Dan asked me about how and why I experienced a call to the priesthood. Since I tend not to have dramatic moments of...
Poetry
Loons, the Moon, the Night
I pine sometimes for the wild and mournful melodyKeening through the mist. We reminisced about loons on our foggy lakeIn southern Nova Scotia Before adjourning to the hot porchTo await the strawberryMoon rise. Behind The Sonoran cityglow this night in June,Beyond a leafy, netted Silhouette of mesquites, a rim of a sphereAppeared, rosé and rounding Above the secant, tangent, then abandonedHorizon. Chatter and tobacco smoke driftedFrom the neighbor’s porch. Irrigation nozzles gurgled, spat,...
Protected by Giants
Just before dawn, stand in the cool desert. Eastward, a dark butte protects you from the light that soon will strike. The oblong moon hovers, waning, in pale silver sky. Walk, and your foot crunches the gravelly earth, loud in the silence. But then it isn’t silent, is it? Before and behind you birds make music. Skinny lizard skitters ahead of you. Farther on, a soft young cottontail disappears into the rattlebush. Wend between the sticky green leaves and furry-globe pods of creosote. Meander...
Before I Forget
Should I be surprised at how unnerving it is to write a memoir? My mother died of Alzheimer's disease, so someday I may forget who I have been. I better finish the story before it’s too late. I recently reread a poem I wrote years ago, a kind of memoir in fewer than two hundred words. It includes references...
Just Wondering
When I was in high school, I discovered a cure for anxiety-driven insomnia: sleeping outside. When I returned from a summer in Afghanistan between my junior and senior years, I suffered reverse culture shock. I’d lived a slow, down-to-earth life in Kabul, where homes seemed to grow out of the soil. I woke up to rooster crows and donkey brays...
A Healer’s Tree
The crucifix that once hung in Nada Hermitage’s Sangre de Cristo Chapel in Crestone, Colorado formed me. Created by Santa Fe artist Dan Davidson, it combined both wood and bronze. And instead of a dead Jesus with eyes shut and head to the earth, it portrayed an ambiguous moment just before death. The young...
Live, Local, Late-Breaking
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,...
Cheers!
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...
An Advent Tale
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...
Animal Oh Antiphons
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...