Guest post by Angela Doll Carlson Over the last twenty years of his musical career with Jars of Clay, guitarist Stephen Mason has seen shifts in the landscape of Christian rock as well as those that have taken place with the rise of social media. Mason and his band-mates have been pioneers in the music scene, producing consistently poignant words wrapped in powerful and soul stirring melodies. Stephen takes a few moments from his daily occupations of music making and... Read more
They arrived as strangers—freshmen at Seattle Pacific University who’d come to take a course in college writing: A tall girl with a flowered backpack and blond hair fishtailed to one side. A brawny boy with a knitted cap and a ready, brilliant smile. An elfin girl in a madras skirt whose black bangs fluttered with her lashes. A lanky boy in soccer shorts whose green eyes lit his freckled face. Within days I learned some names and habits: Peter* always... Read more
Guest post by Kathleen Housley It is a sunny morning in early June. A sabbath calm suffuses the empty Mt. Holyoke campus, the students having left for the summer. Other than a jogger, I seem to be the only one around, sitting on the stone steps of Pratt Music Hall listening to the sound of a small waterfall flowing into a nearby brook. I am waiting for an old blue van, edged with rust, to arrive from Wichita, Kansas, over... Read more
I’ll turn forty in three years. I recognize upon approaching this third score of years that the initial two have been largely peripatetic. The first score’s wanderings were undetermined by me, contingent upon my parents’ choices—graduate school, better jobs, a new house. Before the age of sixteen, I’d lived in ten different homes. My second score echoed the first for similar reasons, though its upheavals were at least ostensibly of my own choosing—the beginnings and ends of marriages, jobs, graduate... Read more
Don’t go to Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts. There isn’t anything there. Not her writing desk, not her books. Not her treasured items. Not her. Emily Dickinson used the house in Amherst to hide from life. As she got older, Dickinson left the place less and less. Often, she refused even to greet visitors. She’d lock herself inside her room. There, she wrote letters and she wrote her poems. And then, in 1886, Dickinson died. She left behind thousands... Read more
1. My children attend a school that sits in rented space in the middle of Historic Rock Creek Cemetery, high upon a hill on the edge of the Petworth neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Although the school itself is an independent Catholic Montessori school, the three-hundred year old cemetery—one of the nation’s oldest—is firmly steered by its overseeing Episcopal congregation whose church sits at its center, in the manner in which Anglican institutions once exerted a patrician mastery over a burgeoning... Read more
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings —Paul Lawrence Dunbar, “Sympathy” I first read Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings when I was thirteen. I discovered the book through an interview with Fiona Apple, one of the many female singer-songwriters whose mournful lyrics poured through my boom box speakers while I slogged my way through the kickboxing routine that, according to Seventeen, would slim my hips. Thirteen was a difficult year; I was overweight,... Read more
I’ve been taking an antidepressant for six months now. Psychiatry wins: I’m a more functional human. I don’t feel so isolated and restless. The tasks of daily life don’t seem impossible. Even the feeling of shame that I need to be on medication has been lessened by the medication. But it’s a dry season, God seems distant, and some days I don’t recognize myself. I wonder how much higher the dosage would have to be to silence that little voice... Read more
Just so you understand: I am dying. I am in the end stage of metastatic prostate cancer, and after six-and-a-half years of close association with the disease, I have another six months to two years to live. That probably sounds exhibitionistic, but I don’t mean it to. Nor am I fishing for pity. Truth is, I’d sooner have your laughter. Man says, “I’ve been diagnosed with terminal cancer, but I am going to fight it with everything I’ve got.” “My... Read more
Yesterday I traced the spirituality of a Zen Garden stroll, then of meditation based on the ancient Eastern insight that, as the Upanishads says: This whole universe is Brahman… He who consists of mind, whose body is the breath of life… He is my Self within the heart, smaller than a grain of rice or a barley-corn… greater than the earth. Mysticism is the general name for this insight: that, in a nutshell (or a barley-corn), God “is my Self... Read more
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