[Subject line from the Frederick Buechner quotation in yesterday's entry.]

More from Parker J. Palmer's Let Your Life Speak:

"Leadership" is a concept we often resist. It seems immodest, even self-aggrandizing, to think of ourselves as leaders. But if it is true that we are made for community, then leadership is everyone's vocation, and it can be an evasion to insist that it is not. When we live in the close-knit ecosystem called community, everyone follows and everyone leads.

Even I -- a person who is unfit to be president of anything, who once galloped away from institutions on a high horse -- have come to understand that for better or for worse, I lead by word and deed simply because I am here doing what I do. If you are also here, doing what you do, then you also exercise leadership of some sort.

From Peter Morales (current president of the Unitarian Universalist Association), on why belief is the enemy of religion:

Religion without belief is not phony religion. It isn't fake religion or pretend religion or partial religion. I think this is what the famous theologian Paul Tillich was getting at when he suggested that atheists are closer to God than most believers. I have heard critics of liberal religion complain that ours is church where people can believe anything they want. Actually, that is not true. I cannot truly believe anything I want. I would love to believe that I will live to be 900 years old and will play professional baseball. What is important about liberal religion is that you and I don't have to try to believe what we don't believe. We don't have to pretend. We don't have to lie. But most importantly, we don't get caught up in endless ridiculous debates about whose beliefs are correct.

Actually, the problem with asking what someone believes is that it is the wrong question.

True religion is about what we love, not about what we think. True religion is about being faithful to what we love. The key religious questions you and I must answer are these: What do we love so much that we are moved to tears? What gives us unspeakable joy? What gives us peace beyond understanding? What do we love so much that it calls us to action? What do we care about so deeply that we willingly, joyfully, devote our lives to it?

I suggest that when someone asks you what you believe, you tell them that you believe that is the wrong question. Beliefs change. If at age 50 you believe what you did at age 5, or at age 15, you are a case of arrested development.
On the other hand, asking what we truly love is the right question. That question goes to the core of our being and opens us to rich possibilities.

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Myths and facts about bone marrow donation; firefighters seeking more potential donors to save lives, including that of a colleague who survived 9/11 but is now battling multiple myeloma.

(One of my friends is also being treated for myeloma, and received a stem cell transplant earlier this year. Please, if you can register, it would be a wonderful thing. There is no cost to do so.)