The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to yourself. Michel de Montaigne As part of the liturgical year, I freely confess that Lent is my least favorite season. Over the past several years I have regularly posted something like “Why Lent is a Bad Idea” on this blog around Ash Wednesday. I have struggled not so much with the season, but rather with what Lent seems to represent for many people. It often is little... Read more
Today is the last Sunday before Lent, a Sunday which, in the liturgical calendar, is always Transfiguration Sunday. Included in all three of the synoptic gospels, Jesus’ transfiguration is a strange story multiple layers of possible meaning. Jesus is worn out by the crowds and takes his best buddies, Peter, James, and John, with him to the top of a mountain for a break. While there, he is transfigured with Elijah and Moses, looking like a great laundry detergent ad. Matthew’... Read more
My tattoo-artist oldest son reported in a phone conversation the other day that one of his recent clients is involved with professional wrestling. This brought me back more than thirty years when my sons were little kids . . . One of my many fond memories of my sons’ youth was our early Saturday morning routine. Their mother worked the night shift at a nursing home; I would wake the boys up around 6:00 and throw them in the car... Read more
My youngest son, Justin, has a remarkable memory–for, as he puts it, “totally useless facts.” By the time he was ten or eleven, I had learned never to challenge his memory of a basketball game we attended, of a conversation from months or years earlier, or a movie. Thanks to me and my forcing Justin and his brother Caleb to watch my favorite movies from the time they were very young, Justin knows every line of dialogue from “Dead Poets... Read more
I was the scheduled lector at the 8:00 service last Sunday, the first time I got to read up front in a couple of months. After the Psalm, the reading for the day was from Isaiah 58. The opening lines were SHOUT OUT, DO NOT HOLD BACK! LIFT UP YOUR VOICE LIKE A TRUMPET! Which I did, sort of—as much as I dared to in church at 8:10 in the morning. As I continued through Isaiah’s “in your face” challenge... Read more
Human love in the purest forms we can know it, wife and husband, parent and child, has the aura and the immutability of the sacred. Marilynne Robinson Occasionally on an early Sunday morning, Jeanne and listen to Krista Tippett’s “On Being” on our local NPR station. Appropriately for Valentine’s week a couple of years ago, Krista interviewed philosopher and author Alain de Botton–the topic was “The True Hard Work of Love and Relationships.” On Being: The True Hard Work of Love... Read more
In my life-long spiritual journey, the decade of my twenties was the charismatic decade. No, that was not when I began to develop my current charismatic personality—that’s when I first encountered the Christian charismatic movement. For the uninitiated, the charismatic movement was (and is) marked positively by an infusion of divine energy into churches and denominations that had for too long lived out the negative side of Paul’s observation that “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life.” For those... Read more
In the religious world of my youth and adolescence, Billy Graham was a rock star. He was the publicly recognizable and telegenic face of the version of Christianity in which I was raised, an conservative evangelical faith in which the whole point of being a Christian was to evangelize, to get other people to be our sort of Christian, thus increasing the number of people ultimately going to heaven and reducing those headed for hell (a zero-sum game if there... Read more
One of the many things that make teaching a rewarding vocation is receiving unsolicited testimonials from former students about things they have carried away from a class they took with you. I particularly enjoy such testimonials when enough time has passed for the student to truly test whatever she or he has taken from the class in the crucible of real life, when what the student has learned has percolated and matured for a while. I received such a testimonial... Read more
Unless a miracle occurs, the impeachment trial of Donald John Trump will end today, with a vote strictly along party lines declining to remove the already-impeached President. All of this, of course, without any additional relevant witnesses or documents, even though the person who might perhaps be the most relevant witness of all is virtually pounding on the closed doors of the Senate chamber, waiting to be invited in to testify. It will be the political version of the final... Read more
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