Faith in God is a crucial issue in any year, but it is even more important in this year that started with the nuclear disaster in Japan and the Arab Spring, now that unrest has also surfaced in Russia, Israel and England, and governments struggle to tackle the problems left over from the global financial […]

Every church, every denomination has a set of beliefs about God and Jesus Christ that informs its worship and practices. What is amazing about the variety and breadth of these beliefs is that they all are so different, yet they all come from one source, the Holy Bible. Together all the churches are the body […]

i am who i am. Even when I try to be like other people, still i am who i am. No matter how young I try to dress, no matter how much make-up I put on, no matter the airs I put on, i still am who i am. It is interesting to me that […]

Recently I came upon a book by Dietrich Bonhoeffer on my shelves that I bought at some distant time and had never read. When I realized that it was a book of daily meditations from his writings, I put it on my bedside table and have been reading a page every evening after I write […]

I am sitting on the back porch this morning listening to the “clicks” of the cicadas’ song rising and falling in a sort of communal slow rhythm and to my neighbor’s water-feature gurgling. I could breathe to the cicada’s rhythm, meditate to its rising and falling just like my breath, now the volume grows, now […]

I finished the book with a ringing and surprising affirmation: “I am not like that!! I don’t wrestle with acedia or depression. That has never been who I am.” I had just put down Acedia & me by Kathleen Norris, a writer whom I really admire, struck by the differences between us, both women on […]

I so appreciate metaphors; some have sustained me for years. The pictures they have formed in my mind have been powerful aids in healing and dealing with the challenges of life. The first one I recall operating in my life was Kahlil Gibran’s metaphor for parenthood in The Prophet which I read in the 70’s, […]

A friend or relative’s name comes to mind. When you call you find out that they needed to talk to you right then. Someone is almost annoyingly insistent that you read this book or see that movie. You feel that you should take a different route home without knowing why. Words drop into your mind […]

The Exodus story is so rich with symbolism for us that I am thinking about it again this week. As with the Hebrews God is calling us out of our stuck places so that we can follow him more freely and willingly. Pharoah and Egypt represent hardness of heart, imprisonment of body and mind, the […]

The story in Exodus of the Hebrew people enslaved by the Egyptians, oppressed by the work of building monuments, pyramids, to the glory of the oppressor, Pharaoh, moves us today. Every part of the story resonates in us—the oppression, the plagues, escaping from the Egyptian army, wandering for years in the wilderness and finally the […]