By Danielle Leshaw Father Bill offered a set of instructions. “Walk beside me, never on my left, but always on my right.” I nodded. “And we’re walking towards Jesus.” He pointed across the church. “Shall we practice?” “Yes, please,” I answered. We processed up the aisle, an elderly priest and a young, female rabbi. I matched his steps. His brown frock went swish-swish while the long, braided belt knocked against his knees. It was a long path, from the entrance... Read more
The first church I attended as a teenaged new believer swiftly taught me two doctrines: There won’t be any Democrats in heaven. Secular music is tantamount to heresy. The first one was easy enough to get. Reagan had saved us from the devil Jimmy Carter, and now Jesus had the go-ahead to return whenever he wanted. The second proved a little more complicated. What was I supposed to listen to? The youth pastor’s wife took me to a Christian bookstore... Read more
On the first day of summer, my daughter created a makeshift microphone in the backyard with a curved branch stuck into the wet soil. Behind, her younger brother beat on an upturned ice cream bucket with two sticks. They were practicing fairy music, they said, to welcome the fairies on summer solstice. Three days earlier, we’d made fairy oyle, partly from a recipe in my daughter’s fairy book, and partly, as many good recipes go, a bit of this and a... Read more
Multiple members of my family live with chronic pain, which is why I’m always arrested by writers who don’t let God off the hook for painful experiences, who question suffering more closely. Can we know who is ultimately responsible for suffering? Does suffering have a purpose (and if it does, why does it so often feel senseless)? Most importantly, how do we move through pain and cause less of it ourselves? The narrator of this poem shows pain reducing us... Read more
I couldn’t record it in my Flava journal app because the transformation happened slowly, like any great change of being. The epiphany, if that’s what it was, only marked my awareness of what had been accomplished through the myriad invisible operations of life. There is mystery yet. I remember one day at church, a friend mentioned a place to look for work, and, almost without thinking, my hand whipped out my phone and opened Evernote. My hand knew what my... Read more
Better Call Saul, a prequel to AMC’s milestone series, Breaking Bad, further establishes co-creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould to be among the most intricate moral thinkers working in the dramatic arts. Whereas the first series rendered the ethical decline of a dying man who makes something of a noble bargain with his conscience—attempting to provide for his struggling family by entering the methamphetamine trade—the second series focuses on an altogether different landscape of principles. Instead of depicting the inch-by-inch, then... Read more
Sometimes the horrors in the news are so overwhelming that I’m left speechless. This is how I feel now—have been feeling for months—about what is being called Europe’s “refugee crisis.” Refugee crisis. Encapsulating massive human suffering in those two simple words strikes me as demeaning: a slap in the face of every refugee from the endless wars in Syria, Afghanistan, Libya…. I imagine a woman who was evicted from the French refugee camp at Calais, sleepless with worry over the... Read more
The tenth item on a list entitled “How to Watch This Film,” which accompanies Tom Sachs’ A Space Program, says that the film is “a love letter to the analog era.” That obsession with all things handmade and non-digital was obvious as I watched the film—even though I was sitting on my couch, streaming a digital screener on my iPhone and beaming it over WiFi to my Apple TV, which is about the least analog thing a person can do. But Sachs loves this... Read more
By John Bryant I’m standing in a circle with thirty singing and swaying old men and we hold each other’s hands because of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and signal the presence of His Spirit by fluttering our fingers during certain parts of the song, the fluttering strange at first and then completely appropriate and satisfying. There is an old man in front of me with wide forehead and dark eyes and he is bald and tall and strong... Read more
(With help from Donovan, D. T. Suzuki, Qingyuan Weixin, Wallace Stevens, democracy, REM, Bonnie Raitt, David Bowie, Stanley Kunitz, neuroscience, Torah, Ben Bag Bag, The Rabbis, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, you.) First there is a mountain then there is no mountain then there is. Donovan, are you flip-flopping? Or is it you, mountain? It was snowing / And it was going to snow. Which is it, Mr. Stevens, the actual weather or the forecast? You want it both ways? §... Read more
Good Letters
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