When the email came in from my editor, I wasn’t sure how to answer. What do you want to do next? After years—a decade, really—of what felt like pushing a boulder up a mountain, sitting down every night to write no matter if my family was watching a movie or there was ice cream being scooped into bowls or board games being set up, it was finally paying off. An editor from a major publishing house was asking what I... Read more
If you’re a contestant on American Idol, you may have the holy desires to uplift your fans through your singing and to earn a living for your family. But if you sabotage another entrant to better your chances of prevailing, your holy desires have become warped. While many desires prompt goodness, others trigger evil and thus can’t be signs of our vocation to love. St. Ignatius of Loyola called these desires disordered, meaning that a God-given longing—a holy desire—has become... Read more
I love American Idol and could hardly wait until this spring when the show was revived after a two-year hiatus. I’d watched it all through the previous seasons: those judged by Paula Abdul, Simon Cowell, and Randy Jackson; those when Kara DioGuardi stepped in; the stints of Steven Tyler, Mariah Carey, and Nicki Minaj; the reigns of Harry Connick, Jr., Jennifer Lopez, and Keith Urban. This penchant isn’t easy to admit. My friends are mostly highbrows—educators, writers, and lawyers whose favorite resting... Read more
Leaving work the other evening—a cold, blustery twilight that belied the spring it’s supposed to be—I drove down D.C.’s North Capitol Street and passed the usual crowds that give the neighborhood its shady reputation. Things are “trending” in these parts—new restaurants have arrived and townhouses are being renovated—but you still have a lot of people begging, a lot of furtive exchanges going on, and a lot of businesses that separate the customers from the owners with a thick wall of... Read more
I love this poem because it mirrors the passing of time, patiently guiding readers through the speaker’s perspectives on truth. The structure of the poem resembles a list, providing four metaphors for how truth moves in the world. The poem’s relationship with truth is a relationship characterized by time and movement. Even before we reach the last strophe, this relationship hints at the speaker’s evolved sense of truth. In reading, we see a “streaking train,” “a seagull wheeling, plunging” and... Read more
My daughter Anna Maria was born on Orthodox Easter Sunday—Pascha—in 2009. That year, the date fell on April 19. While her brother had blasted his way into the world at the very bottom of the night, in a delivery that was swift and surreal and unmedicated, my daughter arrived in the late afternoon as the sunlight was just beginning to dim. I latched her to my breast and asked my husband to run and get me a hamburger, fries, and... Read more
First seder, Passover 5778. Esther recalls climbing Mt. Pisgah in the early ’80s. She was in her fifties. Visiting her daughter and son-in-law at the time and first grandchild. What did I know about climbing a mountain? she says. I was from Driggs Avenue, Brooklyn. We were walking behind some other hikers, women older than me in heels. In heels! I thought to myself, when they turn back, I’m turning back. But they didn’t turn back. I’m turning back. I’m... Read more
Dear Saint Francis, I imagined I saw you today out of the upstairs window. Your cowl had slipped off your head, and you were fighting uselessly with the wind to put it back up again. The recently fallen leaves around your feet likely understood the inevitability of your struggle. Your habit, patched and torn and patched again, was the same dull grey as the maple tree under which you stood. I almost missed you, but your stigmata were bright red... Read more
My Good Friday plans got hijacked by 11:00 a.m. I’d forgotten the big “marshmallow drop” (don’t ask), and suddenly we were rushing around the house finding shoes and coats and plastic bags so we could join several hundreds of our fellow Evanstonians at the park. While there, we ran into friends, who invited us to walk over to the Steak ’n Shake. Also unscheduled. Now we were right by the Aldi, and I needed a few things for dinner, but... Read more
Moira Linehan’s powerful poem scarcely needs commentary; “The Sea Here, Teaching Me” becomes the experience it describes. Linehan turns familiar biblical images of comfort into images of desolation. The reader overhears the sea teaching how to pray, not to a god who is the Psalmist’s rock of refuge and protective fortress but to a “rock of a god” who is “immovable,” “impenetrable,” “glacial.” Before this god, the “you” being addressed—the poet, the reader, the person of faith—is merely a “dot... Read more
Good Letters
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