I need an ornathologist

Mama Robin is back on the nest. What's this mean? Can she be having another brood? Is that possible? Given all the work she and Papa Robin were doing, when did they find the time?

(Oh, well, I guess people do have two children within a year from time to time. You must just find the time....)


I'm getting ready for the Making A Difference Workshop at Wisdom House in Litchfield next week. I've helped lead dozens of these workshops and every next one is so much not like any of the other and so remarkable in and of itself. I love this stuff.

I just took a shower and put on a tee shirt I sleep in sometimes. It has the St. John's, Waterbury logo on the front left breast--an eagle designed by Judy McManis years ago.

On the back it says, DANGEROUS MYSTICS AND SPIRITUAL REBELS.

I wish to hell I'd made that up, but I think, if I remember correctly, it was made up by a guy named Brian Reagner who helped design the original Making a Difference Workshop and helped redesign it years later. I was in on that 'redesign' and love that I was.

Brian, according to legend, since I wasn't there to hear it when it came into existence, was pondering what people who take the workshop should come out of the experience 'being' (the workshop is about, of all things, 'ontology', "the study of being". And that was what he said, as I've been told....

DANGEROUS MYSTICS AND SPIRITUAL REBELS

And during an adult confirmation class a decade or so ago, one of the participants, Jim Morgan, as I remember it, asked: "What will we be when this class is over?"

And I said, quoting Brian without thinking because it is the best thing, the very best thing, to be:
DANGEROUS MYSTICS AND SPIRITUAL REBELS.....

God bless us all, not much better to 'be' than that.

I'm working on my class in June--8 one and 1/2 hour sessions on the Early Christian (so called) Gnostic writings.

I'll wear my tee shirt one day.

Reading the Gnostics will, if nothing else, make us into "Dangerous Mystics and Spiritual Rebels"....Those are the Christians I want to be around and hang out with and create a future with and ponder possibility with.

Those folks and our Robins....

Not bad company all the way around....