The days have been full and my mind and heat have been quiet, so Went back through words I have written before and found this poem in a Long Ago File that spoke to me tonight. I hope it finds you as well. volcano do you remember the grade when we built volcanoes hollow towers…
I learned a new word today: concatenation. –the act of linking together in a chain; concatenating; –the state of being concatenated; connection, as in a chain; –a series of interconnected or interdependent things or events. I read the word in Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald, who was writing about her migraines what they had taught…
I preached this morning at our church in Guilford, and it was another peach of a passage as far as the lectionary is concerned. I had to write the sermon in traffic, as I like to say, because it was a hectic week, but some of those things became part of what helped me to…
This has been a rollercoaster of a week. It started, for me, with finishing up my nine-month bridge pastorate in Westbrook and sending out the inaugural issue of my newsletter, mixing metaphors. On Wednesday morning, Ginger and I went to Athens, Georgia to celebrate the opening of Puma Yu’s, a new restaurant that is the…
Monday did not begin as I had hoped. What I pictured was getting up, doing my morning pages, reading (I’m almost finished with Braiding Sweetgrass), and then putting some finishing touches on the first issue of the newsletter. What happened was I got up, poured myself a glass of water, drank about half of it,…
Part of the reason pastors take vacation in August is because the lectionary passages are complicated when it comes to preaching. Or perhaps the Lectionary Committee thought, “Hey, let’s dump all of these in August when we know we are not going to be in the pulpit.” Either way, in the waning days of summer…
Over the past several weeks I have been contemplating what life might look like in the days ahead. My recent reading in quantum theology and cosmology has given me a deeper sense of the interconnectedness of the universe, and the things happening in my little life in the middle of it have proven it. The…
I realized again today that I keep an informal list in my head of movie scenes that help my understand the world. I’m sure I am not alone in that practice. Off the top of my head I can think of scenes from Miss Firecracker, Big Night, Moonstruck, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Elephant…
One of the surprises of our Ireland trip for me was to learn that C.S. Lewis was born in Belfast and grew up there. I realized my knowledge of him was as a professor in England and I had never considered an Irish connection. The City of Belfast created the square, which has a beautiful…
My earliest memories of zucchini are not good. First, a bit of backstory: When I was growing up the house rules were that we ate whatever my mother cooked. If it was on the plate, we were expected to eat it. It was not negotiable. If we chose not to eat what was served, the…