During her (our) Troubles, I remember sitting at one end of our sofa and holding a book, or a sheet of paper with an assignment on it, and patting the open space beside me. I remember that space as on my left, my strong hand, the side my heart is on. I remember inviting A […]
When I was very, very little — probably as soon as I was noticeably taking purposeful action like, say, crawling — my mom would tell me why she was doing what she did. She actually did this across the whole of her day as I was growing up, but she particularly told me why I […]
KS: I mean, marriage — being, staying married — is a group project. KM: And we all know that not everybody is good at group projects!
I’m far from the only one with this problem, and also it keeps cropping up for me — I wake in the morning (or pause) and make the mental move to orient myself in the day. And — unlike in other years or life-seasons or or or — my mind pulls in a day farther […]
I had the honor of preaching to a congregation this past weekend — the place where I was a pastor-intern, so it was a delightful homecoming made sweeter by being gathered, embodied. The last I was with them, you see, was in December 2020, before any of us had vaccines and thus well before we […]
A while back (a long while back) I attended a speed version of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. The full form is thirty days; there is a week-long form that time has hallowed; there also is a four-day form, which might have been shaped as a concession to the late twentieth century, or perhaps […]
My friend C is a member at the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center. And for the past… six weeks? two months?… we’ve met here on Wednesday mornings at next-door-to-8am in order to walk through whatever is jammed up in our hearts and heads. And for me to say out loud what faithful work I intend to […]
Here’s something I’ve been ‘doing’ but not writing about: waiting in hope to get into / start a PhD program in Fall 2022. My applications? Committed & sealed in mid-December and mid-January. My responses? Of 4 applications: one decline, one decline with a counteroffer of a ThM acceptance, two waitlists. The institutions let me know […]
Back a while ago — when the girls were young, and I was in one of my desperate seasons — I consulted my first spiritual director. She was someone I was friendly with at church, who had recently decided to add this skill to her capacious repertoire. I was early on in my journey into […]
So I’m drinking my second cup of coffee and reading Twitter, as one does, and I wander into a thread on the morality of the death penalty. Not very far, just far enough to see some “teacher” qualities and some “Christian” qualities (go algorithms!) and to notice someone asking the original poster whether they think […]
