evening prayer the world is quiet in our town the moon shines through clouds as if God is under the covers reading with a flashlight I can hear no bombs or see any tracer rockets no buildings are burning no one has to hide to be safe I have done nothing to earn this quiet…
“No one cries over artificial flowers.”–Peter Coyote biscuit king by the time we moved to durham the biscuit king had ended his reign sunny side up was our breakfast joint in guilford till they closed down in charlestown collier’s market made the best cheeseburger sub evah I can chronicle my life in closed down restaurants…
opposition “If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it . . .” –Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses I used to have a poster that said “peace, like war, is waged” and it made sense then but now I don’t want to be a part of anything like war so when solnit says gardens are…
Barely a week into my Lenten Journal and I am already missing days. One of the reasons is good. A longtime friend came to town for a few days and I spent the evenings talking with him instead of writing. But he’s been gone a couple of days and my depression took over responsibility for…
As I say in the opening paragraph of my sermon for the first Sunday in Lent, to preach about the temptations made me want to listen to the Temptations. so, round and around and around we go where the world’s headed, nobody knows oh, great googa-looga, can’t you hear me talking to you just a…
winter wonderland I think winter gets a bad rap it gets blamed for the days getting shorter but that is autumn’s fault every day of winter is a little longer than the last yes, it’s cold but I like the cold it’s also chili and cornbread build a fire bundle up people ask if my…
When I woke up this morning, I had notification of a text message a dear friend had sent while I was sleeping. She had written about my blog post from Ash Wednesday and she closed her note with these words: Your words helped me. You have a wonderful heart and brain, even though I know…
I was in fourth grade in Lusaka, Zambia when Ms. Reedy started reading A Wrinkle in Time to our class as a reward for getting our daily work done early. I had never heard anything like it. Not only did it make me a lifetime Madeleine L’Engle fan, but it let me live with the…
If I had the chance to go back and rewrite Keeping the Feast: Metaphors for the Meal, I would do a better job of explaining why a chapter on baseball belongs in the book. For tonight–Maundy Thursday and Opening Day (even though it got rained out)–I pulled some of what I wrote in the chapter…
one step removed the advantage of living through holy week after the fact is we know what is coming we read the events as connected sequence if this then that we have turned the unexpected into ritual meaningful repetition but still repetition we know what’s coming but the rituals seem empty because of the scares…