It is often hard to find the language to describe the sounds and impact of a piece of music. In “The Music before the Music” we encounter horns that “plow and plant Beethoven’s/great fields,” “the brash cymbal,” “the wigged-out chug of a bass viol.” In this loud and layered poem, Jeanne Murray Walker uses precisely the right words to help us see and feel and hear the orchestra. She also, masterfully, invites us to ponder the rich origins of sound... Read more
On my second day at the abbey, I bounced around, trying to listen, to feel, to be in the moment like Carmen advised. It was a tough slog. “Waste time. Waste time,” I told myself, checking my watch. At lunch with the brothers, I casually mentioned that I was in the RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults) now. I waited for congratulations but everyone just nodded. One of the brothers asked, “Have you seen the library? You might find... Read more
In the middle of life, I fell in love. For my forty-ninth birthday, my wife Lauren gave me a three-day visit by myself at a monastery in South Texas. I went there simply to read for a while and relax. I wasn’t a believer in much of anything, I wasn’t religious, and while I was there, I didn’t see any visions or hear voices. But when I came back, I was on a path. Something had happened. An invisible hand... Read more
My son has always been the smallest kid in his class, often mistaken for being much younger than he actually is. But it isn’t only his size. His voice is high. He loves stuffed animals. And when given the choice at recess, he’s one of the few boys who would still rather fight dragons and build mysterious playground worlds instead of playing football, basketball, any of it. It’s not that he can’t keep up—he’s a gifted athlete. Faster than most.... Read more
It is Martin Luther King Day, and I muse about how my relation to African-Americans has been shaped over the years. When I was a child, my father would sometimes take me into work with him on Saturdays. He was a physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he ran a research lab (with real rats, whom I liked to watch cavorting in their cages). This was the early 1950s, well before the Civil Rights movement was making national... Read more
Sabbath as beloved bride and queen: familiar tropes in Jewish liturgy and thought. Now, thanks to Dan Bellm’s “Sabbath,” a subtle poem of loss and longing, a promise and a vow, we have another metaphor: Sabbath as mother. The Sabbath, a fixed period of time, stands outside of time. Jews are commanded to keep and remember it, and these two commandments, according to Lekhah Dodi, Come, My Beloved, the mystical hymn sung on Friday evening to welcome Shabbat, were spoken... Read more
I found myself returning to the work of Reynolds Price in 2011, the year he died. Price passed in January and that summer I served as hospital chaplain. Within a week of starting at the hospital, I went looking for one of Price’s books. After A Palpable God, Price had mostly left religion alone, writing novels, stories, plays, and even a little advertising copy. While his characters experienced spirituality and interrogated belief, Price himself went years before wrestling with his own angels.... Read more
Reynolds Price slithered onto the American literary scene in 1962. “Just with his body and from inside like a snake,” Wesley Beavers drove his motorcycle and his girlfriend Rosacoke Mustian into the 189-word sentence that opens A Long and Happy Life. The title of Price’s first novel was prescient for an author whose career spanned five decades and left us with forty books of essays, plays, poetry, stories, and translations. Born in the thick of the Great Depression, Price grew up... Read more
What made me pick up Ralph Ellison’s classic 1952 novel, Invisible Man? Had I ever even read it before? I don’t think so, and when I recently noticed a reference to it somewhere, I immediately thought: now is the time. (more…) Read more
Over Christmas break, I was marshalled into watching two televisions series to which I wouldn’t have been drawn ordinarily—The Crown and Victoria. The former was something I would have been suspicious about, doubting the fairness and authenticity of any dramatic effort revolving around the life of a person—Elizabeth II—who, though not literally unable to defend herself, is all but figuratively kept from doing so. The latter, Victoria, features a subject of which everyone is very familiar, and whose life has... Read more
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