The endless debate between gun-rights advocates and the need for addressing the senseless violence in our country is a disconnect between ideas of personal freedom and personal responsibility. The violence in American streets and in our schools will not be solved by arming teachers in the classroom.
Too many people still think of the secular and the sacred as separate categories. We can make distinctions, but real separation is misleading. We live in one interlinked world.
“Eugene Bianchi’s poems reveal a healthy maladjustment, a holy irreverence which merges insights from a life in academe with Christian, Buddhist, and delightfully agnostic views.” – Don Foran, professor and editor
In my writing I have often tried to point to a closer relationship between what we think of as the secular and the sacred. An intimate connection between them is not arbitrary or insignificant. In the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching we are told that the invisible ultimate is present in its everyday manifestations.
Spirituality has been widely enlarged for me by Buddhist and Daoist insights as well as by Muslim and Christian mystics. The carpenter bees of aging are further clearing the field for me, bringing me down to experience the simplicity of God in every molecule of the universe.