I’ve loved the Magi since I was  a kid. I don’t know if it was their exotic nature, or that they were chasing stars across the desert, or that they were a sort of odd addition to the whole manger scene, but they have continued to keep my attention. As I learned to love poetry,…

One of the books I read and reread as a youth minister was David Elkind’s The Hurried Child, which was his take on adolescence in the 1980s. My guess is it still holds up pretty well. One of the things I took away from that book (or at least I remember it coming from that…

The story below is one I wrote several years ago. I read it this morning at church. I offer it to you tonight. A Faraway Christmas by Milton Brasher-Cunningham     As we gather together on this Silent Night, To sing ‘round the tree in the soft candlelight,   From a Faraway Christmas, from time…

on the cusp of a new year back edge of the old one may I see life as frontier ‘stead of something that’s done may I age with more grace and far fewer demands stare out into space and work with my hands make love the last word and thank you the first let my…

Looking through Facebook posts this evening, I noticed my friend Christopher Williams is playing at Club Passim in Harvard Square, one of my favorite places to listen to music. When we lived in Charlestown, I volunteered there and help run the sound from time to time. Thanks t the luck of the schedule, I got…

I have posted this poem before. It remains one of the most powerful statements of gratitude I know, so I’m sharing it once again. Thanks Listen with the night falling we are saying thank you we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings we are running out of the glass rooms with…

what we saved in daylight by falling back appears to be nothing more than the stealing of afternoon light to shore up the dawn the babies and chickens aren’t fooled even though the days roll by like an old tire out of round we think we have fixed something and can’t see what we lost…

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1) As definitions go, the opening verse of Hebrews 11 — the “faith chapter” — is about as good as it gets. Faith is at the heart of what we can’t make happen, of what we cannot see, of…

This past Sunday, our church finished a month long celebration of our 125th anniversary. One Sunday we returned to the little wooden church out in the woods where our congregation began; two Sundays ago, we spent the afternoon listening to Jeremy, our amazing accompanist, transport us with his words and music. And it was on…

this morning while the sun was wakingand the air was waiting to be warmedwe walked as though we had no otherpurpose but to walk together as though nothing else was as importantas passing under the changing leavesand letting the schnauzers sniffmost everything along our way then we circled back to meet the demandsof our day…