My definition of a saint, a spiritual giant, is someone who makes other people holy, just by their presence. Someone who engenders peace in other people’s hearts, who calls forth beauty and goodness and faithfulness in other people’s lives. Nurturing your own holiness, your own peace, calling forth your own beauty and goodness and faithfulness […]
Faith/Trust
“Succession”: The Incredibly Shrinking Children
Everyone loves a deeply flawed hero or heroine. Hamlet, King David, Emma, Gatsby, Scarlett O’Hara. Despite their dark sides, we are attracted to these people because there is something good and beautiful in each of them. The tragedy is always that their goodness just isn’t strong enough to prevail. The popular TV series “Succession” appears […]
Labyrinth Lessons
No, no—that’s not how you do it. That’s what I was thinking as the group began to walk the labyrinth. They were here for one of the retreats that Pam and I host here at Copper House. The leader asked if the small group of six could use the labyrinth for one of their sessions, […]
The Return of Innocence: A Week With Two Children
Our grandchildren, ages eight and four, are with us for a week. All day every day. By about day four an adult reaches a saturation point and becomes, in some sense, a child too. After days and nights participating in play, story, physical and imaginative games, make-believe, general silliness, and the deep need for security […]
Rescue Me
Five people are trapped in a titanium tube on the floor of the Atlantic ocean, and I can’t get them off my mind. I am constantly checking my news feed. Sonar is picking up tapping sounds. Hope surges, then I read how unlikely it is that help could arrive in time. In some real way […]
Last Will and Testament
Don’t stop thinking about tomorrowDon’t stop, it’ll soon be here-Fleetwood Mac Prince died without a will. So did Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jimi Hendrix, Pablo Picasso, Howard Hughes. Something like 64% of Americans don’t have a will, and for good reason, as I found out when we updated our wills from 29 years […]
When Home Isn’t Where You Left It
I think of South Dakota, the place I left on my way to college, as Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone: “The little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve.” But, as I found on my visit last week, time has not unremembered my old home. It’s both the same as ever, and yet dramatically […]
What If I’ve Lost My Way?
Speaking of her early stage of faith, writer and retreat leader Paula D’Arcy shared a dream in which the kitchen table of her childhood disappeared. That table symbolized the beautiful security of her early years. It was the heart of her childhood home, where she learned her Baltimore Catechism, mastered every question, and came to […]