I spent some time this morning reading Life Work by Donald Hall. It’s not a new book to me. When I was finishing up at Winchester and preparing to move to the South Shore, my friend Jack loaned me his copy. Donald Hall was a poet who lived in
Call the world if you please “The vale of soul-making . . .” I say “soul-making,” soul as distinguished from intelligence. There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions, but they are not souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. Those were the first words I
In our Monday night Bible Study, we are working through the “I am” statements of Jesus as recorded in John’s gospel: I am the shepherd, the door, the bread of life, the light of the world. Tonight we were looking at John 15: “I am the vine and you
In the past couple of days, I’ve had a chance to see people gathered together in several different kinds of groups. Saturday afternoon, I joined Lynn and Bob at their son’s lacrosse game. He’s in seventh grade, so the bleachers were filled with pretty much only parents
I arrived at the church yesterday about twenty minutes before the service was to begin. I would guess close to four hundred people were already in the sanctuary. A giant blown up picture of my friend’s father was on an easel and a folded and framed American flag honoring
While I was waiting to meet my brother yesterday afternoon, I sat in Starbucks and read A Matter of Time, a special edition from Scientific American. I don’t read the magazine on a regular basis, but I picked it up because time is one of the things that fascinates
Today has already been a long day and it's only late afternoon. At 3:45 this morning, Ginger and I were on the way to the airport. She drove me into Logan since leaving the car there for three days would have cost more than the plane ticket.
Today is World Water Day 2006. I woke this morning to the news that my friend's father died last night about eleven. I've spent the morning making arrangements to get to the funeral to be with my friend, which means leaning into friends and co-workers who
My schedule has made it difficult to find much time to read these past few days, so I took some time this morning to listen to Parker Palmer and Madeleine L’Engle, two names you are quite familiar with by now. Palmer was talking about the temptations of Jesus as
Last night at youth fellowship we played board games. We keep a big box in the closet with Boggle, Risk, Uno, Word Up, Scrabble, Mankala, and several oth ers I can’t remember right now. From time to time I pull them out and we spend our evening playing games
On a normal Saturday night, I come straight home from work so I can try to sleep since Sunday morning comes early. My job at church requires I make it to an 8:30 am worship service. But last night – even though I knew I was preaching today – was not
Here’s what I learned yesterday: f you want to fill up your restaurant on St. Patrick’s day – at least in the Boston area – serve corned beef and cabbage (we threw in some roasted potatoes, carrot ribbons, and diced turnips) at a bargain price (all for $9.95, with