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 […]
Family
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 […]
Family Estrangement
Cleaning out a basement closet today, I find, stuffed in a box of old sermons and random papers, a twenty-year-old photocopy of an obituary for Robert Foster Anderson. There’s a grainy picture of a man in a white cap. He looks like my Dad, but I never met him. The obit said he had a […]
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 […]
The Birthday Willow
May 16, 2023. I kneel beside a small hole in the earth. Today is our daughter Maggy’s fortieth birthday and we have given her, according to her wish, a weeping willow to mark the occasion. Since, in a fit of spring madness, I have just planted over forty trees and bushes around our home, I […]
Who Is Hard For You To Love? (And How Might You Love Them Anyway?)
“We love because God loved us first” (1 John 4:19). That truth is especially sublime when we hear it in Holy Week, when we watch with awe as someone embraces the whole world in love—and chooses to die rather than limiting or qualifying that love. If Jesus had recanted, if he had just admitted that, […]
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 […]