I first learned of the ancient Christian sage Augustine through one of his striking prayers. If an utterance to God can achieve celebrity status, his would qualify. And it did not take me long as a young person to encounter it: “Our hearts, O God, are restless till they find their rest in you.”
Read MoreI must have been ten or eleven. Certainly young enough still to be learning to write legible longhand. All four of us were in the family car, heading to a budget department store or maybe (less likely) a restaurant. Looking back now, I’d guess my attention was elsewhere, thinking about homework or a girl in my class I liked, but my ears pricked when my brother, seven years my elder, said something he had just heard about a person’s handwriting.
Read MoreWe do not like to stand speechless or stammering before God, but that does not mean God holds it against us when we do.
Read MoreI knew better than to assume, as someone once put it, that the Psalms are mostly mild “benign poems about sheep,” but more like, as Eugene Peterson wrote, “earthy and rough,” just right for sorting through life’s sometimes gritty, seemingly graceless moments. Still, I found myself turning elsewhere for inspiration.
But one morning I was troubled.
Read MoreI see, captured in a flash of a moment in a department store or photographer’s studio how I sent out little signals, bids for connection, theorists call them, testing the nature of the world in which I would find myself, a world both precious and perilous. Would my little sphere prove safe? Every child wonders, as I did. As much as I have lived since, I still wonder about the nature of this world—especially when things happen that seem random or heart-rending.
Read MoreLots of us are pretty ingenious at thinking up things to worry about.
There’s even a site called phobialist.com, where Fredd Culbertson has funneled his lifelong fascination with exaggerated, exotic fears.
Read MoreI’ve lived long enough to be grateful to God for not answering all my prayers. Jobs I’ve applied for. Regions of the country where I thought I wanted to live. All grist for my asking, yet requests denied.
Read MoreA woman told a story about a time she had emergency surgery: “My sister, a professor with final exams to give, was getting married in less than a week. Yet she drove from New York City to Massachusetts in a snowstorm to see me in the hospital. No phone call would assure her that I was alive, and okay. She had to see me with her own eyes.”
Read MoreSome years ago I heard someone tell her story at a small group meeting. As a young person growing up, she recounted, “I was active in my Methodist church and the youth group. I thought I would keep rules and try to be a good church girl, and then God would help me with my life. He would be there to smooth all the edges and take care of me.”
Read MoreA question during Lent: What are we to make of the suffering in the world (sometimes our lives) that has achieved, well, pandemic proportions?
Read MoreDon’t trust your gut.
Read MoreWe need to see our proper place sometimes. Maybe you've heard about the psychiatrist who tells a client, “No, you don’t have an inferiority complex. You really are inferior.” Harsh words.
Read MoreI could sense the hint of danger in her voice--the warning. So I paid attention to Mrs. Hamilton explaining to my fifth-grade class how to avoid getting run over. “When you cross the street,” my teacher told us, “don’t just step out, but stop. Look. Listen.” Only then, walk.
When I cross a downtown street, I have hardly to think twice now. I do instinctively what I had to do by practiced effort back then. But I still have to work on the soundness of that pattern in other ways now.
Read MoreI’ve been re-reading J. R. R. Tolkein’s remarkable book, The Fellowship of the Ring.
“Why read a book you already have read?” someone asked me when I mentioned it. Some books are, of course, worth only one read-through (some not even that). But others, and Tolkein’s among them, draw me back again and again.
A scene from early in the book (the first part of the trilogy, The Lord of the Rings) strikes me now. Frodo, a hobbit, the main character, finds himself uprooted from his quiet, calm life in the Shire. A resurgence of evil in the world has meant a new calling for him fraught with difficulty, a vocation pressed upon him.
At one point, as Frodo counts the cost and realizes the potential perils of the journey he has to undertake, he confides in Gandalf, the sage figure who has more-than-natural wisdom.
“I wish,” Frodo says of the disruption, “it need not have happened in my time.”
[photo credit: Joshua Baudelaire at unsplash.com]
Read MoreShe wore green for the broadcast this morning because it’s St. Pat’s Day. Gayle King called attention to the color as she prepared to lay into the headlines because, the newscaster said, “I’m craving some normalcy when nothing is normal.”
Soon a program segment commented on New York’s normally bustling intersections as “deserted, desolate streets,” complete with eerie, quiet images. And another phrase from the newscast to depict the nature of things now: a “social-life shutdown.” And then there’s that phrase social distancing. What used to be a negative (“Oh, I don’t like how he’s so distant emotionally”) now, in the new pandemic normalcy becomes not just a virtue, but a mandate.
This is strange, new territory for all of us.
Read More“Where is the poetry section?” I asked the bookstore owner, who stood behind the counter. I wouldn’t say I’ve been a big follower of poets. But I’ve grown interested in the odd and stunningly articulate Emily Dickinson. I had visited her historic house just days before, while visiting in New England. And here I was in Manchester-by-the-Sea, a Massachusetts town given notoriety by a (somewhat depressing) movie of the same name, staying with my son and his family. And of course, I was drawn to the bookstore there--the cleverly named Manchester-by-the-Book.
Pointed in the right direction, I found a biography of Dickinson, as I hoped I might. When I came back to make my purchase, an elderly, distinguished lady--obviously a regular used to chatting with proprietor and customers--asked me what I was buying.
Read MoreRecently I discovered a disturbing web site: www.withoutsanctuary.org. It documents postcards of lynchings in earlier times in America, most of the victims black. The scenes printed for mass distribution depict gut-wrenching brutality and obvious signs of torture leading up to the hangings. Just as striking is the nonchalance of the perpetrators, and the fact that the photographs, some capturing a carnival atmosphere with children present, became postcard “souvenirs,” a grotesque testimony to the way humans can grossly dehumanize one another. My discovery of the unspeakable atrocities coincided with something that has come back to mind, during this season of Lent.
Read MoreA woman I heard about tried a prayer experiment. She had already decided she wanted to do less talking, more listening for a larger voice. She sat in a chair and tried to imagine the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in the room sitting around her, conversing and communing. “I wanted,” she said, “to eavesdrop on the Trinity.”
Read MoreWhat does it mean to grow close to someone in a healthy way? Is it a merging of souls, a fusing of identities? Do we not instead grow closer, perhaps intensely and intimately so, but still remain distinct? Tackling the question in the sphere of human relationships helps me make sense of what it means to grow into intimacy with God.
Read MoreMy new friend Kerry Egan spends her days with dying people, listening and talking. Those conversations come with her job as a hospice chaplain, but the way her eyes come alive when she talks about what she has learned shows that it’s also a calling.
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