It was perfect. Don was taking prayer requests before the pastoral prayer in our ten o’clock service. One of the men in the congregation, a retired surgeon who is full of both gentleness and whimsy, raised his hand. Don called on him and he stood up, his hymnal open. “I wanted to make note of…
Carl and I were the only ones at the restaurant for most of the morning, which is usually the case on Saturdays. He is the function chef and I am the lunch cook. Carl does brilliant work in his kitchen. Not only does he make great food, he does it in a way that he…
It was a great night. We went into Boston about two o’clock because we had to go to the doctor’s office before our evening could begin. Ginger and I are three weeks away from her sabbatical and the Trip of Our Lives to trace the steps of Paul through Greece and Turkey (thank you, Lilly…
Ginger and I are going to the symphony tonight. (Let’s see – I’ll take “Sentences that Milton Rarely Types for $200, Alex.) One of the people in Ginger’s church was kind enough to give us her tickets since she could not use them – with a parking pass. According to the BSO web site, we…
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…