Are you listening? It was my mother’s frequent outcry. And of course we weren’t. We were following the devices and desires of our own hearts, as the prayer book says. We were children, after all, and we had imaginations to grow and visions to seek, and our own hearts to explore. We were not born to obedience. We were not robots to be programmed. Our normalcy as young humans is why are you listening? is normal in the mouths of... Read more

William Barnwell, an Episcopal priest who lives in New Orleans, has spent his life working for racial justice and reconciliation, mostly in the south but for about ten years in Boston, which is when we became friends. In retirement, he is choosing to spend his time volunteering in Louisiana’s infamous Angola maximum security prison, where men convicted of violent acts are locked away, often for decades. The majority of the prisoners are black. Barnwell runs a different kind of Bible... Read more

Interruptions. I’m just enjoying one now, an NPR piece on Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who wrote so winsomely about the human mind, the oddest of our associations (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) and what we can learn from our oddities about our conventional habits of thought. I delayed my work to hear a story that gave me pleasure. Now I’ll have a glass of iced tea – and then, I’ll get down to it. Till the... Read more

It’s election year in the US, and the mudslinging has begun. Score-keeping, which is tracked by the pollsters, records what mud is thrown, how badly it stinks, and whether it sticks. Right now there is a hunger for what the press terms ‘red meat’. But by the end of the season, a year from now, we will be groaning for an end to this. So many candidates are in the field it resembles the Hunger Games. When at last some... Read more

Wading through John’s 6th chapter, dense with repetitious mystical instructions about eating the body and blood of Jesus, is a trip through a sucking bog. I’ve walked along one of these bogs, not too far from Walden Pond, and listened to its strange, insistent noises, its burps and belches and long wailing siren sounds, and gotten the creeps.  John’s 6th chapter can do that to me, too.  As, John says, Jesus did to large numbers of those who had been... Read more

Time. We all know what time is. We are in it, of it, on it, in the nick of it, or out of it. We are its creatures. As the fish is in the sea and the sea is in the fish, so are we in time and time in us. Hurry up, you’ll miss your train. When’s dinner? Are we there yet?  I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date. Are you having the time of your life?... Read more

Manna from heaven, so the story tells us, rained down, so that the Israelites, in their long wandering journey to an unknown destination, had each day enough bread for that day. Our imagination is caught by this bread, which Jesus calls the bread of eternal life, and which he also says he is.  But in the ongoing journey of human life – and all life – on this planet, we need to pay attention to its raining, and we need... Read more

For a month of Sundays the readings are a drama of holy bread, miracle bread, bread that came down from heaven, bread, Jesus said, that gives life to the world. And the world, so the story says, did not expect this bread – and misunderstood it. Over the centuries Christians have called this bread by a number of names:  bread broken and shared – the bread of heaven – the bread of life – the bread of redemption.  Eucharistic bread... Read more

In the desert, when the bread of heaven came down upon the fleeing refugees, we are told it was like hoarfrost on the ground.  Strangely sweet.  A taste of honey in it. In the mornings  people could gather it up in jars, enough to last through the day.  Then as now, there were all kinds of folks.  And the worriers, the plan-a-headers, the supply counters, and the schemers, the instinctive retailers, the concierges of the caravan, found they could fill... Read more

People everywhere are hungry. Mark writes that wherever Jesus went he was beset by crowds of folk begging him to feed their hunger, for cures for their sick bodies, cures for their fearful minds, cures for their bellies that ached with emptiness. Everywhere Jesus went, there were crowds of empty, aching folk who believed Jesus was the answer to their needs, or at least they suspended their disbelief to give him a try, to touch his garments, to get his... Read more