double-edged expanse

I brushed my teeth at 10am today. I arose from bed at 7:30am. So there was time to (in not-their-order): read all the parts of the newspaper I cared to; have breakfast; fold and put away the towels; consider the rose-petals floating in a bowl on the coffee table and decide they could become potpourri […]

i always take the toll road

Hello, everyone! This semester (Jan 2021 – Apr 2021 which is now) has been the most time-intensive stretch in my whole MDiv journey, and one of the more crunched times across my adult life. Which is why I haven’t blogged since Dec 2020… I haven’t had enough spare brain cells to make sentences out of […]

this is not silence

My Sweetie and I are taking advantage of the between-week at the bridge of the year to be Someplace Else for a few days. Come to think on it, we not infrequently travel during this window — a memorable post 9-11 trip to New York City pops brightly into mind…. I suppose it’s the moment […]

what I carry with me

More than having one experience among a host of others, our professor — whose instructional responsibility, from what I can tell, is to concretely equip us for post-academic life as Ministers of Word and Sacrament — wants us to come away from this semester with a template or a framework that we could repeat… and […]

what I left behind

In the movie The Way, the gendarme character hands Martin Sheen’s character a pocket-sized rock as Sheen sets out to walk his dead son’s pilgrimage. In one of the late-late scenes in the movie, the erstwhile group of pilgrims arrives at an impressive pile of pocket-sized rocks… larger than any ebenezer I’ve yet encountered. Each […]

a pilgrim at john knox ranch

I began my pilgrim-week in this place. Yes, I know I take a lot of botanical pix. Some of these were to feed into a new app I have on my phone, Seek by iNaturalist, but truthfully… I probably would have taken them anyway. It was a lot more wandering and not much “going,” pilgrimage-wise. […]

pilgrimages have destinations

My destination for this pilgrimage? Know Where I’ll Be Next Fall For My Next Phase. When my pilgrimage class began, that destination looked like “find out more about PhD locations.” Two weeks before making the pilgrimage, S. approached me about how I felt about doing a two-year congregational pastoral residency. Over the course of the […]

pilgrimage vs. retreat

Pilgrimages go — move — from point a to point b. {Or they are without an articulated destination — peregrinatio, wandering.}Retreats stay in one place for the retreat-time, though one might travel to get there and get home. Stabilitas, constancy. There is a “site” for most pilgrimages: a destination to come close to and go […]

bad at contemplation

I think I’ve mentioned in the past that I have a morning devotional routine… routine in that it has regular components, and a usual timeslot. Not routine as in “I do it every day,” but then, I’m a known-non-routiner in that regard. My drill? I read 3 poems (or 3 pages of poetry, or to […]