Giovanni GiacomettiChristmas Now burn, new born to the world,Double-natured name,The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled,Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,Mid-numbered he in three of the thunder-throne!Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fire hard-hurled.-Gerard Manley Hopkins, excerpt from “The Wreck of […]
Read moreThis beach is a mess. It wasn’t like this yesterday, and now look. I don’t have to walk ten feet before I’m practically tripping over the refuse washed ashore. Here is a plastic soda bottle, unearthly green and in the sand neck-deep. And here the sodden remnant of a ruptured mylar balloon has draped itself […]
Read moreBy now we’ve seen the photos and the videos; we’ve read the interviews. In the video I watched, the thing came bearing down unstoppable, a thick, gray column, opaque and faceless, an all-powerful horror. Forty minutes isn’t terribly long, but it was more than enough. It left a swath of destruction that staggers the mind: […]
Read moreI attended our church’s women’s retreat this weekend. It was a beautiful time: so many women I know– and many others I don’t– gathered to enjoy one another, to learn more about our God, to rest from the pull of our daily lives. I remember going on youth group retreats when I was a teenager. […]
Read moreLike everyone else, I was surprised and dismayed to hear Monday’s news: the bombs detonating, the screams and smoke, the aftermath. Amputations, shrapnel and surgeries because you went to see them cross the finish line. Three of them dead, all of them somebody’s child. After three days worth of radio news, I was nonetheless surprised […]
Read morebiblechurch.org I play the violin. I do not play it well, and I never have. This fact is not terribly problematic for me– not in terms of ego, anyway. I don’t expect myself to be good at it because, well, I have never been good at it. Not even when, in high school, I daily […]
Read more[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/39439897 w=400&h=300] I have never felt that his was my story to tell. I had the privilege of being his teacher for only a few short months, you see, and that is nowhere near long enough to discover anyone, let alone this bright-eyed boy, this sometimes seven-year-old-wonder in a fourteen-year-old body. Like anyone else, […]
Read moreThe ears wake first, opening to the songs of birds: titmouse, cardinal, the jay’s cry. They are close to the house and they are in the woods; they are streets and blocks and arm’s reach away. In the cedar, in the dogwood, the beech. It’s time to feed, maybe time to nest. Morning is the birds’ world first. Then the […]
Read moreMy children went back to school yesterday. First day of school in the new year, but they are still wrapping up the first semester. The trees are bare still; the lawn still only two-thirds raked from the fall of leaves and pine needles. The kitchen window still wants washing, and only yesterday I scrubbed last year’s […]
Read moreDecember is the month of our greatest anticipation, followed at a distance– in this country, anyway–by May, when children are waiting for school to liberate them for the summer. But December is a month of anticipation around the world, the season in the Christian church for expectation. We re-live in worship and celebration the Most […]
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