I offer a poem of my own this evening. gift swap the Christmas party tradition for the confirmation classes is to sit in a circle and take turns choosing a gift, or taking one someone else has already opened and replacing it with another mystery. the giant jar of M&Ms changed hands four or five…

As the second week of Advent begins, the light moves from hope to peace. The practice of Advent grows out of church tradition rather than anything Jesus said or did, or anything in the Bible. I don’t know the story of how the weeks became identified—hope, peace, joy, and love—or how the order was chosen,…

As this first week of Advent draws to a close and we prepare to move form hope to peace, I offer these words from The Shape of a Pocket by John Berger: Hope, however, is an act of faith and has to be sustained by concrete actions. For example, the action of approach, of measuring…

This week I have been posting poems on my Facebook page. I started because a friend half-jokingly asked me to pick up where the Writer’s Almanac had left off, since it stopped when Garrison Keillor was fired after allegations of sexual harassment. That was a tough one for me. I started listening to A Prairie…

I spent some time looking for songs about hope in my music library tonight, in search of something beyond the songs I go to first. Here’s what I found. The first is from the Milk Carton Kids, who are sort of Simon and Garfunkel for a new century. Their song is called “Hope of a…

Two or three times on Facebook today I saw a picture posted of an engraved quote at the FDR Memorial in Washington DC. It reads, The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have little….

For a long time now, the comma has been an important symbol for the United Church of Christ. You have to love a denomination that finds metaphor in punctuation. The idea started with the “God Is Still Speaking” campaign that played off of a Gracie Allen quote—“Never put a period where God has placed a…

One of the records that has been in heavy rotation at our house is Fifteen by The Wailin’ Jennys. (There are so many anachronisms in that sentence.) It is a record of cover songs, and specifically songs about grief and sorrow. They have the awesome audacity to sing Emmylou Harris’ “Boulder to Birmingham,” Warren Zevon’s…

As Advent begins, I wonder how Christ can be born again in our time and in our culture. Yet Luke starts his story by noting that Quirinius was governor of Syria, and he made Mary and Joseph go to Bethlehem because Augustus declared a change in the tax plan. They were surrounded by wars and…