Just as I was getting to work on Saturday, Scott Simon introduced a segment about a Carnagie Hall performance of Verdi’s Requiem to benefit the refugees from Darfur. I made a mental note and went to the web site to listen to the program. What I know of classical music I mostly learned from movie…

I’ve spent the better part of my day reading about what is happening in Darfur in preparation for a worship service we are going to devote to what is happening there and in other parts of Africa. Between the news of famine, AIDS, malaria, and all the other things that afflict the continent, Darfur stands…

Several experiences and conversations this week have set me to thinking about the words I both say and hear. My thoughts turned to poetry. Here is my attempt to describe some of what I am feeling. reverberation the air in the room is thick with leftbehind words from long agowords from last weekwords we just…

My musings on church a couple of days ago led me to look up an old friend. When I was in seminary, someone gave me a copy of The Way of the Wolf by Martin Bell, who was described as an Episcopal priest and a private detective. The book is a series of short pieces…

Friday and Saturday were two of the best days I’ve ever had working at the Inn. We worked hard, we worked well, and we had fun. Part of the reason things went as well as they did was we were appropriately staffed – finally. Part of it was Chef made some minor adjustments to the…

I’ve worked two days at the Inn since I decided to go back and have quickly realized the two weeks away lessened my capacity to work ten and eleven hour shifts. In short, I’ve come home tired, which is one of the reasons I didn’t write last night. My fortnight of forced freedom also brought…

One of the things I’ve learned in a little over a year of blogging is how short the life expectancy of a post really is. Once it moves far enough down the page that people have to scroll to find it, it is truly an archive. So, when I woke up this morning to find…

For a mostly white congregation in the suburbs, we do a pretty good job celebrating Martin Luther King Day. It starts with a breakfast (we had fifty people this year) where we hear excerpts from King’s speeches and writings, and then a worship centered around issues of peace and social justice. Paul Nickerson, the Associate…

Several years ago, I was singing for a church banquet and came to the point in my set where I was going to sing “Angel From Montgomery,” my favorite song. I prefaced the song very simply — “I relate to this song more than any song I know” — then I started to sing: I…

This morning on the TODAY show, they told of an American Airlines flight from hell over New Year’s Weekend. The flight was supposed to go from San Francisco to Dallas: three and a half hours. Because of severe storms in Dallas, the flight was rerouted to Austin, where it was told to land and wait…