Words for/from anyone under siege, really. My anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain! Oh, the walls of my heart! My heart is beating wildly; I cannot keep silent; for I hear the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war. Disaster overtakes disaster, the whole land is laid waste. Suddenly my [house, garage, and […]
The most destructive forms of speech in community, Benedict understood, are those that involve judgments against the other. Benedict calls this form of speech “murmuring,” included all forms of griping, gossiping, and nagging. He forbids it absolutely. When I was a monk, I thought that the rule of silence was mainly in service of contemplation. […]
Y’know, seminary has some heavy intellectual lifting to it, but it’s the physical load of my laptop and books that’s knotting my shoulders and increasing the girth of my thighs! As I’m wrapping up for the day and packing my briefcase for tonight/tomorrow morning, I’m prioritizing my classes by text-weight! Thank heavens I don’t have […]
At that time it will be said to this people and to Jerusalem: A hot wind comes from me out of the bare heights in the desert toward my poor people, not to winnow or cleanse— a wind too strong for that. Now it is I who speak in judgment against them. — Jeremiah 4:11-12 […]
Or, in this case, the streak: I’ve sent two more poetry submissions out into the world, so September is covered. October 2013 began the run—this makes five years of sending something forth each and every month. (Trivia: one of the places I submitted to this time, I submitted to on precisely the same day last […]
…the hat rules, and what changes at Easter and Memorial Day. Not to mention seersucker season, when to use my silver bouillon spoons, and what a “Francis the first girl” is like. I own the Southern Belle Primer and its sequel. My married-person notecards are engraved instead of using thermography. And yet I’ve never seen […]
My 27-year-old self would’ve thought that, by now, I would not be startled when I have weeks like this. Weeks when the deadlines of my “other things” all crowd around into a single span, shoving my “real things” under the bed and into hampers. Yet here I am, startled to not finish yesterday’s post before […]
It’s still Yom Kippur, until well after sunset. So I’m still thinking about the practice of “settling accounts” for a year’s behavior. Y’know, like small businesses (and once-upon-a-time households) routinely go through their expenses and their money coming in, making sure everything lines up and the amount the bank says is there and the amount […]
גמר חתימה טובה /gemar chatimah tovah/ a good final sealing (of the book of Life for the year) I don’t know the actual Hebrew words yet, but I’m getting pretty good at sounding things out. Kind of like the six-year-olds you know. H-OU-S, house. It’s the last day of the Jewish High Holy Days, the […]
It’s been some years now since this moment of dismay. We — the usual crew of loving Scripture-wrestlers, cheerfully not just agreeing to disagree, but willing to hang on to each other’s different understandings alongside our own — were putting some passage through its paces. Somehow either the text or the gloss we were using […]
