You could say I am fond of animals; I have loved many as pets and close companions. But never have I loved an animal with the ferocious, guarding affection I have for Sybil Luddington—a cat of thirteen years, soft and gray as a plume of smoke. When my daughter Madison brought Sybil home from the rescue shelter in 2014, I thought she had picked a real lemon. “Why did you choose this cat?!” I asked, hardened as I was to... Read more
I snatch some fabric from the scrap heap, holding it up to the improv quilt square taking shape—‘80s playlist crooning in the background, or old Lionel, the window cracked so I can hear crickets or frogs or mourning doves, depending on the season. As I quilt, I sing to my cat, who surely thinks this tidbit was written for her: “My love, just thinking about you baby blows my mind.” In pandemic, with group-singing silenced, this evening ritual gained... Read more
Part of what Advent is, and what Christmas is, is a time of telling stories—most importantly, the two stories of Jesus’ birth in Matthew and in Luke. Only these two gospels tell the birth story, and if we look at them side by side, we see they tell it quite differently. The two authors have different things to say in these stories. And what’s amazing about literature, including biblical literature, is that we read or hear something different every time... Read more
Today in my car, I played Kate Rusby’s ‘Hourglass,’ which I hadn’t heard in ages, and was transported to years in St. Andrews, Scotland at the close of the millennium. Those two years were seriously hard—not least of all because I was often ill. But the sad songs on that album ring gladness for me. A fiddle-pipe duet on ‘Annan Waters’ makes me shiver it’s so beautiful—even if the tune, like most English folk songs, is tragic, narrating the story... Read more
“Advent,” meaning the arrival or the coming is my favorite liturgical season. And yes, part of what’s coming is Christmas, when we celebrate the birth of Jesus 2000 years ago. The rituals of this season build with anticipation and hope in a way both beautiful and centering—at an often frenetic time of year. Gradually, we light more and more candles, marking how Jesus came as a light into the world. We decorate with evergreen boughs and trees, symbolizing the triumph... Read more
{Perhaps my favorite thing about this season is reminding readers (and myself) how subversive are the Christmas stories. Before reading this column, I suggest you read Part One HERE.} The Christmas stories in Matthew and Luke[1] served as preludes, or overtures, to those gospels. They encapsulated in miniature the “good news” of the larger piece and are the lens through which to read it. For readers living under the weight of imperial violence, including systematic economic and religious oppression, spying,... Read more
Perhaps my favorite thing about this season is reminding readers (and myself) how subversive are the Christmas stories. Among global literature, they stand out as baldly subversive and anti-imperial while at the same time being neutralized. The gospel writers of Matthew and Luke (the only canonical gospels with birth narratives) each in their own way set up a stark confrontation between Jesus and the Roman Caesars, of all things—something no first-century reader would have failed to recognize or to understand... Read more
{This is a particularly vulnerable column. But in the sense that the deeply personal can sometimes be the most universal, it may resonate. Note, if you find talk of weight triggering, please accept this as a warning.} Confession: I have incredibly disordered thinking around body image and weight. It comes from culture, family, programming. My disordered thinking is particularly clear when I’m slated to see certain people I haven’t seen in some time, who will notice I’ve put on weight.... Read more
Whenever we talk about God, or the incarnational role of Jesus, we use metaphors. The God who created a universe so beyond our understanding our heads explode trying to understand—this God can only be known by metaphor. And what Jesus might mean as representative of this God is equally head-exploding. God and Jesus are in many ways indescribable. Metaphors are how we talk about things that are indescribable. We compare the indescribable thing to something familiar and easy to understand... Read more
First, a few years back, Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens (2014) enthralled me. Now he’s got a new book out. While I’ve not yet read Unstoppable Us, How Humans Took Over the World, I enjoyed hearing him talk about it on a favorite podcast: ‘The Gray Area with Sean Illing.’ Harari makes some similar assertions in these books, namely that humans have transcended other species because—of all things—we were able to pass on great stories. Sacred stories. Shared stories. Basically,... Read more
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