Wild Geese

By Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

The Shaking of Foundations

By Paul Tillich

There are few words more strange to most of us than "sin." It is strange, just because it is so well known. During the centuries it has received distorting connotations, and has lost so much of its genuine power that we must seriously ask ourselves whether we should use it at all, or whether we should discard it as a useless tool. But there is a mysterious fact about the great words of our religious traditions: they cannot be replaced. All attempts to make substitutions, including those I have tried myself, have failed to convey the reality that was expressed; they have led to shallow and impotent talk. There are no substitutes for words like "sin." But there is a way of rediscovering their meaning, the same way that leads us down into the depth of our human existence. In that depth these words were conceived; and there they gained their power for all ages; there they must be found again by each generation, and by each of us for ourselves. Let us therefore try to penetrate the deeper levels of our life, in order to see whether we can discover in them the realities of which these words "speak."

Readings of March 6, 2005