T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock speaks heavily into our contemporary souls of "time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet." Who are we, really, aside from our curated Instagram personas, our virtue signals and our self-justifications? What is the truth we hide even from ourselves? In Till … Continue reading C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces and the Slow Liberation of Our True Selves
With lights dimmed and screen illuminated in my optometrist's examination room, he and I review my latest retinal scan, one eye at at time. My eye appears as an orange globe networked with a map of red blood vessels. The scan allows him to detect signs of early eye disease, tears in the retina and … Continue reading How to Remove the Speck in Your Neighbor’s Eye
I discovered the power of wind and fire the hard way. I was a thirty-something mom of two toddlers and my husband and I had rented a little home in the country surrounded by open fields. One breezy spring afternoon, having returned from grocery shopping, I put the kids down for a nap, gathered up … Continue reading Pentecost: The Wind that Spreads the Fire
Every Holy Week, when the Palm Sunday readings take us from the adulation of the crowd at Christ's Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem to their cries to crucify him only days later, the lyrics of a Bruce Cockburn song from The Charity of Night rise in my mind. They turned their backsI made it too hardEvery … Continue reading Bruce Cockburn’s The Whole Night Sky: A Holy Week Interpretation
I lost a brother last month. I'm the oldest sibling in my family and the only sister. Andy, the middle of my three younger brothers, lost his life to COVID-19 on February 10. A grieving heart wants to review the details of what happened. It wants to relive the memories. It wants to make sense … Continue reading “It Does Not Appear What We Shall Be” – Reflections on the Loss of a Brother
Two days before Christmas in 1949, Thomas Merton returned to his room in Kentucky's Abbey of Gethsemani and opened his mail. He had received a postcard bearing Fra Angelico's golden rendering of the Annunciation, the moment when the Angel Gabriel appeared to Mary with the invitation to bring God into the world through her own … Continue reading Contemplating Christmas Cards with Thomas Merton
Remember when email was fun? How simple it was to "shoot" a greeting to a friend, receive a pithy reply and close your inbox feeling content and connected? I now have three inboxes and I approach each of them with trepidation. Even my personal inbox is more like Pandora's box than a friendly greeting gatherer. … Continue reading End 2020 on the Path to the Ever-Ancient, Ever-New Normal
While the world longs for 2020 to be over, a new year has already begun. Nature has sunk into hibernation; the bare trees speak in silence and early evening shadows darken our days. "Nature and mystery join and invite us to recognize our hopeful longing and the return of the sun and the birth of … Continue reading Advent Begins with a Flame
I'd just been paired with a stranger for one of those awful icebreakers at a conference in a Denver hotel. We stood among the other pairs, politely smiling, straining to hear each other in the din of the introductions going on all around us. He was a tall man, late sixties maybe, with thinning hair … Continue reading Let there Be Light: Thoughts on the Life-Giving, Death-Dealing Power of the Tongue
There are plenty of "hard sayings" in the Bible, but one I often puzzle over doesn't tend to make the lists offered for our reflection. It's Christ's directive to have no anxiety. What? I protest. Anxiously. A spiritual director once asked me point blank, "Why are you so anxious?" Momentarily stunned, I responded with a … Continue reading A Prayer Practice for the Anxious Heart
