One of the people I got to meet, or at least talk to, while I was working as an editor is Debie Thomas, who is minister of lifelong formation at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, California, and author of Into the Mess and Other Jesus Stories. About this time last year, I contacted…
Seventeen years ago tonight I wrote my first post for don’t eat alone. It was titled “working with what I have.” The first paragraph I wrote said: I’ve been staring at the “posting” screen for several days now trying to figure out how to join the world of food bloggers. Since I’m writing from a…
We were in the kitchen this morning kind of goofing around and Ginger said, “Hey, Siri, play sad songs.” A couple of seconds passed and the voice from our HomePod said, “Okay, now playing sad songs.” Two or three tunes played and Ginger smiled and said, “This sounds like what you listen to all the…
November begins with two anniversaries in our household: on the first day of the month, seven years ago, we said goodbye to Durham, North Carolina, and then on the second we said hello to Guilford, Connecticut, arriving in town on the fiftieth anniversary of the day Ginger and her parents moved into the house where…
I learned a new word today: concatenation. –the act of linking together in a chain; concatenating; –the state of being concatenated; connection, as in a chain; –a series of interconnected or interdependent things or events. I read the word in Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald, who was writing about her migraines what they had taught…
I preached this morning at our church in Guilford, and it was another peach of a passage as far as the lectionary is concerned. I had to write the sermon in traffic, as I like to say, because it was a hectic week, but some of those things became part of what helped me to…
This has been a rollercoaster of a week. It started, for me, with finishing up my nine-month bridge pastorate in Westbrook and sending out the inaugural issue of my newsletter, mixing metaphors. On Wednesday morning, Ginger and I went to Athens, Georgia to celebrate the opening of Puma Yu’s, a new restaurant that is the…
Monday did not begin as I had hoped. What I pictured was getting up, doing my morning pages, reading (I’m almost finished with Braiding Sweetgrass), and then putting some finishing touches on the first issue of the newsletter. What happened was I got up, poured myself a glass of water, drank about half of it,…
Part of the reason pastors take vacation in August is because the lectionary passages are complicated when it comes to preaching. Or perhaps the Lectionary Committee thought, “Hey, let’s dump all of these in August when we know we are not going to be in the pulpit.” Either way, in the waning days of summer…
Over the past several weeks I have been contemplating what life might look like in the days ahead. My recent reading in quantum theology and cosmology has given me a deeper sense of the interconnectedness of the universe, and the things happening in my little life in the middle of it have proven it. The…