When people reminisce fondly about childhood I often wonder how many social trials in the schoolyard they are airbrushing out. Kids can be brutal. I remember a group of girls who pointedly wouldn’t play jacks with me, kids whose lunchtime circles seemed impenetrable, giggling groups whose secrets I knew weren’t for me. I wasn’t an outcast; I had my own friends and a loving family and a church where I knew I belonged. I imagine, though, that everyone experiences exclusion... Read more

Life transitions—graduations, departures for new homes and jobs, for field work or long mission trips or new assignments—are emotionally complex times. Celebration and loss, anticipation and apprehension mingle as you allow yourself to realize, even as new opportunities open and life seems full of promise, the likelihood is that even if you return, you will not return to what you have known. Life goes on and the waters close behind you. Psalm 139, which I have loved since childhood, offers... Read more

Sue decided to move after twelve years in the same apartment. The decision was followed by seven months of anguish. Her apartment was a museum of totems—significant and symbolic objects, each with a story she was ready to tell, each contributing to the general kaleidoscopic effect, dazzling when you entered, a little bewildering when you tried to decide where to sit down. A wicker swing hung from a giant hook near the center of her living room. A striped kite... Read more

“In my end is my beginning . . .” I’ve spoken with two people in the past two days about grief. Its ongoingness. The way it resurfaces. The way a dream will trigger it, or a sudden look from a stranger whose crooked smile is heartbreakingly familiar. Grief softens over time, and sometimes disappears, and then comes back. It ebbs, but it doesn’t end. But loss is a beginning. I have learned that enough times to trust that it is... Read more

Volunteering for Hospice has taught me more about living in the moment than a good many sermons and inspirational readings. Every visiting day I drop into a patient’s life expecting nothing, knowing the slow ending may come today, or tomorrow, or in months of unexpected ongoing. One of them, a dear one, just died a few weeks ago. Our visits over the ten months I knew her covered a surprising range. Some days she wanted to walk and talk. She... Read more

“For the love of God is broader / Than the measures of the mind . . . 19th-Century Hymn I was surprised when a friend who is a pastor and person of great faith asked in some anguish when her husband died suddenly, “Why would God do this?” I shouldn’t have been surprised. It’s a perfectly natural question. But in her years of parish work she had seen many others through similar losses, offered comfort, preached sermons, knew the relevant... Read more

“These things have served their purpose: let them be.” – T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” A hand-hewn rosewood chest stands in the corner of our bedroom. It holds a small collection of artifacts my parents brought back from years of mission work at a school for orphans in South India. The chest is, itself, one of those artifacts: the boys at the mission school made it from a felled tree on the property. As a child I heard many of Mom’s... Read more

“Only by wintering through it will your heart survive.”                                     — Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 13 There are other phrases in Rilke’s haunting Sonnets to Orpheus that have lifted me into surprise and exhilaration, but “wintering through” was the phrase that gave me pause as I made my grateful way through the poem this time. “Überwinternd” in German—bless the Germans for making one word of it—because they recognize that something is lost when prepositions are divorced from... Read more

Among my various experiments with breath prayer, centering prayer, and meditation, one of the most helpful has been a simple focus on what we do when we breathe: we receive the breath that gives us life. Then we release it. Then we receive it again. We cannot keep or hold it for long. It comes like the manna, or the dew, or daylight, or any of the other many gifts that “come dropping slow” into our timebound days and then... Read more

Listening to the audio edition of Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal consoles me as I drive around town doing relatively mindless errands. It also renews my gratitude for a childhood spent in a three-generation household. My father’s parents welcomed him, his wife, and two small children into their small Los Angeles duplex upon their return from several years at a mission school for orphans in South India. Grandma cared for us while our parents were at work and read Winnie-the-Pooh aloud... Read more