My best friend, Susie, from my Kindergarten class, died before the end of the school year. I keep a photo of her in my scrapbook, in the first part where the pages are still neatly arranged. After about twenty pages the neatness ends and the rest of the scraps are thrown in. I forgot about […]
Yesterday I finished reading Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons For Our Own, by Eddie S. Glauber Jr. I read it for a book-discussion group and I’m so glad that I did. I have not read all of James Baldwin’s writings, and I know that I will never be able to do […]
Is it the ongoing isolation of a pandemic that is the cause of my lack of concentration? Is it my age? The change of going from weekly writing of sermons to my own writing? I don’t feel a restless “cabin fever” so much as a desire to watch and listen. There’s a lot to see […]
In the three months of my retirement from local church ministry I’ve been doing what I love the most—reading and writing. One of the books I took off my shelf to reread is Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, which led me to another of her books off my shelf, Home, and that led me to her […]
A few days ago I finished reading our friend Riva Lehrer’s new memoir, Golem Girl. I closed the back cover of this most beautiful book and felt so full of wonder, joy, spirit, and hope that I wanted to get down on my knees and pray and then get up and dance and sing. It’s […]
I’ve grown crooked, at a tilt.
I got up not too early on this Christmas Day, 2019 after a late night Christmas Eve service. I got my daughter the meds she needs and sat down at her bedside to keep watch, read, and pray. As in most mornings, song lyrics were running through my mind. This morning the lines were, “Why […]
Dad took us to see the Shrine Circus when it came to town. My father, playful and listening? I took it whenever it came, but I didn’t trust it much. I never knew how long it might last. I had never been to the circus before. As I said, Dad taking us somewhere fun and […]
The global United Methodist Church, some 12 million members worldwide, represented by delegates from each area of the United States and around the world, gathered in St. Louis this past weekend to vote on a way for the denomination to continue to be the church together across a widening divide of theology as it relates […]
I just finished reading the editorial pages in this last Sunday of 2018’s New York Times. The editorials grouped under the title “Hope Isn’t Only About the Future” renewed a sputtering flame of creative writing inside me (other than sermon-writing and other writing for church work). 2018 was a hard year. I lost some heart […]
