It was the summer of 1984, as I remember it. I was twenty-seven, living in Dallas, Texas and working as a chaplain at Baylor Medical Center. My father was pastoring at Westbury Baptist Church in Houston. The ties between us were strained a bit, in large part because I was working hard to figure out…
I was driving to work early this morning, as is my custom more days than not, and took my usual exit off of I-40 at Fayetteville Road. The ramp bends up and over the freeway to get to the mall and there’s a traffic signal just before the bridge. As I came up the hill…
On this second Sunday of the Advent season, I read the Hebrew scripture passage as if I were the prophet, which I have done for over twenty years in various congregations, and which has been preceded almost all of those years by my singing the chorus of “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord” from…
The protests have been in my mind all day. Here are a few of the songs that have been the soundtrack in my mind. As we walk this Advent road, these are good tunes for the journey. The first is a John Fogerty song covered by Mavis Staples and Jeff Tweedy called “Wrote a Song…
As soon as work was over this evening, I raced across Durham to meet Ginger at the Armory for the Durham Symphony Holiday Concert. Downtown was full of activity: something at the Durham Performing Arts Center (DPAC), a crowd around the downtown Christmas tree, and the usual folks finding their way to one of our…
Somewhere in the night I woke to remember I had not written. The day was full. Ginger and Rachel were driving back from the funerals in Birmingham, I cooked lunch for our UCC clergy group (as I do the first Thursday of every month), other food to deliver, and we had our regular Thursday Night…
I don’t know who said it, or where I first heard it, but for years I have remembered the First Rule of Theology: there is a God and it’s not me. I find comfort in that sentence. Being God looks like an incredibly difficult job. There’s something about the Incarnation that flips that statement over,…
Mark Strand died this week. He was a poet, even a former U. S. Poet Laureate. In the middle of the violence that makes up our world, it feels worthwhile to say thanks for the life and words of a poet who held a sense of appropriate insignificance with grace; therefore I offer two of…
I have been ruminating much of the day on a contrast presented to me by The Writer’s Almanac this morning. Along with the daily poem, they marked two anniversaries. In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the front of the bus to a white passenger. In 1913, Henry Ford introduced the…
As Advent begins, I am breaking my blog silence — which was not intentional. I have been writing, but my energy has been aimed at a new book called This Must Be the Place: Reflections on Home that will come out next fall thanks to the good folks at Morehouse Press. To be able to…