In Lent we are given forty days in which to look closely at the axis of our lives, to notice where our thoughts, attitudes, and choices still revolve around our own small self and that ancient, anxious, defensive question, “What's in it for me?” and also to notice where we have begun to find a new axis in the love…
I don't know if I am conveying it well, but I am trying to express that sense of quiet despair that can come upon us when we feel as if we are trapped in the shallows of life, and our lives feel too small. We can go very dutifully through the motions -- we do what needs to be done…
What interests me more than the setting is who was gathered that day around Jesus in the synagogue. What sort of people do you imagine were there? I like to imagine the room being filled with people not so different from ourselves. I like to imagine there being a young man in the crowd, a rather shy and serious fellow…
Around here we don't have to search hard for such places. I grabbed a cup of coffee and drove straight to Skinner State Park. I left my car in the lot near the base of the mountain and began walking up the road. It was a warm day, and a gusty wind was roaring about, tossing the branches of the…
In just six weeks, world leaders will meet in Copenhagen to negotiate a new treaty to cut global warming pollution, and the message that millions of people around the world were lifting up yesterday, and will keep lifting up in the weeks ahead, is the urgent need to reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to no more…
I don't know the exact history of how Grace Church came to celebrate its anniversary on the feast day of St. Michael and All Angels. Rob tells me that our building is patterned roughly after that of the Parish Church of St. Michael at the North Gate in Oxford, England, whose tower, dating back to the 11 century, is the…
One summer day in Ashfield, as I was eating lunch on the back porch, a sparrow with a light-brown belly made a landing on a banister nearby. I held my spoon of yogurt in mid-air, frozen in place. Sparrow and I looked each other over, briefly taking each other in. I tried to imagine its experience of the world. I…
Our Gospel is paired this morning with a passage from Hebrew Scripture about a similar, decisive choice. Joshua gathers all the tribes of Israel to Shechem -- a city in Canaan -- and he summons the leaders, and they stand together in the presence of God. Joshua tells them, “Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel: Now therefore revere…
I find this a wonderfully evocative image. I think of these two men roaring their way up into the sky, moving beyond the pull of gravity and the blue-green sphere of our planet, passing through the silence and darkness of space, traveling to an entirely new place, and sharing Communion there -- as if to say: God's redeeming love is…
