How You Know It’s Time for a New Phone There was a moment when it became easier to walk downstairs and talk to my wife face-to-face than to wait for my phone to load messages. It was time for new phones. Soon we were at the T-Mobile store looking at a display of tiny machines with flashy screens and signs with large numbers posted next to them. Each had a different message, somehow. I’m the newest. I’m the... Read more
The Americans, FX’s drama about Russian spies living in Washington, D.C., has ended its six season run. After season five, I wrote about how deception corrupts various kinds of bodies (national, personal, marital) because intimacy cannot abide it. In one plotline during this final season, spy Elizabeth Jennings goes undercover as Stephanie, a private nurse for an artist, Erica, who suffers from terminal cancer. Elizabeth wants information from Erica’s husband, Glenn—a U.S. weapons negotiator she wants to remain close to... Read more
Monks in the Orthodox tradition have long believed that God’s love is unchanging, constant, like the light of the sun. We do not need to appease a deity’s anger or perform well to turn the light of God’s affection and gaze upon us. It’s just there, divine mercy blazing away, pouring down all the time. The problem, these elders say is that our minds—our nouses, or the window to our hearts—have been darkened, like crusty basement windows. We can be... Read more
Fifteen years ago, there was no end to the noise. It took a cutting to get me to silence. I worked twelve-hour days and longer in an aircraft hangar on a flight line of hundreds of helicopters with the cacophony of auxiliary power units, the collision of metal, and rotor blades beating the air outside, sounds so loud earplugs and noise-canceling helmets were required. After my shift I would climb into my car and turn on the radio, classic rock... Read more
“It’s the End of the World as We Know It…and He Feels Fine”—that’s how the New York Times Magazine titled a profile of the writer Paul Kingsnorth. Kingsnorth is an essayist and novelist, an Englishman who lives on a small homestead in Northern Ireland. With his deep concerns about what he called the “ecocide” of the natural world one might be tempted to call him an environmentalist, but as his recent book Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays... Read more
I recognized the Orthodox monks’ prostrations I’d learned in the monastery in the “burpees” the guys showed me after they were home from prison—exercising alongside them in their driveways and garages, my heart thumping in my throat and a sweat in my shirt sooner than I expected. The homies in their tight tank tops and huge jeans began upright, then hit fists to their abs, bent down to a full bow, touching knees, then the ground, dropping to pushup position,... Read more
I happened to be in the midst of re-reading Homer’s Odyssey when the current issue of Image (#96) came in the mail. At the end of the issue are the rich reflections, by various poets, on poetry and worship. After sinking into them (even being drawn into deep prayer by Emmett Price’s powerful reflection on the hymn “Stand by Me”), I began to sense a new dimension in the Odyssey. As I let translator Robert Fitzgerald’s iambic pentameter weave the... Read more
Mother’s house is not a house. Mother’s house is not a cave. Mother’s house is not a sacred text. Mother’s house is not an oven. Mother’s house is not a medicine cabinet. Mother’s house is not a song. Mother’s house is not a tree. Mother’s house is not an ocean. Mother’s house is not a casino. Mother’s house is not a plane. Mother’s house is not a Mazda 6. Mother’s house is not South Jersey, Northeast Philly, West L.A. Mother’s... Read more
“You’re not a good mom!” My ten-year-old daughter shouted as she stomped up to her room. “Good moms don’t throw paper plates at their children!” Of course, this declamation can be proven false. A good mother would construct a Chinese kite out of a paper plate, toss it toward her daughter at the perfect moment of uplift, and watch her little girl revel in the kaleidoscopic tail. A good mother would cover a paper plate with cookies shaped like autumn... Read more
Ashley Wong’s poem “Post-Miracle” begins with empathy for the hard-hearted: “I understand now how the disciples could touch thousands / of pieces of bread with their hands and still not get it…” Without sentimentality, Wong describes the transience of a miracle and places us within this specific moment, the space after a miracle. The speaker tells us, “I know / what it’s like to be hardened in the face of a miracle” and goes on to describe the preoccupations of... Read more
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