Since we didn’t get to have a Christmas Eve service, I chose to preach on Luke 2:1-7 for the first Sunday of Christmas. If you are watching the video, the reason I am singing acapella is I cut my finger on one of my sharp knives while I was putting them up and ended up…
postpartum Mary rose before sunrise; the baby was still sleeping, as were Joseph and most of the animals, except for one cow who looked a little sheepish. The shepherds were long gone. In their excitement, they had not cleaned up well after themselves. The magi were resting somewhere, waiting to be guided by darkness. But…
I think it was about fifteen years ago, maybe more, that Ginger asked me to write a story for our Christmas Eve service at North Community Church in Marshfield, Massachusetts. That story, A Faraway Christmas, has shown up off and on since–several times on this blog. This year, because of COVID and because I am…
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…