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 […]

The riches of the Christian tradition are revealed often in the writings of the saints, for instance Catherine of Siena who lived in 14th C. Italy. Many of her letters exist to this day. A force of nature in her own day, she convinced Pope Gregory XI to return the papacy to Rome from Avignon […]

I am a conservative liberal and a liberal conservative in my approach to life and religion. I am a liberal, mainline Protestant who is able to entertain new scholarship and thinking about Jesus Christ and religion and the church, but I am conservative in my liberalism(no longer the knee-jerk liberal a friend once labeled me) […]

Reminder: Tuesdays thru Fridays I post additional comments and questions on Monday’s blog on FB. Use this link: www.facebook.com/pages/By-the-waters/146585815373488 Today I am putting together a test for all of us to use in evaluating ourselves on our ability to incorporate the main contributions of four major  denominations in the whole body of Christ. Since writing […]