It was a relief to get past Las Vegas en route to Death Valley. an open space we traversed reminded my friend Tessa and me of Colorado’s mountain-ringed San Luis Valley, where we once lived. But then we dipped southwest from Pahrump, Nevada, crossed a ridge and dropped into an alien world. Vegas was electrified urban surrealism. As we...
I am old enough to recall when Americans got our news from a daily newspaper and thirty minutes of televised evening broadcasts. This left more than twenty hours to hear other voices and see three-dimensional, living creatures. My adult life has been bizarre enough to take place mostly in wilderness. There, the voices include loons, coyotes,...
In our first 2024 Fire and Light podcast, “Ordinary Plenty: Celtic...
Happy New Year! The greeting may sound glib at the beginning of 2024. But joy expresses courage in the face of pain and flaunts hopeful resistance in the face of angry disrespect. I remind myself that Christ is born and risen, never to be eliminated from our...
We hope your Advent deepened your hope even in the midst of dark times. Now we celebrate the Word made flesh, the great Light that shines on us who have dwelt in darkness and sorrow. Enjoy our brief illustrated celebration of 2023 and our Christmas greeting. And may these next twelve days bring you wonder and gratitude.
I first heard the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe when I was twenty-one. I was considering monastic life and about...
Children, there was a girl. She lived in a small village On a tall dry mesa the size of ours. She did what you do. But her ears heard more than sounds. You hear me talk And know I am bigger than my words: They come from inside me. This girl heard a word, But it wasn’t inside her. She was inside the word. She stayed as still as the Stone canyon walls, And let herself be spoken. That word, which made The desert and the sky, The mesas and the arroyos, The rain and the girl, That great word of our...
Decades ago I became haunted by a question: When does a war end? The suffering of refugees and veterans endures long after and far away from the hell of war. If not faced, the trauma passes from one generation to the next. Since 1948, Jews traumatized by Europe’s pogroms have traumatized Palestinians, who...
For centuries, Christians have prayed special verses called "Oh Antiphons" during the week before Christmas. Each verse begins with the word Oh and uses images from the Jewish Testament to ask God to come into our midst as "Emmanuel," God-with-us. Tessa Bielecki beautifully introduces the context for the antiphons here and presents the antiphons here in a form that can be prayed either alone or with others. My own idiosyncratic take on the antiphons, using animal images for Christ, grew out...
What does a kiss mean? It means one thing to a baby, something else to a bride, and something different to Judas. We might call a kiss a depth symbol. Depth symbols are not literal. They are fraught with connotations, allusions, memory, emotion, mystery, history. They’re more like chords than single notes. They don’t mean simply one thing....