Last week a man was killed in a car crash in Uganda. He was a pastor. He was also one of the most mean-spirited and vicious people I have ever encountered in my life. He made me question what Evil was. His death has prompted an outpouring of sorrow from people touched by his ministry and […]
It starts simply, in separate places. The seed takes root. It winds through the soil searching for moisture. The trunk sprouts soft and vulnerable, then its hard case stiffens as the cold wind, biting rain, steamy sun buffet it. The tree grows. Across the path, another tree grows too. Both trees spread their boughs wide, present […]
My father was always the last guy to buy a Christmas tree. He explained that the prices were cheapest the day before Christmas. He didn’t dwell on how bad the selection was. So we’d be driving along the country roads a day or two before Christmas, looking for a tree stand that was still open and […]
Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source. Leo Tolstoy A Russian chapel, photographed […]
An old tree came down at the edge of the property in a windstorm. It sat below the cottage at the edge of the farm road. The base was massive and marred with water bumps, knocks and scars. Time had thinned out the top, making it appear foreshortened against the sky. The trunks and branches […]
On a trail I walk there is an old tree that has given up life but stands rooted stolidly in the ground. The trunk is thick and black. The seasons have embalmed it. The wood is so hard that the bark won’t break off in your hands. The boys pick up stray scraps that have been […]
Every writer is a man with one deaf ear and one blind eye, who is possessed by a demon and unteachable by anybody but himself; a man who only half hears and half sees the world around him because for half his time he is absorbedly listening at the keyhole to his own Demon, examining […]
An essential step forward is the development of a fitting order of the day: a division of the day that gives a rhythm to the day, with a reasonably fixed pattern of exertion and relaxation, of spiritual breathing in and breathing out, of ordering one’s environment and moments when one is in touch with something […]
In the quiet of am empty cathedral, archetypes creep up on you. Yankee Stadium is that kind of place for a long-time baseball fan. The imagery is mythological; a modern pantheon of ordinary men who did un-ordinary things, who are held up in memory as being something more than men. Like Gods, they have their […]
A’s Communion Through him With him In him In the unity of the holy spirit Unto the hour of death, And the echo of a long valley For ever and ever. Crepe paper lightens my hand The flutter comes from the breath Of the word One supplication in this prayer To feel him A postcard From a […]