http://vanwaddy.com/blog Atlanta Marriage Counselor and Family Therapist Sun, 12 Aug 2007 16:04:31 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en ALLOW THE IMAGE TO SPEAK   "Are you a Christian?" my friend asked, not as confrontation, but as invitation from one who intimately knows my spiral inward journey. I heard the chambers of my mind clang like iron gates, opening backwards through centuries of buried theologies I have embraced, rejected, embraced. Two ... http://vanwaddy.com/blog/?p=89                                                                                           WRITING OUR OWN CREDO   Writing our own credo -- a living, organic statement of what we have come to believe -- is an essential process in developing soul.   Like our ... http://vanwaddy.com/blog/?p=88                                                                        RELIGION                                                                                  RELIGION From the beginning, humankind has attempted to address the light in the darkness, to call it by name, to be in relationship with it. The light brings with it questions with no easy answers: Who are we? Why ... http://vanwaddy.com/blog/?p=87                                                             A CLEAN PIPELINE   All human life comes through the birth canal. So do all human institutions and cultural traditions, even church.   We receive a tradition, a religion, from our family, our culture. Everything we receive comes through a pipeline -- a preordained, organized framework of beliefs and presuppositions that someone else ... http://vanwaddy.com/blog/?p=86                                                                   GOD SPEED   My father died believing it was more important to cling to his belief in the Catholic Church than to trust where that journey leads. He perceived my siblings’ switch to other religious denominations in their adult, married life as a failure on his part, as something to grieve. ... http://vanwaddy.com/blog/?p=85                                                   AN AWARENESS OF ANGELS                                            The magic of the Advent season -- the church's time of waiting before Christmas -- was always dramatized for me by the lighting of the candle in the darkened church and the yearning chant of the music: "Emanuel, Emanuel, who are we that you should ... http://vanwaddy.com/blog/?p=84 CARVING OUT VIRGINAL SPACE I’m always reminded, with each return of December’s dance, of that seasonal story of stable births and virginal responses. Just because I’m all grown up and have made room in my life for other stories, that doesn’t mean the old story can’t hold its own. ... http://vanwaddy.com/blog/?p=83 There's been a death in my family. The house has stood silent for two days now, empty, a tomb of what was once a glorious presence, a visitation of sorts of the numinous in nature. Though life goes on as normal, nothing soothes my heartache. How can it be normal ... http://vanwaddy.com/blog/?p=79 Each age has its own vantage point. I read recently that Robert Frost, at 63, reflected that young people have flashes of insight, but "it is later in the dark of life that you see forms, patterns, constellation. And it is the constellations that are philosophy." That is what I, ... http://vanwaddy.com/blog/?p=78 An elderly gentleman who lived down the street would often startle me with his routine greeting. “Hello, Duncan,” I’d call to him in the grocery store. “It’s good to see you out and about.” He’d look up, expressionless, from the produce he was handling and respond blandly, “Am I dead ... http://vanwaddy.com/blog/?p=75