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…
sundown our oldest dog Ella has taken to fits of barking at night doggie sundowning the vet says sometimes I can tell what she wants she barks at the food closet or she stares at the kitchen counter at other times things aren’t so clear her bark a barbaric yawp an existential cry of angst…
unsustainable the first restaurant where I worked was a disaster from the start the owner had dreamed of a tea house but had no idea how to run one we closed on a Tuesday without any warning we should have seen it since the dining room never filled with people but we kept cooking after…