I started a new interim today–actually a bridge interim, which means I am there to bridge between two stages of life for the congregation. The passage today was the Beatitudes. As I say in the sermon, a book, a conversation, and a movie gave me a new way to look at these familiar words. _______________________________…
hardship “Hardship is routinely hidden.”–Kieran Setiya the sentence came at the end of the second paragraph I’m not sure he meant for it to be as significant as it was as I read down the page I think about people I meet our stories were mostly hidden we are trained to keep them so the…
get rhythm I live with an arrhythmia I know of what I speak it’s awfully hard to dance when you cannot find the beat somewhere along the way as I traveled through my week the metaphor extended ‘cause we still can’t find the beat to life beyond these past two years of isolation and defeat…
The title of the interview was “The Pleasures of Disorientation”–a phrase that caught my attention. It was another in Conversations with Billy Collins, and from it came these words, in response to the question, “What is it about mystery and disorientation that is so appealing?”: For disorientation to be a pleasure–an odd concept in the…
I have had a quiet day today marking what would have been my mother’s ninety-first birthday. As I sat down to write, I went back to what I wrote for and read at her memorial service. They seemed like good words to repeat. When my father died, I adapted a poem I had written for…
the reading list I finished reading one of my Christmas books today: The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams. Ginger gave it to me because “it looked like I would like it.” She was right. The book centers around the relationship between two people: Mukesh, a widower who lives in West London and Aleisha, a…
The sermon below is one I preached for a church on the other side of New Haven to candidate to be their Bridge Pastor for the next five or six months. I started not to post it because it is kind of “teachy” (as I described it to Ginger) and, therefore, felt like it might…
meal prep the boxes of dried pasta in my pantry are harbingers invitations to improvisation promises that dinner can be something even on nights when I don’t know what to cook set a pot of water to boil and then open the fridge and find what wants to be cooked leftovers whose time has come…
The afternoon that they moved my mother into hospice her doctor came to check on her. Although we all knew she would never leave the hospital, her death was not imminent. She looked at the doctor and said, “If my goal is heaven, what do I have to do?” He smiled and said, “Stop eating…
For the last seven years the first two weeks of January have belonged to my mother. She went into hospice just after New Year’s Day 2016 and died on January 15, three days after her eighty-fourth birthday. I got to spend all of those days with her. Tonight, this story came back to find me….