That doesn’t mean you never say things with which people disagree. It means you don’t make a career, in or out of the Church, out of being a provocateur and a hater.
OUR COMMON HOME
FALLOUT: THE EVIL OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS
When journalist John Hersey arrived in Japan, over a year after the dropping of the bombs, he was staggered by what he found. A mother who’d clung to her dead infant daughter until the body started to decompose. Human beings who had been vaporized, leaving only shadows on the ground or walls. Residents, desperate to rebuild, who were still coming across severed limbs and charred corpses.
THE CONVERSION OF ST. PAUL
St. Paul fell off his horse, but Christ comes in the form of a lamb, a dove, a heron. That’s not to say he’s always gentle. But he’s often gentlest when we’ve been doing terrible violence to ourselves and others.
HOBO FOR CHRIST
At first she stayed mostly with friends and, along the way, experienced unexpected healing. “My core wound is the belief that I have to earn love. But everywhere I went, people would say, ‘Don’t leave. Just move in.’ ‘You don’t have to earn love,’ the Lord was telling me. ‘You already are enough.’ ”
ROBERT MACFARLANE’S LOST WORDS
His capacity to conjure landscape is alone astounding. Add to that an astonishingly wide-ranging grasp of geography, geology, natural history, cartography, and literature. Throw in the fact that he’s no mere scholar or armchair philosopher: every book is grounded in his willingness to take on the physical hardship of mountain climbing, hiking, camping, sailing, and tramping. But what makes Macfarlane sublime is the aching longing for a lost Eden that sounds like a bass note beneath all his work.
HAPPY NEW YEAR: BIRDS, SPIRITUAL COMPANIONS, NEW LIFE
Santa Barbara’s Coal Oil Point Reserve, a mute swan, and saving lives for the New Year…
DESIRE PATHS: A GUEST POEM
“All conspiring without a plan,
unmapped siren channels
through a city at your feet. “
O HOLY NIGHT
Advent, as always, has been packed with emotion. I become over-excited, awaiting the birth of the Christ child so eagerly that my sleep is thrown off. With Daylight Savings Time, my circadian rhythm naturally leans more toward both early nights and early mornings. I love waking in the dark, lighting the beeswax candles, opening the […]
THE MIRACLE OF THE LOAVES AND FISHES
“You can picture the stage set: Christ, the Messiah, seated on top of the mountain: the crowds so far below they are literally at his feet. They have to crane their necks to see his face.”
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A GARDEN VIDEO
My dear, insanely multi-talented friend Lisa Marr who, along with her life partner Paolo Davanzo, runs the Echo Park Film Center (EPFC), put this video together with footage I shot on my iphone and with a grant from the AARP. I am actually NOT retired, thank you, though am thrilled to be part of this […]
WONDER AND ENCHANTMENT
“Our language for nature is now such that the things around us do not talk back to us in ways that they might. As we have enhanced our power to determine nature, so we have rendered it less able to converse with us.”
–Robert Macfarlane, “Landmarks”
THE ONE ULTIMATELY IRRESISTIBLE PERSON
I think people who have not been huge desperate sinners perhaps don’t understand those of us who are drawn to Christ. Always I carry the wound of my sins. I have to believe, I do believe, I’ve been forgiven. It gives no glory to a Savior who came precisely to reconcile us to God in spite of the blackness of our consciences, to hold ourselves to a higher standard than he does.
TURN OVER A NEW LEAF WITH MY JAN-FEB 2021 WRITING WORKSHOP!
Come on, you know you’ve been dying to!!