The past few days I have been captured by James Carroll’s book, Christ Actually: Reimagining Faith in the Modern Age, in which Carroll articulates what faith in Christ looks like in the light of the Holocaust. He begins with a question Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to a friend: “What keeps gnawing at me is this question,…
I spent part of my day working from a window seat at The Marketplace, a wonderful coffee shop-café-grocery store that sits on the edge of the Guilford Town Green, which is renowned as the largest town green in New England (almost eight acres) and was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, who also designed Central Park…
As Christmastide comes to a close, I come offering a collection of thoughts and words that have found their way to me over the past couple of weeks, mostly through my reading. John begins his gospel saying, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” This year, his words have called me to try and…
I didn’t write yesterday because I didn’t sleep well the night before. On purpose. As one who lives with sleep apnea, from time to time I have to take a sleep test, which means trying to sleep without my CPAP, affectionately known at our house as my Snuffleupagus Machine because it requires of me to…
As I rode the train into New York, hoping for sunrise this morning, I came across an article shared by a couple of friends stating that tonight would be “the darkest night in 500 years” because the solstice was paired with a lunar eclipse. Now there’s a metaphor, I thought, because that is how this…
A comment from my friend Jeff on last night’s post sent me on a bit of a musical journey today, so I thought I would invite you to make it with me as we head to the manger. After reading about our new house in Durham, he quoted the chorus of a Kenny Loggins record I remember…
I haven’t written for the last few days because we have been traveling. Wednesday night, after our Service of Reflection and Remembrance, Ginger and I loaded up a rented van with some furniture, pictures, and household goods we had packed in the barn and began driving to Durham, North Carolina (in New England, you have…
The book I started on my ride to New York this morning was Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry by Donald Hall. A couple of pages in, I found this sentence: Their house was always dark: it felt like held breath. (5) The sentence stayed with me. When I sat down…
I’m seventy minutes away from the end of my sixtieth year, as I sit down to write, and I have a confession to make: I am not a mathematician. I did, however, just stumble upon something as I was trying to figure out what words to use to close out this decade and begin the…
The fact that Ginger and I have been in Guilford a little over a year now means we are beginning to do things for the second time; our inaugural year is over. Last year I was invited to serve on the Christmas Tree Committee, which, I learned, meets only once a year on the second…