I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. The voice was low, lifeless. He just got out of jail, and the guys in there told him to call me. I function as a volunteer chaplain in Washington State’s Skagit County Jail, and I’m the closest thing to a pastor most gang members in my valley have known. Jail-tier referrals like these are how my tiny congregation grows. The next day, I picked this new guy up and we... Read more
Holy Week, if I’m being completely honest, was never more than a blip on my radar until I became a staff member of a church and it affected my calendar. It wasn’t that I didn’t care or failed to understand the significance of the narrative in the liturgical season. Instead, I’d become desensitized to the highs and lows of the story. To the cries of Alleluia. To the death and resurrection. (more…) Read more
I don’t live a very active life, though observers might deduce that I am always late, leaping over railroad tracks in my early millennium Honda pilot to get to a pickup before my kids notice my absence. It benefits me to preserve the appearance of a harried, overbooked mother of a large family, because it prevents well-meaning parish coordinators and parent-teacher organization officers from asking me to volunteer for things. And thus, it protects my beautiful midday window of total... Read more
I watched Black Mirror’s “Crocodile” episode feeling as if writer/creator Charlie Brooker had gotten into my head and seen my nightmares. (Spoiler Alert: This post reveals key plot points to Black Mirror’s “Crocodile.”) It begins when Mia’s boyfriend Rob accidentally kills a cyclist with his car. They’re terrified, scared. They don’t know what to do; they can’t believe what’s happened to them. Long story short, they cover it up and get away with it, but years later the secret threatens... Read more
If you write poetry, odds are you don’t expect your work to achieve acclaim like that of a Robert Frost or a Mary Oliver. You consider yourself most fortunate if, now and then, you find a publisher and an audience who connect with your sensibility. There are moments, many of them, when you question why you continue to write, given the improbability of your work surviving your own demise and given the plethora of poets who similarly labor in obscurity.... Read more
In second grade my mom put me in an art class taught by a fluffy-haired blonde who took us to a museum to sketch a Madonna with child. Before we began, our teacher asked us what we noticed about the painting. I raised my hand. “She has a golden crown.” “It’s a halo, not a crown,” my friend Sarah corrected. “I want one,” I said. “You can’t have one,” she said. “Only angels have them. Or if you die and... Read more
How did I first hear of lectio divina? It must have been from the monks at the Trappist Abbey near my home, who engage daily in this ancient practice of “holy reading”: the prayerful reading of Scripture, just a short passage at a time. This is my guess, because I at my second meeting with my new spiritual director, Fr. Bill Shannon, in March of 1985, he asked me how I pray. I told him I do lectio divina. And... Read more
My old friend Gina, one of the loveliest ladies I know, lived for years with her family in a large co-op apartment overlooking Riverside Drive in New York City. The building, on its lower floors, was like a wedding cake swathed in white icing, but once you made it through the dark Gothic lobby and the be-capped doorman, and into the filigreed elevator, you arrived on the appointed floor thinking you’d perhaps stepped into group home, or a kind of... Read more
I am chatting with a woman in a clothing store as our conversation moves from friendly small talk to the anxiety of raising children. My conversation partner, who is a few parenting years ahead of me, is lamenting dangers that now seem rampant for children, ones her preteen will face the closer she gets to driving. It’s something that most parents think about often. How do we protect our children in a world that seems so hostile? We are bombarded... Read more
How to image good and evil? It’s hard to do in a way that astounds us afresh with how they penetrate every aspect of our lives. Yet Jeanne Murray Walker manages to do this in “God Reads the Poem of the World with Interest.” Evil is terrifyingly concrete: men setting a boy’s mother on fire and others who simply watched. Good is concrete too, personified by the boy’s teacher, who cares for the boy in a tender way that a... Read more
Good Letters
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In