I spent some time this morning reading Life Work by Donald Hall. It’s not a new book to me. When I was finishing up at Winchester and preparing to move to the South Shore, my friend Jack loaned me his copy. Donald Hall was a poet who lived in and around Boston; his love for…
Call the world if you please “The vale of soul-making . . .” I say “soul-making,” soul as distinguished from intelligence. There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions, but they are not souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. — John Keats, “The Vale of Soul-Making” Those…
In our Monday night Bible Study, we are working through the “I am” statements of Jesus as recorded in John’s gospel: I am the shepherd, the door, the bread of life, the light of the world. Tonight we were looking at John 15: “I am the vine and you are the branches,” a great metaphor,…
In the past couple of days, I’ve had a chance to see people gathered together in several different kinds of groups. Saturday afternoon, I joined Lynn and Bob at their son’s lacrosse game. He’s in seventh grade, so the bleachers were filled with pretty much only parents who see each other at every game and,…
I arrived at the church yesterday about twenty minutes before the service was to begin. I would guess close to four hundred people were already in the sanctuary. A giant blown up picture of my friend’s father was on an easel and a folded and framed American flag honoring his military service was on the…
What then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who does ask me, I don’t know.Augustine of Hippo While I was waiting to meet my brother yesterday afternoon, I sat in Starbucks and read A Matter of Time, a special edition from Scientific American. I…
Today has already been a long day and it’s only late afternoon. At 3:45 this morning, Ginger and I were on the way to the airport. She drove me into Logan since leaving the car there for three days would have cost more than the plane ticket. We got to the exit for the Ted…
Today is World Water Day 2006. I woke this morning to the news that my friend’s father died last night about eleven. I’ve spent the morning making arrangements to get to the funeral to be with my friend, which means leaning into friends and co-workers who are allowing me to inconvenience their lives so I…
My schedule has made it difficult to find much time to read these past few days, so I took some time this morning to listen to Parker Palmer and Madeleine L’Engle, two names you are quite familiar with by now. Palmer was talking about the temptations of Jesus as a way of looking at the…
Last night at youth fellowship we played board games. We keep a big box in the closet with Boggle, Risk, Uno, Word Up, Scrabble, Mankala, and several others I can’t remember right now. From time to time I pull them out and we spend our evening playing games and talking together. I was in the…