When I lived in Nova Scotia, midwinter meant frozen water buckets at Nova Nada Hermitage: our wood stoves and inadequate insulation in our lakeside hermitages failed to prevent water buckets from forming a layer of ice. And yes, they were indoors. The buckets were in our hermitages because we had no running water in the winter. We took water from lovely old rock-lined wells. Later in Crestone, Colorado, winters were much colder than in Nova Scotia. But thank goodness our hermitages were new,...
BEGINNINGS ARE IMPORTANT. They set the tone for everything that follows, like an overture. In the book of Genesis, God said, “Let there be light.” God spoke light into being. “In the beginning,” the Gospel of John proclaims, “was the Word.” And through this Word came the life and light of our lives. At the beginning of Lent, I’m thinking about speech, words and their power. God speaks and it comes to be. We exist through a primal Word. Confessions I hear often revolve around words: taking...
I am sorting and evaluating decades of my writings. It’s encouraging and embarrassing to look back! But certain threads persist, fibers of what William Blake called a “golden string” that, as we wind it up through our lives, leads us to glory, to “heaven’s gate.”We celebrated one of those threads on February 2, the Feast of the Presentation. That is halfway between winter solstice and spring equinox. And around that time, I entered monastic life in 1975. Fifty-one years ago! I took the name...
I spent most of my adult life preparing for Christmas either in the snowy lakeside woods of Nova Scotia or the snowy arid expanse of Colorado’s San Luis Valley, in the shadow of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Both landscapes were wild and silent. Maybe that’s one reason I still love Christmas. It was preceded by weeks of starry nights and...
We close our 20th Anniversary year with the Winter 2025 Caravans newsletter account of our joyful participation in the Center for Action and Contemplation’s October ReVision conference. And we honor the new generation of contemplatives who give us hope for the future. Tessa offers thoughts on “the desert as resistance” and ten key practices...
Dan asked me about how and why I experienced a call to the priesthood. Since I tend not to have dramatic moments of...
A recent article by Lynn Casteel Harper on the Commonweal magazine...
One evening in the early 1980s in a log lodge at Nova Nada Hermitage in Nova Scotia,...
In summer, mesquite pods and Saguaro fruit husks cover the Sonoran desert floor. Symbols of desert fecundity, they even litter city and suburban yards where locals tend these native plants. You can read about this special season in Tessa’s post from two years ago when we harvested Saguaro fruit, guided by...
We are six months into the year, and I’m...