got maybe three hundred feet up before it lost lift, stalled, and fell back toward the ground. It crashed into the field between the runways. Everyone aboard was killed.

Those of us who saw it just sat there in silence. I don’t remember anyone saying much. Sometimes your mind can’t keep up with what your eyes see, and watching a plane fall from the sky is one of those moments. Pilots train for emergencies because we know what can happen. That day, we saw the worst come true.

A few days later, I was back at the airport and asked what the investigators had learned about the accident. I was told that the owner had recently upgraded the engines and that the new engines produced substantially more power than the airplane’s original configuration had been designed to handle. This was reportedly its first flight with the new engines.

I have thought about that airplane many times since. Maybe it’s because so much of life right now feels overpowered.

I feel it in my own body. Some mornings, before I finish my first cup of coffee, I’ve already heard about a war, a political crisis, a climate disaster, three urgent emails, seventeen text messages, the latest AI breakthrough, and someone online warning that civilization will end by Thursday.

My nervous system was not built for this. Yours wasn’t either. And yet we keep adding bigger engines.

People have become incredibly good at creating power. We can send information around the world in seconds. We can fly across oceans in hours. We burn in a few generations the carbon the Earth took millions of years to store. We split atoms, change genes, automate thinking, move mountains, dam rivers, and light up whole continents at night. But we rarely ask if the systems getting all this power can actually handle it.

I’ve spent much of my life admiring people who get things done. I like big ideas and powerful airplanes. I’m not the type to do less. If there’s time for another project, I usually wonder why I haven’t filled it yet. So I understand the seduction. More thrust feels like possibility. Until it doesn’t.

The human body has limits that no productivity system can negotiate away. Attention has limits. Families have limits. Organizations have limits. Democracies have limits to how much disruption and mistrust they can absorb before something begins to fracture.

The Earth has limits too, although we have spent the better part of two centuries behaving as though acknowledging them would represent some terrible failure of imagination.

Soil takes time to regenerate. Aquifers refill at their own pace. Forests cannot be clear-cut indefinitely. The atmosphere can absorb only so much carbon without changing the climate. None of this is ideological. It is simply how living systems work.

I’ve started wondering whether one of the great mistakes of our age is confusing power with capacity. They aren’t the same thing. The engines can generate the thrust. That doesn’t mean the airframe can carry it. Technology can deliver unlimited information. That doesn’t mean a human mind can meaningfully absorb it. An economy can extract resources faster. That doesn’t mean an ecosystem can replenish them. An organization can demand more. That doesn’t mean the people inside it can continue giving more without consequence. AI can accelerate enormous amounts of human activity. That doesn’t mean we have developed the ethical, social, political or psychological capacity to live wisely with that acceleration.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I keep returning to Sabbath. Sometimes I hear people speak of Sabbath as another wellness technique we should adopt because studies show rested people are 14 percent more productive on Monday. God save us from making Sabbath productive. That is not the kind of Sabbath I am speaking of.

I mean the older, stranger idea. The idea that we stop. For one day, we don’t improve anything. Don’t produce. Don’t harvest. Don’t prove your worth. Let the field sit there. Let your neighbor sit there. Let the animal sit there. Let yourself sit there. The world will continue without your assistance.

That is a fairly radical theological claim. Sabbath places a limit inside the structure of life and calls the limit holy.

Maybe that’s what we’ve forgotten. We often see limits as insults. When we hit a boundary, we quickly start inventing ways to get past it. Sometimes, that drive leads to medicine, art, exploration, and amazing progress. Sometimes it produces an airplane with engines too powerful for its frame. Wisdom lies somewhere in knowing the difference.

A good pilot doesn’t resent the limitations of an airplane. She learns them intimately. Every aircraft has what pilots call a flight envelope: the range of speed, altitude, weight, load and maneuver within which that particular airplane can safely fly. Knowing the envelope doesn’t diminish the freedom of flight. It makes flight possible.

I wonder what our flight envelope is, not only as a species, although we urgently need to ask that question. I mean yours.

What can your body actually carry?
How much information can your mind absorb before knowing more stops making you wiser?
How many people can you care for well?
How much grief can you metabolize before you need rest?
How much work is enough?
How much money is enough?
How fast do you actually want your life to go?

I don’t know the answers to those questions. I’m not sure there is one answer that applies to everyone. But I have become increasingly suspicious of any culture that answers all of them with more.

More isn’t inherently wrong. Neither is power. Neither is ambition. Thrust is what gets an airplane into the sky.

But the point was never to climb as fast as possible.

The point was to fly.

We are in this together,

Cameron

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Reflection Questions

Where in your life are you currently asking more of yourself than your body, mind, or spirit can sustainably carry?
Where have you confused greater power, speed, or productivity with greater capacity?
What would “enough” look like in one part of your life right now, and what might become possible if you honored that limit?

A Prayer for the Day

A Prayer To Teach Us the Wisdom of Enough

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Holy Mystery, 

We have become very good at acceleration.

We know how to make things faster,
bigger, more powerful and more productive.

We are less practiced at knowing when enough is enough.

Teach us to honor the wisdom written into living things.

The body that needs sleep.
The soil that needs rest.
The forest that needs time to regenerate.
The heart that needs silence.
The community that needs trust.
The grieving person who cannot be hurried toward healing.

Help us recognize limits not as failures,
but as part of the sacred architecture of life.

Give us courage to pull back the throttle
when everything around us demands more.

Give us wisdom equal to our power.

Give us patience equal to our ambition.

And when we forget that we are creatures
living within a world we did not create
and cannot control,
return us gently to the rhythms
that have sustained life for billions of years.

May we learn the difference
between what we can do
and what we should do.

May we know when to climb,
when to level off,
and when simply to fly.

Amen.

Spiritual Practice

Find Your Flight Envelope

Pilots don’t discover an aircraft’s limits by pushing it until something breaks. We learn the flight envelope before we fly.

Try offering yourself the same care. Sometime today, take a blank piece of paper and draw a large circle. Think of the circle as your current flight envelope—not your theoretical capacity on your very best day, but the actual life you are inhabiting right now.

Inside the circle, write down what genuinely sustains you. Include the amount of sleep your body needs, the people you want enough time to love well, the work that feels meaningful, movement, prayer or contemplation, time outdoors, play, solitude, creativity, and whatever else helps you feel like yourself.

Then notice what is crowding the edges. What are you carrying that leaves you chronically depleted? Where have you increased the thrust without strengthening the frame? Is there too much work, news, responsibility, consumption, screen time, caregiving, outrage, travel, noise, or simply too many expectations competing for the same finite human life?

Don’t immediately make a plan to optimize all of this. That would be wonderfully on-brand for the culture we’re examining. Just notice.

Then choose one place to reduce the thrust.

Turn off the news for an evening. Cancel something that does not need to happen. Leave an hour unscheduled. Go to bed earlier. Say no without constructing a legal defense for your decision. Take a walk without turning it into exercise. Sit somewhere beautiful without photographing it.

Pay attention to what happens when you create a little margin.

The practice is not about making your life smaller. An airplane operating safely within its flight envelope can cross oceans.

The practice is learning the conditions under which you can actually fly.

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A Lot of Zeros

Rev. Cameron Trimble — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 08:01:36 GMT

“Just as my ancestors planted for me, I too am planting for my descendants.”— Babylonian Talmud, Ta’anit 23a

This week, the United States reached a number so large that it is almost impossible to understand.

Forty trillion dollars.

That is now the total national debt of the United States.1 This includes money owed to the public and debts between parts of the federal government. The number alone does not mean the economy will collapse tomorrow, and experts can disagree about how much debt a wealthy country like the United States can handle. Still, most people who study the federal budget agree on one thing: we cannot keep going like this forever.

On the same day, President Trump gave reporters a tour of his construction projects at the White House. There is a new helipad, a new granite driveway, and a huge ballroom being built. He even signed his name on a piece of granite that will be part of the presidential seal on the helipad.2

The images felt allegorical. We are borrowing huge amounts from the future while the president literally carves his name into stone.

This is not just Donald Trump’s problem. The national debt has grown under presidents from both parties. We have fought wars without paying for them, cut taxes without cutting spending, and borrowed a lot during economic crises and the pandemic. We have made promises through Social Security and Medicare that are getting more expensive as the population ages. Now, the interest on our debt takes up more and more of what the government collects.

Trump’s policies have added a lot to the debt, especially tax changes that lowered federal revenue.3 But if we only blame one president, we avoid facing the bigger ethical question: What do we owe people who have not been born yet?

There is a wonderful story in the Jewish Talmud about a teacher named Honi who encountered an old man planting a carob tree.4 I’ve told us this story before, but its such a good one, let’s remember it together…
Honi asked the old man how long the tree would take to bear fruit.
“Seventy years,” the man replied.
Honi was confused. He knew the old man would not live long enough to eat from this tree.
The man answered that when he entered the world, he found carob trees planted by those who came before him. Just as his ancestors planted for him, he would plant for those who came after.

I love the clarity of this story. The old man saw wealth in a different way than we do. His wealth was not merely what he possessed. His wealth was what he could pass forward. He saw himself as part of a chain of responsibility, reaching back to ancestors he never met and forward to descendants he would never see.

Many Indigenous traditions share this wisdom. The choices we make today also affect future generations. The Earth is not just something we inherit from our ancestors. It is also something our descendants trust us to care for.

Modern economies have often turned that relationship upside down. Instead of planting trees for future generations to enjoy, we are more often leaving them with the bill.

We borrow money now and leave them the interest.
We burn fossil fuels now and leave them the changing climate.
We exhaust aquifers now and leave them the dry wells.
We accumulate conveniences and leave them the waste.
We build monuments to ourselves and ask them to maintain them.

This is where economics connects with our values and beliefs. A budget is really a moral document. It shows whose lives we choose to support and whose lives we are willing to burden.

Debt is not always a bad thing. Families borrow to buy homes, and businesses borrow to build factories. Governments borrow to build roads, educate children, respond to disasters, and make investments that can help for generations. Borrowing for the future can be responsible if we give something valuable back to those who come after us.

The bigger question is whether we are leaving our descendants things that are worth the debts we pass on to them. Will they inherit functioning bridges and healthy forests? Good schools and clean water? Scientific institutions and resilient communities? A stable climate? A democracy capable of solving problems? Or will they inherit huge debts, damaged ecosystems, broken infrastructure, and monuments built by people who only held power for a short time?

Spiritual traditions have asked this kind of question for thousands of years, because true wisdom looks beyond a single lifetime. We are only here for a short time in a story that started before us and will go on after we are gone.

Maybe this is what we should remember when we look at the huge number $40,000,000,000,000. Behind all those zeros are people. Some are alive today. Many are not.

They are children who will be born in 2040, 2070, and 2100. They will live with decisions made in rooms they never entered, by leaders they never chose, in an economy they did not help create. We will never know their names. But they are already our neighbors.

Honi’s old man understood that. So he planted the tree.

Maybe a healthy society is not measured by how grand a ballroom it can build for those in power today. Maybe the real measure is whether we are willing to plant something today that will only benefit people we will never meet.

That is stewardship. That is love stretched across generations. And right now, we have some trees to plant.

We are in this together,

Cameron

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Reflection Questions

What have you inherited from people you never knew—materially, spiritually, environmentally or civically—that made your life possible?
Where are we currently asking future generations to bear costs that rightly belong to us?
What are you planting now whose fruit you may never see?

A Prayer for the Day

A Prayer For Those Who Come After Us

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Holy Mystery, 

We give thanks for those who planted before us.

For people whose names we will never know
who built schools, tended forests, protected rivers,
created institutions, raised children, preserved wisdom
and imagined futures they would never live to see.

We are living beneath their branches.

Forgive us when we forget
that we, too, are ancestors.

Free us from the illusion
that the world belongs only to the living.

Teach us to consider the children
who will walk this Earth long after we are gone.

May they inherit clean water and fertile soil,
healthy communities and trustworthy institutions,
wisdom greater than our fear
and possibilities larger than our mistakes.

Give us courage to sacrifice something now
for people who can never thank us.

Teach us to measure wealth
by what we leave flourishing behind us.

And when our own lives have passed into memory,
may there be trees somewhere
whose roots remember that we were here.

Amen.

Spiritual Practice

Plant Something You Will Not Finish

The old man in the Talmud planted a tree knowing that someone else would eat its fruit.

Try practicing that kind of love this week. Choose one thing you can begin but will probably never complete. You might plant an actual tree. You might contribute to a child’s education, restore a patch of land, support an organization whose work will continue beyond your lifetime, preserve a family story, mentor someone younger, help strengthen a public institution, or make a financial decision that leaves more possibility for those who come after you. The action matters less than the time horizon.

Before you begin, imagine someone living seventy years from now. You don’t know their name. You don’t know what they look like. You don’t know what they believe, whom they love, what language they speak or what kind of world surrounds them. But for a moment, imagine them receiving something because of a decision you made today.

Then do the thing: Plant. Give. Teach. Protect. Repair.

Resist the temptation to measure the return. Some forms of love are never meant to come back to us. They travel forward. Let yours go.

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August 20, 2026, 7-8:45pm ET - I will be joining Jackie Sussman for an online session on practicing eidetics as a part of our “Reclaiming the Power of Imagination” monthly series. Eidetic Imagery is a powerful tool for pastors, denominational leaders, coaches, and spiritual directors working with others, and for individuals seeking deeper integration and healing in their own lives. Jackie is a psychotherapist, author, and leading expert in Eidetic Image Psychology, and has spent over forty years helping leaders and individuals unlock creativity, uncover hidden strengths, and move through limiting patterns. During this session, she will lead a live Eidetic process shaped by mythic imagery, offering a direct experience of the work. REGISTER HERE.

Fun Things My Friends Are Up To…

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Associated Press, “The US national debt now stands at $40 trillion,” August 19, 2026.

Reuters, “Trump the builder carves his legacy in stone as pressures mount,” August 19, 2026.

Reuters, “US debt crosses $40 trillion threshold after doubling under Trump and Biden,” August 19, 2026.

Babylonian Talmud, Ta'anit 23a:15–16.

The Useless Tree

Rev. Cameron Trimble — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 08:01:48 GMT

“Everyone knows the usefulness of what is useful, but few know the usefulness of what is useless.” — Zhuangzi

Photo by Felix yu on Unsplash

There is an ancient Daoist story about a carpenter who came upon an enormous tree.

The tree was impressive. Its trunk was wide enough for several people to stand beneath it. Its branches stretched out in all directions, forming a canopy big enough to shelter many. It had grown for generations.
But the carpenter barely gave it a second glance. The trunk was twisted and rough. The branches bent in strange ways. The wood was knotted. You couldn’t make a straight beam from it or turn it into fine furniture. Even a coffin maker would have turned it down. The carpenter declared the tree useless and continued on his way.
Later, in one version of the story, the tree appeared to the carpenter in a dream and questioned his judgment. What was he comparing the tree to? Fruit trees and timber trees were seen as valuable because people could use them. Their branches were cut, their fruit picked, and their trunks eventually cut down. Their usefulness shortened their lives.
The old tree had survived because nobody could figure out what to do with it.
So it grew.
And grew.
And grew.
Many generations spent time under its branches. Travelers found shade there. Birds built nests in its canopy. Insects made homes in its bark. Its roots kept the soil in place. Its leaves took in sunlight and released oxygen.
Useless? Zhuangzi was playing with us. He was asking a question that remains uncomfortable more than two thousand years later: Who gets to decide what something is for?

We live in a culture that has a ready answer. Almost everything is measured by its usefulness.

We ask kids what they want to be when they grow up, usually meaning what job they’ll have. Adults often introduce themselves by their jobs. We judge our days by what we get done and our organizations by what they produce. Even hobbies can turn into side jobs, and our free time is supposed to make us healthier or more productive when we go back to work. Somewhere along the way, usefulness became confused with worth.

We use the same thinking with the Earth. A forest is valued for its timber. A mountain is valuable if it has minerals. A river is valuable if it can water crops, make electricity, or carry goods. Land that doesn’t make money is called “undeveloped.”at these things are useless. Maybe our understanding of usefulness has become terribly small.

The old tree shows us a different way to look at things. Its value isn’t about what we can take from it. Its gift is simply being part of a network of life that no spreadsheet could ever measure.

I wonder what would happen if we extended that generosity toward ourselves. You do not have to justify your existence through productivity. You don’t become more important by answering more emails, making more money, gaining more followers, joining another committee, or adding one more task to an already busy life. It might even be spiritually risky to spend our lives trying to be useful to systems we no longer trust.

Perhaps these times require us to become a little more useless.

We might become less useful to an economy that always wants us to buy more. Less useful to algorithms that make money by keeping us upset. Less useful to political groups that want us to fear each other. Less useful to jobs that see exhaustion as dedication. Less useful to cultures that think every quiet moment needs to be filled.

That does not mean withdrawing from the world. The useless tree was doing quite a lot. It was making shade. It was holding soil. It was sheltering birds. It was participating in the slow exchange of carbon, water, sunlight, fungi, insects, roots, and air that makes life possible.

It just wasn’t doing anything the carpenter could sell. Doesn’t that sound…liberating?!?

Many traditions teach that the most important parts of life can’t be measured. Buddhism encourages us to let go instead of always collecting more. The Jewish Sabbath stops work every seventh day and reminds us the world goes on without our effort. Islamic prayer pauses business and activity several times a day so people can remember what matters most. Jesus often left the crowds and their demands to be alone.

Again and again, our traditions break the cycle of always being useful and remind us that living isn’t the same as being productive.

Maybe you need that reminder today. You are allowed to sit beneath a tree without accomplishing anything. You are allowed to make something beautiful that nobody buys. You are allowed to spend an afternoon with someone you love and have nothing to show for it. You can pray without getting an answer, grow tomatoes poorly, sing out of tune, take a nap, watch birds, look at clouds, read poetry, or learn something that will never help your résumé.

You are allowed to be wonderfully inefficient at being human.

And maybe, paradoxically, that is when another kind of usefulness begins to emerge. Someday someone exhausted from trying to survive this strange age may come upon you. They may need somewhere to rest. Because you resisted every demand to turn yourself into lumber, you may still be standing there, gnarled by experience, crooked in interesting places, gloriously difficult to monetize, with branches wide enough to offer them shade.

Maybe Zhuangzi was right.

Perhaps we have spent far too much time learning the usefulness of what is useful.

It may be time to rediscover the sacred usefulness of what the world calls useless.

We are in this together,

Cameron

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Reflection Questions

Where have you learned to confuse your productivity with your worth?
What parts of your life have no obvious economic or practical value but make you feel most fully alive?
What might you become less “useful” to so that you can become more available to life?

A Prayer for the Day

A Prayer For The Grace to Be Enough

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Holy Mystery, 

Release us from the exhausting belief
that we must earn our place in this world.

Teach us the wisdom of trees
that grow without résumés,
rivers that flow without recognition,
and birds that sing without wondering
whether anyone is listening.

Forgive us for the ways we have measured life
only by what can be extracted from it.

Help us recognize the sacred worth
of forests and wetlands,
elders and children,
rest and play,
silence and wonder,
and every life that refuses
to fit neatly into our calculations.

May we become less useful
to everything that diminishes life
and more available
to everything that nourishes it.

Give us courage to grow crooked
when straightness requires becoming
something we were never meant to be.

And when someone weary
finds their way beneath our branches,
may there be room.

Amen.

Spiritual Practice

Waste Some Time

Set aside thirty minutes today and deliberately accomplish nothing useful. Don’t optimize the experience. Don’t track it on your watch. Don’t listen to a podcast that will improve you while you’re doing it. And please don’t turn it into a productivity practice called something horrifying like “strategic restorative downtime.”

Just waste some time.

Sit beneath a tree. Watch birds at a feeder. Lie on the floor with your dog. Drink coffee slowly enough to taste it. Doodle badly. Listen to an entire piece of music without doing anything else. Wander somewhere without trying to reach a destination.

Pay attention to whatever resistance arises. You may hear the internal voice insisting that you should be answering emails, cleaning something, reading something important, or otherwise justifying your continued existence. Thank that voice for its concern.

Then remain gloriously useless.

Afterward, notice what happened. Did anything in you soften? Did you notice something you normally miss? Did time feel different when you stopped trying to extract something from it?

The point is not to become unproductive. There is good work to do in this world, and much of it urgently needs our hands.

The practice is remembering that your life is larger than your usefulness.

For thirty minutes, become the old tree. Make some shade. And let that be enough.

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Who Gets to Say What Happened?

Rev. Cameron Trimble — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 08:00:29 GMT

“Putting away falsehood, let each of you speak the truth with your neighbor, for we are members of one another.” —Ephesians 4:25, NRSVUE

Photograph: Kylie Cooper/Reuters

On Monday, CNN correspondent Kristen Holmes asked President Trump a question he did not want to answer. He told her to be quiet and called her loud, boisterous, disrespectful, and fake.

This was part of a familiar pattern. Trump has told female reporters to smile and has commented on their faces and bodies. He called Bloomberg correspondent Catherine Lucey “piggy.”1 When women ask questions he wants to avoid, he often responds as if a woman’s voice needs a man’s permission.

These attacks are degrading, but they also serve a political purpose. The insult overshadows the question. By the next morning, the focus is on his cruelty, which is real, instead of the truth he wanted to avoid.

The administration’s attacks on the press go beyond insults. The White House punished the Associated Press for using the name Gulf of Mexico. The Pentagon limited access and replaced established news organizations with those more supportive of the administration. Federal agents searched a reporter’s home. The Justice Department subpoenaed journalists to find their sources. Trump has sued the BBC, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal while in office.2

Absurd actions can hide real dangers. Even a weak lawsuit is costly to defend. A childish insult can lead to thousands of threats against a reporter. Demanding a new name for a body of water can show that access to power depends on using the leader’s chosen words.

The conflict over the Gulf was never just about geography. The Associated Press was punished for refusing to be compliant.3 The administration was claiming the power to decide not only what people should believe, but also what can be spoken as real.

Still, defending the press means being honest about the press itself. Over the years, large news organizations have come under corporate ownership. They gave up some independence for access, turned complex issues into simple conflicts, and built their business around grabbing our attention. Reporters gave anonymity to powerful officials but treated vulnerable people as content. Too much journalism served business interests while pretending to be separate from power.

Public trust in journalism did not collapse only because politicians attacked it. Some trust was lost through the media’s own actions.

Paul’s letter to the Ephesians connects truth-telling to belonging: “Speak the truth with your neighbor, for we are members of one another.” Truth is more than just giving accurate information. It is a responsibility we share because our lives are connected.

That responsibility includes telling the truth about the institutions we are trying to defend. A press incapable of examining its own compromises cannot fully serve the public. Institutional failure does not justify authoritarian punishment. Criticism seeks accountability. Authoritarianism seeks submission.

The cost of submission is not shared equally. Salvadoran journalist Mario Guevara lived in the United States for twenty years before being detained while covering a protest.4 The charges were dropped, but he stayed in immigration custody for over one hundred days, much of it in what advocates called solitary confinement, before being deported.

Rümeysa Öztürk, who was a doctoral student at Tufts, was detained after coauthoring an opinion essay about Gaza.5 Independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were arrested after covering an anti-ICE protest in a Minnesota church.6 Reporters covering immigration enforcement have been shoved, assaulted, detained, and threatened.

Journalists who work for big companies have lawyers and institutions to defend them. Freelancers, immigrants, students, and local reporters often have to stand alone. They are easier to intimidate and easier to ignore. “Freedom of the press” becomes just an idea when we do not ask who pays the price for witnessing.

For much of the twentieth century, Americans believed that neutral institutions could create a shared reality. That system was never as neutral or inclusive as it claimed, but it did provide some common ground for public debate.

That common ground is disappearing. The Trump administration is speeding up its loss, though it did not create all the conditions that made this possible.

This raises a bigger question than just how to save major newspapers or TV networks. How can people keep a shared reality when the institutions meant to protect it are compromised, taken over, or attacked?

Communities have faced this question before. When official histories left them out, families kept names alive. When authorities denied violence, neighbors wrote down what they saw. Congregations kept records. Elders shared stories. Workers gathered testimony. Communities built archives from photos, letters, court records, and memories.

Truth has never belonged to just one institution. We still need reporters who have the time and resources to investigate governments, corporations, wars, and prisons. We also need local journalists, community archives, neighborhood historians, librarians, teachers, artists, and witnesses who are willing to remember the truth together.

“For we are members of one another.”

A shared world lasts because someone notices what happens, someone records it, and someone else refuses to let that witness be forgotten.

This work is becoming more dangerous, but it is also becoming more important.

We are in this together,

Cameron

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Reflection Questions

When have you seen an insult or spectacle distract public attention from a question someone in power did not want to answer?
What failures of contemporary journalism need to be acknowledged without becoming excuses for government intimidation?
Who is preserving the truthful memory of your community, especially the experiences that powerful institutions overlook?

A Prayer for the Day

A Prayer For Those Who Bear Witness

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Holy One, 

Strengthen those who ask the unwelcome question,
record the hidden violence,
and remember the names others would erase.

Protect the reporter standing alone,
the writer made vulnerable by her words,
the neighbor holding a camera,
the community preserving its own history.

Give our institutions courage to confess their failures
and resist every demand for submission.

Keep us from mistaking spectacle for truth
or repetition for reality.

Make us faithful witnesses—
humble enough to be corrected,
brave enough to speak,
and steadfast enough to stand beside those
who bear the cost of telling what happened.

Amen.

Spiritual Practice

Keep a Faithful Record

Choose one local story that matters to your community but is receiving little sustained attention. It might concern an immigration raid, a school-board decision, an environmental hazard, a library closure, a threatened congregation, or a neighbor organizing care.

Find two reliable accounts of what happened. Record the date, the names of those involved, the sources, and what remains uncertain. Save that record somewhere others can find it. If a local or independent journalist is already covering the story, subscribe, donate, or share the reporting with context.

Do not place yourself or anyone else in danger. The practice is simply to help keep one piece of reality from being lost.

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Current reporting on the administration’s treatment of journalists includes coverage of Trump’s attack on CNN correspondent Kristen Holmes and the White House’s subsequent personal response: Daily Beast.

Axios reports that Trump, his businesses, and his administration have been involved in sixty-one media or defamation lawsuits since 2015: Axios.

The Associated Press has documented the White House’s retaliation over its Gulf of Mexico terminology, restrictions at the Pentagon, and the arrests of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort. Amnesty International documented Mario Guevara’s detention conditions before his deportation: Amnesty International.

The Committee to Protect Journalists documents Mario Guevara’s arrest while livestreaming a protest, the dismissal of the charges, his prolonged immigration detention, and his October 2025 deportation to El Salvador. Committee to Protect Journalists, “Mario Guevara,” link. Amnesty International also reports that he spent more than one hundred days in ICE custody and was subjected to solitary confinement: Amnesty International report.

Rümeysa Öztürk was held for more than six weeks after coauthoring an opinion essay criticizing Tufts University’s response to the war in Gaza. A federal judge ordered her release. See Michael Casey and Kathy McCormack, “Turkish Tufts University Student Released from Louisiana Immigration Detention Center,” Associated Press, May 9, 2025, link.

Don Lemon and independent journalist Georgia Fort were arrested and charged after covering an anti-ICE protest inside a Minnesota church. See Jaimie Ding, Alanna Durkin Richer, and Eric Tucker, “Journalist Don Lemon Charged with Federal Civil Rights Crimes after Covering Anti-ICE Church Protest,” Associated Press, January 30, 2026, link.

When the Night Does Not Cool

Rev. Cameron Trimble — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:01:22 GMT

“He makes the dawn break; He makes the night for rest.” —The Qur’an 6:96

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Nearly one hundred million Americans have experienced heat advisories during this recent heat wave.1 In many cities, nighttime temperatures have stayed close to 80 degrees. The air that used to cool us after sunset now keeps the heat around us.

Across much of the United States, nighttime temperatures are going up faster than daytime ones. Since 1975, the average summer nighttime low in the lower 48 states has risen more than the average daytime high. This is one of the clearest signs of a warming climate.

The risks go beyond just affecting our sleep. Plants collect energy from sunlight, but they also breathe. When nights stay warm, this breathing speeds up. They use more of the sugars they made during the day just to keep going.2 That leaves less for their roots, fruit, and seeds.

Animals in hot places depend on the coolness of night. Foxes, owls, bats, rodents, insects, and others hide underground, in trees, or under shelter until it gets cooler. Darkness lets them hunt, find food, drink, travel, and mate.3 As nights get warmer, their time to live and thrive shrinks.

Wildfires used to calm down after sunset when it got cooler and more humid. Now, they often keep burning all night. This is more than just a change in the weather. We are seeing an old boundary fade away.

The cultural critic Jonathan Crary has written about the rise of a “24/7” world, where the economy runs on nonstop production, consumption, watching, and being available. In this world, every hour is used for business. Stores stay open. Markets keep trading. Servers handle transactions. Screens tempt us with one more purchase, one more email, one more show, or one more argument. Sleep turns into a problem because people who are sleeping don’t produce or consume much.

Nature has always pushed back against this nonstop way of living. Darkness stops things. Winter stops things. Empty fields stop things. Migration, pregnancy, shedding, hibernation, and sleep all slow down productivity. Life thrives because of these cycles of giving and taking.

But our society is built on avoiding these natural pauses. We take from the soil without giving it time to heal. We use water faster than it can be replaced. We expect people to work hard and see tiredness as a weakness. We burn old forests and ancient life so our machines can keep running without pause. Now, even the night is getting warmer.

The Qur’an says that God “makes the night for rest.” In Jewish teaching, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called the Sabbath “a palace in time.”4 Both traditions show that sacredness is not just in what we create or achieve. Holiness is also found in taking a break.

This goes beyond simple self-care. If the Sabbath only helps us recover for another week of hard work, nothing really changes. True sacred rest stops the cycle. It says a worker is more than what she produces, land is more than what it gives, an animal is more than a resource, and darkness matters even if no one can profit from it.

Of course, not everyone has the same chance to rest. Some people sleep in air-conditioned homes, while others pick crops, deliver packages, guard prisons, fix power lines, or stay awake worrying if they can pay for another night of cooling. Areas with fewer trees get hotter. Often, those who did the least to cause climate change are the ones who suffer the most.

Our tired minds are part of this same system of taking without giving back. Many of us feel like we can never fully disconnect. News and politics reach us on our phones before we even get out of bed. Work interrupts our grief. Quiet moments are filled with alerts. We stay emotionally on edge long after we can do anything about it.

Over time, we lose the inner calm we need for reflection, kindness, and creativity.

Warmer nights reveal the emptiness in a world that sees every limit as something to beat. But those limits are still there. People break down. Crops die. Animals lose the time they need to survive. Fires keep burning after dark.

Night has never been just empty hours. It has always been a safe space built into the rhythm of the Earth.

What will happen to us if that safe space disappears? And who might we become if we choose to protect it?

We are in this together,

Cameron

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Reflection Questions

Where in your life have you become so accustomed to strain that you no longer recognize your need for recovery?
Who in your community is least protected from extreme heat, exhaustion, or economic insecurity?
What do the needs of plants and animals teach you about the limits shared by all living beings?

A Prayer for the Day

A Prayer For The Cool of Evening

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Holy One, 

You formed a world of movement and rest,
sunlight and shadow,
labor and renewal.

We pray for every being waiting for the heat to break:
the elder beside an open window,
the worker beneath the afternoon sun,
the fox hidden in its den,
the field spending its strength through the night.

Cool the fever of our planet
and the fever within our spirits.

Teach us to honor the limits of every body.
Make us attentive to those denied shelter and rest.
Guide us toward ways of living
that allow the Earth and all her creatures to breathe again.

Amen.

Spiritual Practice

Receiving the Night

Tonight, step outside after sunset. Leave your phone indoors. Notice whether the air has cooled and where the day’s heat remains…in the pavement, the walls, the soil, or your own body.

Listen for the beings beginning their nighttime lives. Look at the trees and plants resting in the darkness. Take several slow breaths and allow yourself to belong to this community of creatures.

Then consider one practical way you could offer relief during this season: checking on a neighbor, putting out clean water for wildlife where appropriate, supporting a local cooling center, advocating for worker heat protections, planting a shade tree, or reducing unnecessary energy use.

Let the night remind you that rest is a gift meant to be shared.

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August 18 - September 1, 2026, 12:30-1:30pmET - Book Club in The Commons - FREE - We are reading our next book, “I Eat The Stars” by Sarah Wilson. We will meet each Tuesday for 6 weeks. It’s such great fun. I hope you will be a part. All are welcome! RSVP HERE.

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https://apnews.com/article/db329527d454636ca0140b14c17358f3

https://www.ars.usda.gov/research/publications/publication/?seqNo115=416396

https://home.nps.gov/crmo/learn/nature/animals.htm

Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 15.

When The Stranger Arrives

Rev. Cameron Trimble — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 08:01:31 GMT

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” —Hebrews 13:2

This week at the Common Good Farm has been an exciting one. We have welcomed two baby Nigerian dwarf goats, Atticus and Evie! We have been looking forward to their arrival for months. In order to prepare for their arrival we built a pen, bought their food, spread the hay for their bedding and imagined how the goats would fit into our everyday routine. So far, they are magic. You can expect many future meditations about our adventures together.

Atticus (brown and white goat) and Evie (black and white goat) getting to know their new home at the Common Good Farm.

Then another animal arrived. A few mornings ago, we discovered a young male rottweiler dog on our property. He weighs about 110 pounds. From everything we can tell, someone abandoned him, and he eventually found his way to us. He didn’t have a collar and wasn’t chipped. We can’t find his family, and he has decided he likes it here.

The thing is…we had not prepared for him.

He is sweet and gentle, and we are trying to find him a loving permanent home. For now, he has joined our busy household, which already has three dogs, chickens, goats, and people with their own routines and relationships.

At the Common Good Farm, hospitality is one of our core values. It sounds lovely when you say it like that. But then a 110-pound stranger moved in and made himself at home. Suddenly, hospitality feels much more real.

Our new house guest, Otis, the rottweiler.

Our three dogs had to figure out if this big newcomer was a threat. Once they realized he wasn’t, something interesting happened. They started to adjust. They gave him space, he learned their signals, and they set boundaries. Together, they began to work out how to share a home none of them expected. We humans are learning to do the same.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the difference between welcoming someone and actually making room for them. Welcoming can sometimes just be a feeling. We might say, “Everyone is welcome here,” but not really change anything about ourselves.

But making room is different. Making room means accepting that someone else’s presence could change things. Their needs might interrupt our routines. Their story might challenge what we assume. We might need to make space.

The ancient Greek word for hospitality in Christian scriptures is philoxenia. It joins philos, meaning love or friendship, with xenos, meaning stranger. So hospitality literally means loving the stranger.

This idea goes far beyond Christianity. In Jewish tradition, welcoming guests, hachnasat orchim, is a sacred act. In Islam, caring for guests and strangers is a central spiritual teaching. Buddhist practices of mettā, or loving-kindness, encourage us to grow our compassion until even strangers are included. Maybe our traditions focus on hospitality because strangers shake up our lives.

The people we already know fit easily into the world we’ve built. We know where they belong, what they need, and what to expect from them. But when a stranger arrives, they bring a life we never planned for. Suddenly, we have a choice to make. We can protect our turf. Or we can choose to make room.

Making room doesn’t mean giving up all boundaries. I’ve seen our dogs show me that this week. They’ve been careful, let others know when something was too much, and kept their own places in the family. Hospitality has needed careful thought from everyone. But slowly, they’re learning that the circle can grow without anyone losing their place.

Maybe that’s what hospitality really asks of us. It’ not simply whether we are willing to open the door, but whether we are willing to let someone’s arrival change the shape of the room.

Our unexpected guest will hopefully find his permanent family soon (let us all pray). When he does, our household will settle back into another rhythm. But I hope we don’t settle all the way back. I hope something remains rearranged in us…

We never know when the stranger will arrive.

We are in this together,

Cameron

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Reflection Questions

When has an unexpected person, experience, or relationship disrupted your life and ultimately enlarged it?
Where do you find it easiest to offer welcome as a sentiment, but harder to make the accommodations that genuine belonging requires?
What might need to be rearranged in your life right now to make room for someone—or something—you did not expect?

A Prayer for the Day

A Prayer For An Expansive Heart

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Holy One, 

Keep our hearts open
to the lives that arrive without warning,
to the stranger at the door,
to the interruption we did not plan.

When our first instinct is to protect what is ours,
give us enough spaciousness to wonder
whether the circle might grow.

Teach us the wisdom of welcome
and the wisdom of boundaries,
the courage to draw near
and the patience to learn one another slowly.

May we make room
without losing ourselves.

May we receive
without needing to control.

And when another life rearranges ours,
may we resist the urge
to put everything back exactly as it was.

Leave something changed in us.

A little more room.
A little less fear.
A wider sense of who belongs.

Amen.

Spiritual Practice

Make a Little Room

Sometime today, look at the spaces you inhabit—your home, your calendar, your relationships, your community—and ask yourself: Where is there room for someone I did not plan for?

You don’t need to manufacture an encounter with a stranger. Simply notice how tightly arranged your life has become.

Perhaps making room means leaving enough time in your day for an unexpected conversation. Perhaps it means reaching out to someone who is new to your community. Perhaps it means listening to a person whose experience is different from your own without immediately trying to fit their story into what you already believe.

Practice making one small accommodation. Then notice what happens inside you when your plans are interrupted.

Hospitality often begins there, not with a perfectly prepared guest room, but with our willingness to move over.

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Upcoming Events That Might Be of Interest…

August 11 - September 1, 2026, 12:30-1:30pmET - Book Club in The Commons - FREE - We are reading our next book, “I Eat The Stars” by Sarah Wilson. We will meet each Tuesday for 6 weeks. It’s such great fun. I hope you will be a part. All are welcome! RSVP HERE.

September 8, 2026, 12:30 - 1:30pm ET, ONLINE EVENT with NYTimes Best-Selling author and journalist, Sarah Wilson!!! Sarah has just published her latest book I Eat The Stars: How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World. Join us for this one hour conversation where we will talk with Sarah about how we face collapse, how we find beauty and who we can become in these challenging times. Scholarships are available. REGISTER HERE.

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Poisoned Arrows and Primary Elections

Rev. Cameron Trimble — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 08:01:44 GMT

“It is just as if a man were wounded with an arrow thickly smeared with poison, and his friends and companions brought a surgeon to treat him. The man would say: ‘I will not let the surgeon pull out this arrow until I know who shot me.’” —The Buddha, Cūḷamāluṅkya Sutta (Majjhima Nikāya 63)

Photo by Strange Happenings on Unsplash

In an old Buddhist teaching, a man is struck by a poisoned arrow. His friends bring a surgeon, but the wounded man refuses treatment. First, he wants answers. Who fired the arrow? What family did the attacker come from? What kind of bow did he carry? What feathers were used? The Buddha explains that the man would die before he ever got his answers.

That story came to mind as I watched coverage of primary elections around the country. Progressive and democratic socialist candidates are challenging longtime Democratic incumbents, and some are winning. Headlines talk about a leftward shift in response to the rightward turn that changed the Republican Party, first with the Tea Party and now with MAGA.

It seems like a familiar pattern: Republicans move further right, Democrats move further left, and each side blames the other for becoming more extreme.

There is some truth to this. Political movements react to each other. Each side gathers proof that its fears are real. Every provocation leads to another. Social media rewards the harshest accusations and the most dramatic predictions. Candidates see that outrage brings in donations. Cable news makes public life feel like a constant crisis.

But seeing these movements as equal and opposite actually hides more than it shows. MAGA holds the presidency, the Justice Department, the House, the Senate, a Supreme Court with a six-member conservative majority, and twenty-eight state legislatures. Its radical ideas have become government policy. Federal power is now used to target immigrants, punish political opponents, weaken oversight, attack universities and law firms, and send military personnel into American cities even when local leaders object.

The Democratic Socialists of America has about 95,000 members. It is an activist group, not a political party, and it does not run the Democratic Party. Some of its candidates have won important races, and its ideas are shaping national debates. But it cannot control the military, direct federal prosecutions, or decide how civil-rights laws are enforced.

The difference is important. Left-leaning movements can become rigid and self-righteous. Sometimes they mistake public shaming for justice and see ideological purity as moral courage. Cultural power can hurt people. But there is a big difference between social condemnation and state force. One can harm someone’s reputation. The other can take away a person’s freedom, family, job, or even life.

Not all poisoned arrows are equally deadly. They are, however, flying through a country already badly wounded.

Factories have shut down and towns have emptied out. Wages have not kept up with the cost of living. Addiction has torn families apart. The old promise that each generation would do better than the last is now hard to believe. Civil-rights progress has made some people feel like equality means losing their own status. The internet has broken apart any shared sense of reality we once had.

Our economy still relies on endless extraction from a limited planet. The climate is changing faster than our politics can keep up. Soil, water, forests, and even our bodies are paying the price for a lifestyle built on constant growth. Most big political promises assume the future will just be a bigger version of the past.

These problems did not start with Donald Trump or Zohran Mamdani. Instead, these conditions created the fear, anger, and longing that these leaders now represent.

When people feel less secure in their lives, they want to know who shot the arrow. MAGA blames immigrants, secular people, queer people, universities, and what it calls the deep state. The left blames billionaires, corporations, landlords, and an economy based on extraction. These explanations are not morally equal. Some targets have a lot of power. Others are vulnerable people being asked to carry the country’s fear.

We need to hold those who cause harm accountable. The Buddha’s story does not tell us to ignore the person with the bow. Instead, it asks if our need for a full explanation has become an excuse to avoid getting help.

The threat of authoritarianism is real and urgent. We have to resist it. But getting rid of one candidate will not bring back abandoned towns, restore worn-out soil, make housing affordable, heal addiction, or help young people feel hopeful about the future.

We have spent years arguing about who shot the arrow. All the while, the poison has kept spreading through the body.

Maybe our most important political task now is to do two things at once: stop those who are still firing arrows and care for the wounds that made so many people vulnerable to their promises.

A society can die waiting for perfect answers. Healing begins when we finally admit that we are hurt.

We are in this together,

Cameron

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Reflection Questions

Where do you see political language disguising the deeper grief, fear, or economic abandonment people are carrying?
What helps you distinguish between naming a genuine danger and turning another person into the explanation for everything that is wrong?
Where is the poison still moving through our common life while we argue about who should be blamed?

A Prayer for the Day

A Prayer For Our Wounded Life

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Holy One, 

We are frightened by how quickly the world is changing
and by the cruelty our fear can unleash.

Give us clear eyes for the dangers before us.
Help us recognize the hands that cause harm
without allowing hatred to govern our own.

Draw our attention to the wounds beneath the spectacle—
the abandoned community,
the family stretched past its limits,
the neighbor made into a target,
the Earth exhausted by our taking.

Give courage to those who stand between the vulnerable
and the powers that threaten them.

Make us healers of what can still be healed,
truth-tellers who remain tender,
and faithful companions to this wounded world.

Amen.

Spiritual Practice

Tending the Wound

Choose one political issue that reliably provokes anger or fear in you. Write down the person or group you are usually taught to blame for it.

Then ask: What wound has made this conflict possible? Who is living with that wound most directly? What kind of care would help?

Spend fifteen minutes learning about one local effort addressing that underlying pain: affordable housing, addiction recovery, soil restoration, worker organizing, immigrant accompaniment, community mental health, or another form of repair.

You do not need to understand every detail of how the arrow was fired before you help treat the wound.

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Upcoming Events That Might Be of Interest…

September 8, 2026, 12:30 - 1:30pm ET, ONLINE EVENT with NYT Best-Selling author and journalist, Sarah Wilson!!! Sarah has just published her latest book I Eat The Stars: How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World. Join us for this one hour conversation where we will talk with Sarah about how we face collapse, how we find beauty and who we can become in these challenging times. Scholarships are available. REGISTER HERE.

Fun Things My Friends Are Up To…

I get to work with such amazing, creative people. This section is my way of celebrating them—no paid promotions, just joy in what they’re creating.

My dear friend and Buddhist teacher, Isa Gucciardi PhD, leads this amazing center call The Foundation of the Sacred Stream. On August 13 from 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm Pacific (8:30 pm – 10:00 pm Eastern), they will be hosting an online event called “Compassion for the Modern Heart with Geshe Gedun Samdup.” In a world that moves quickly and often feels fragmented, compassion is not a luxury—it is a vital practice for staying present, connected, and resilient. This class offers a grounded and accessible exploration of compassion through the lens of Tibetan Buddhism’s three distinct forms of compassion: compassion for all beings, compassion for conditioned phenomena, and objectless compassion. Together, these teachings provide a practical and deeply nourishing framework for meeting the complexities of modern life with clarity and care. LEARN MORE HERE.

If you are a leader or member of a congregation looking for consulting support in visioning, planning, hiring or staffing, please consider Convergence.

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What Story Will We Tell About This Heat?

Rev. Cameron Trimble — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:02:03 GMT

“The present is not a time for desperation but for hopeful activity.” — Thomas Berry, The Great Work

July was the hottest month ever recorded in the contiguous United States. The average temperature hit 76.89 degrees Fahrenheit, beating the previous record from the Dust Bowl in 1936. Even more surprising, nighttime temperatures broke their old record by a bigger gap. The hours that used to bring relief from the heat are getting warmer too.1

We could treat this as just another climate statistic. We have gotten used to doing that. A record is set, a wildfire spreads, a glacier retreats and an island is flooded. We read the headline, experience a sudden surge of concern, and then carry on with our day since the groceries have to be bought, meetings have to be attended and the dog needs walking.

People can’t stay in a constant state of emergency. Sooner or later, our minds protect us from it. But we can choose to see this news differently.

We can ask ourselves what story this news is telling. For the majority of history, people have understood themselves in terms of the stories relating to their connection with the living world. The Hebrew scriptures begin with a garden. In indigenous traditions all over the world, humans are seen as relatives in a wider community of life. Buddhism holds that all things are connected and that nothing exists by itself. In Islam the natural world is filled with ayat, or signs of the Divine. Our ancestors when looking at rivers, animals, the seasons, mountains, storms, and stars realized that they were part of a story greater than themselves.

Modern industrial culture had a completely different account. It taught us to view the Earth primarily as a source of raw material. We converted forests into timber, mountains became mineral sources, rivers turned into water rights, animals were included in the inventory, the soil was treated as property, and oil which had been under the ground for millions of years was turned into fuel that could be drawn out and burned almost instantly. And people became consumers.

That story brought about great wealth, medicine, mobility, and technology as well as comfort. At the same time, however, it caused more heat-trapping gases to build up in our atmosphere and resulted in climate change occurring at a rate faster than people have ever before seen.

The heat in July is part of that story. The planet’s temperature isn’t just a scientific number. It also shows the story of our relationship with the Earth. It tells us something about the way we have lived.

Cultural historian, Thomas Berry, spent his life saying that people need a new story that places us back within the living Earth. He wrote, “the human is neither an addendum nor an intrusion into the universe. We are quintessentially integral with the universe.”2

This means climate change isn’t just happening somewhere else or only to something called “the environment.” It is happening to all of us.

The heat that sweeps through our cities also moves through our lungs and blood. Warmer nights reach bedrooms where older people struggle to stay cool. Drought affects grocery prices. Warmer oceans affect fisheries and coral reefs. Climate change touches migration, insurance, farms, forests, hospitals, and families. We are part of this story. Now the question is, what kind of story will come next?

Maybe future generations will talk about a time when people knew what was happening but kept on extracting resources anyway. They might wonder about a civilization that could measure the temperature of faraway planets while upsetting the climate at home.

Or maybe they will tell a different story. Maybe they will talk about a generation that finally remembered it belonged to the Earth community. A generation that changed how it made energy, grew food, built cities, traveled, and measured success. A generation that brought back forests and wetlands, protected watersheds, listened to Indigenous wisdom again, and saw that restraint could be a kind of love. A generation that learned living within limits was not about going without, but about belonging.

Thomas Berry called this change the Great Work: moving from a time when people harmed the Earth to a time when we live in a way that helps both us and the planet’s living systems. He said, “The Great Work now, as we move into a new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.”3

That work has already begun. It happens whenever someone restores a prairie, puts up solar panels, protects a river, redesigns a city for shade, plants trees, changes a law, challenges a fossil-fuel company, teaches a child the names of birds, or simply starts to see the Earth not as scenery but as home.

July was extremely hot. This won’t be the last record we break. Scientists say extreme heat will become more common as greenhouse gases keep warming the planet, and heat waves in the United States have already about doubled since 1980. So our deeper task isn’t to wait until the numbers scare us enough. Fear fades quickly. Love lasts longer.

We need a story big enough to show us how to love the world we live in now: wounded, changing, beautiful, and still able to heal. And then we need to live as if that story is true.

We are in this together,

Cameron

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Reflection Questions

What story about humanity’s relationship with the Earth did you inherit, and how has that story changed over the course of your life?
Where do you experience yourself most clearly as a participant in the living world rather than as someone standing apart from it?
If future generations told the story of how we responded to this moment, what would you want them to say about the choices we made?

A Prayer for the Day

A Prayer For the Story We Are Becoming

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Holy Mystery,
You have been unfolding this story
for billions of years.

Before there were words for God,
there were stars forming in darkness,
oceans gathering upon the Earth,
roots reaching into soil,
and creatures learning to breathe.
And somehow, impossibly,
we are here.

We confess that we have too often mistaken this gift for possession.
We have taken without replenishing,
consumed without considering,
and lived as though the future belonged only to us.

Teach us another way.

Help us remember that the Earth is not beneath us,
but around us and within us.
Its waters move through our bodies.
Its breath fills our lungs.
Its flourishing and ours are inseparable.

Give comfort to those already living with the consequences of a warming world, especially those who contributed least to creating this crisis.

Give courage to scientists, activists, Indigenous leaders, farmers, organizers, policymakers, and ordinary people working to protect what can still be protected and restore what can still be restored.

And give all of us the imagination to live into another story.

May we become good ancestors.

May those who come after us inherit evidence of our love.

Amen.

Spiritual Practice

Learn the Name of Something

For generations, many of us have been taught to move through the natural world without really knowing it. We know the names of corporations, celebrities, politicians, and products, but we may not know the name of the tree growing outside our window.

So today, learn one name. Find a tree, bird, flower, insect, creek, mountain, or other living presence near your home that you cannot name. Spend a little time discovering what it is. Learn something about how it lives. Where does it come from? What does it need? What other lives depend upon it? What role does it play in the ecosystem you share?

Then go meet it again. This time, approach it by name.

There is a difference between walking past “a tree” and walking past an oak you have begun to know. There is a difference between hearing “a bird” and recognizing the call of a chickadee. Relationship begins with attention, and attention slowly transforms what once appeared to be background into community.

You don’t need to save the planet today. That language may itself reveal something about our old story, as though humanity stands outside the Earth with the power to rescue it.

Instead, practice belonging to it. Learn one name. Pay attention to one life. Allow yourself to become curious about one small corner of the astonishing community that has been holding you all along.

Perhaps this is one way the new story begins: not with humanity heroically saving the Earth, but with humanity finally remembering that we belong here, too, and learning how to behave like good relatives.

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https://apnews.com/article/hottest-month-july-climate-change-4a9d612281485356103631f0f09b61af?utm_source=copy&utm_medium=share

Thomas Berry, “The Earth Story,” in The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Bell Tower, 1999), p. 32.

Thomas Berry, “The Great Work,” in The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Bell Tower, 1999), p. 3.