My prayer is not prayer, not exactly. It includes words. It may even begin with words: “Modeh ani l’fanecha / grateful am I in your presence; baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu, Melech Haolam, hanotein laya-eif ko-ach / Praise to You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the universe, who gives strength to the weary; ahavah rabbah ahavtanu / with a deep, expansive, manifold love do You love us.” The words illuminate aspects of my experience. This morning, in the car on the... Read more
Continued from yesterday. Read Part 1 here. In the rocky cave-like interior at Newgrange, the air felt damp in my nostrils. It smelled of dirt. The passage was narrow, but it opened into a slightly wider room where a number of us could gather. “We don’t know what they did here,” the guide told us. “All we know is that for seventeen minutes a year, at the winter solstice, the light shines in through that little opening above the door”—he... Read more
A few summers ago, my husband Tom and I were in Dublin for a week, and one day, we took a tour bus to two ancient holy places—thin places, the Celts would have called them: spots where heaven and earth are very close to one another, where the ordinary distance between the two collapses. When I was an evangelical teenager, I thought the idea of thin places was sort of cool, another way to describe that feeling I got when... Read more
I’ve long loved Pattiann Rogers’ poems: how they caress nature’s most minute details with acutely attentive language. Here, in “The Moss Method,” she focuses on one of nature’s most lowly living things: moss. The poem is a paean to moss’s inconspicuous virtues: its literal lowliness, its quiet power of softening sharp edges, its luscious mats laid out for our pleasure. Rogers’ alliteration throughout enacts moss’s own softness, as words glide over each other: moss can “sooth… stones / with frothy... Read more
It has been said that one of the most effective means by which evil can have its way is to convince us that we are too abominable to love. It’s not a bad tactic. When our faults are catalogued back to us, the inventory is hair-raising and earth-shattering. This is one of the methods attributed to demons, unsurprisingly; they shock the conscious self through the exposition of things it knows but won’t look at, has suspected but never acknowledged. This... Read more
His back to us and to the camera, the hero walks silently away. His work in this particular community is done. He has restored the community to its better self. This is the closing image of the classic 1947 film The Bishop’s Wife, which I watched recently. Cary Grant as the angel Dudley—sent to guide the bishop away from his egotistical ways and back into the arms of his neglected wife—has effected this conversion not only in the bishop but... Read more
Detroit is the only major city in America, people will tell you (even if you haven’t asked), where you drive south to get to Canada. The southerly orientation of our otherwise-northern neighbor is due to an odd strip of Canada that squeezes in between Lake Huron and Lake Erie. That strip extends all the way to the outskirts of the Motor City. There, just across the Detroit River, is the city of Windsor, which is located in Ontario, which is... Read more
Last week, I walked up Dale Street from the train station. It’s a perilous walk owing to the lack of shoulder and the speed at which people drive, a recklessness passed off to people living in poor neighborhoods. Shattered green glass, no trees to bar the bright spring sun, bits of fluttering paper garbage—anonymous love notes maybe—caught in the fence separating Interstate 94 from St. Paul’s steep hills. The Islamic Center sprawls in a field across from the freeway, looking... Read more
The Genesis story of the creation of Adam and Eve: poets for centuries have been attracted to it. They wonder: what was in God’s mind? In Adam’s? In Eve’s? Poets wonder and re-envision the scene. Richard Chess, in “When God Dreamed Eve through Adam” (Image #85), chooses to stay in Adam’s mind—and chooses to craft most of the poem as a long subordinate clause. The eight stanzas that hold us in suspension in this extended “when”-clause imagine Adam’s complex of... Read more
By E.D. The drummer in the rock band at my church, bangs on his drum, living for the solo at the recessional where a small handful of fellow children of the sixties clap their hands and shake their hips in a way that seems, I don’t know, like everyone would rather be at the Whitesnake concert, but if that’s no longer possible or respectable, then maybe church will do, “For creation was made subject to futility…” And the children of... Read more
Good Letters
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