star treatment we drove down to the water last night to see the suggestion of a star made by two planets closer than they have been in eight hundred years close enough to imagine a star worth following a beautiful night on the shoreline snow on the rocks all of us spread out staring in…
slouching towards bethlehem yeats put pen to page last century in the wake of a world war and as his wife was recovering from the pandemic before this one we’ve since learned how to keep the world at war without end to live in sustainable exhaustion and act as though we’re alive easier to replace…
On the eve of the winter solstice and the cosmic illusion of the “Christmas Star” that Jupiter and Saturn will provide this week, I went back to a poem I wrote a couple of years ago that found new life this year, thanks to my friend, composer Taylor Scott Davis, who used an adaptation of…
I’ve missed a couple of days in my Advent journal. With Ginger’s help, I stepped away from everything to catch my breath and a sense of myself. I’m back tonight with my sermon for tomorrow. Earlier in Advent I was a part of a Zoom workshop with poet Pádraig Ó Tuama entitled “A Poet Reads…
weather report my father once told me I should become a weather forecaster “you can be wrong everyday and you’ll never get fired’ it’s going to snow all night six to twenty inches they say a reminder that we’re all guessing when it comes to the weather by morning the snow will be deeper than…
Almost every week since March, I get to Wednesday or Thursday and I think, “Where did the week go?” mostly because I haven’t been able to remember what day it was unless I have a meeting or a deadline. The present tense feels endless. I’ve spent a good deal of my life learning how to…
After a long day, I have been staring at the screen and writing down dead end streets to the point that I have circled back to an old poem of mine that showed up in a memory today. I need to sleep, so I am going to lean into to your grace and offer words…
Since I preached about joy this week, I thought I might as well put together a hymnal to go with it. When I started looking for joy songs, I found, much as I did in my sermon, that joy doesn’t travel alone. Joy grows out of grief and pain. So that’s where the songs started….
In an earlier chapter of my life, I was a high school English teacher at Charlestown High School in Boston. The student population was a broad mixture of ethnicities but, because of the nature of urban public education in America, what most all of the students shared in common was they were from poor families….
A couple of Sundays ago, Ginger talked about numbers in her sermon, bouncing off of the scripture about God knowing the number of hairs on our collective heads. A couple of nights ago, I talked about the role the Beatles have played in the soundtrack of my life. Tonight, they both come to mind because…