By the time most of you read this, Ginger will have received her Christmas present. She will be on a bus headed for Birmingham, Alabama as a part of the 21st Century Freedom Ride, which has been organized by a group here in Durham. They are riding from here to Atlanta and then to Birmingham…
As many evenings as we can, Ginger and I take a walk around our neighborhood, which, in our case, is downtown. Old North Durham sits just a few blocks north of the center of the city, not far from the Farmers’ Market Pavilion and a bunch of old warehouses and abandoned buildings that are coming…
For the last twenty Advents I have been a prophet. My calling began at First Congregational Church of Winchester, UCC where Ginger was serving as Youth Minister. We lived in Charlestown, which was eight miles away and didn’t have a car. I was teaching full time and going to grad school full time to finish…
Beginning Advent this year is an exercise in finding a centering rhythm as I come back to writing daily during the season, which has become my spiritual practice. Over the past few months, with the publication of my book and the corresponding learning curve of how to begin to get the word out that the…
Looking through Facebook posts this evening, I noticed my friend Christopher Williams is playing at Club Passim in Harvard Square, one of my favorite places to listen to music. When we lived in Charlestown, I volunteered there and help run the sound from time to time. Thanks t the luck of the schedule, I got…
I have posted this poem before. It remains one of the most powerful statements of gratitude I know, so I’m sharing it once again. Thanks Listen with the night falling we are saying thank you we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings we are running out of the glass rooms with…
we are made of dust but I’m not so sure — our bones, perhaps but our spirits . . . our spirits are made of the stuff of sautéed garlic the hope of rising dough the laughter of bacon frying the tenacity of friendship every morsel of mortality a reminder to remember from love we…
what we saved in daylight by falling back appears to be nothing more than the stealing of afternoon light to shore up the dawn the babies and chickens aren’t fooled even though the days roll by like an old tire out of round we think we have fixed something and can’t see what we lost…
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1) As definitions go, the opening verse of Hebrews 11 — the “faith chapter” — is about as good as it gets. Faith is at the heart of what we can’t make happen, of what we cannot see, of…
This past Sunday, our church finished a month long celebration of our 125th anniversary. One Sunday we returned to the little wooden church out in the woods where our congregation began; two Sundays ago, we spent the afternoon listening to Jeremy, our amazing accompanist, transport us with his words and music. And it was on…