In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. —John 14:2 When Charlotte moved in with me in January of 2005, my Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder surged with such searing intensity that I had to schedule an emergency session with my therapist. I sought treatment in the first place because every time I tried to date someone, electric anxiety coursed through my central nervous system, threatening... Read more
I did not enter a church until I was in third grade. My friend Vicky, who always wore long jean skirts and seemed to be liked by everybody, invited me to a Sunday school competition where she would be quizzed on Bible verses. I remember dirt-colored shag carpet, wooden pews, a crowd of stern-looking women gathered around a microphone, their khaki skirts brushing their Keds. I remember Vicky standing beside them, unsure of how to phrase the lines of Psalm... Read more
This is my one hundredth post for Good Letters. What a privilege it has been to write for these readers (you readers) all this time. I treasure the stimulating conversations we’ve had through the comments, and the cyber-friendships I’ve made among Good Letters writers and readers. To mark my one hundredth anniversary, I looked back at what I’d written for my very first post in 2008. (Of course I had no idea until I opened the document; I can’t remember... Read more
I was raised in a house full of old furniture: old desks, old mirrors, old rugs. There are old paintings on the walls and old linens in the drawers. The silver is old, the lamps are old, and at this point, even most of the photographs are old. After all, who prints such things out these days? Most of the time the images we take stay locked within the device upon which they’re captured. And there they remain, always new,... Read more
Despite my Christian upbringing, I didn’t grow up with the church calendar. Easter was a single day affair involving plastic eggs hidden in hill country pastures and Sunday school handouts with coppery brads to swing a construction paper stone away from an empty tomb. The graphic was always neat and tidy—flowers and grass and “He is Risen!” written alongside. I knew the story of the suffering, but the celebration made more of an impact. So between Valentines Day and Easter... Read more
I know my limits. Though often I go on saying yes to this, yes to that, yes to the other as if the calendar were merely a hypothesis, as if the body were merely an argument, the most tangible, perhaps, for how far, how long a man or woman can go without rest. Time is elastic. Exhaustion is an illusion, a trick performed by some agent to keep us from creating at a level equal to The Creator’s output. And... Read more
For Peter and Jackie Cooley, who live in one. “So what do you know about East Pines?” I directed the question about a nearby neighborhood to an acquaintance whom I know solely as a friend on Facebook, a local historian who has written widely on the postwar country music scene in Prince George’s County and the “haunted boy of Cottage City,” who was the inspiration for The Exorcist. “Not much,” he typed back. “You could check the Prince George’s archives.”... Read more
It was my eleven-year-old’s turn to pick a movie, and he chose The Hobbit, just as his thirteen-year-old brother had done a few weeks before. The full title of the movie is: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and believe me, I never expected I’d be journeying to the theater to watch it a second time. I’m very impatient with people who take a long time to tell a story, because I believe my time belongs to me. My aesthetic sense,... Read more
My sister my brother and I are right now, from three separate states, trying to put together a reception for our parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. In addition to the normal stress these things bring, we are feeling a dark ambivalence about the whole affair. It’s not the celebration itself that gives us pause. It’s where we are compelled to hold it. We will be going back to the church of our childhood. I think of the movie Junebug, in which... Read more
“Pain is an evil, suffering is an evil. We mustn’t desire it. We don’t desire it for others, so why should we for ourselves?” These were the words of my spiritual director, Fr. Bill Shannon, early in our twenty-five year relationship. (For background on our relationship, see this post.) I’d come to our monthly session after a couple days of a migraine. “I’m not good at accepting pain,” I told him. “I’m not either,” he said, continuing with the words... Read more
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