I love to run in new places. At home I run the same loop—it takes me down to Long Island Sound and it’s beautiful, but I know it so well that I can almost run it blind. This morning I am running in Knoxville, Tennessee, where my father lives. I am a little stiff. My […]
Seeing
I Am Also a Bird
This morning, sipping my coffee, glancing out the window, I see a simple sparrow on the deck railing. Then in an instant she darts like an instantaneous thought and is gone. It was perhaps the first time I had seen a bird fly! Of course I have seen it thousands, but in that moment I […]
Do You Hear What I Hear?
Last Sunday I was greeting people as they walked out of church and into a beautiful spring morning. There were scores of people around me, spirits were high, people were lining up for coffee, laughing and talking. That’s when Melissa walked up to me. I grasped her hand, smiled and said how happy I was […]
Old News
Today when I went out to get the paper, I was smitten by the weeping cherry tree in the front garden. Its blossoms were like huge pink puff balls, swaying in a light breeze. It was May Day. The sun was vernally strong. But I was not here to admire a tree. I was on […]
Everything We Need Is Here
The secret of life takes us into unbelievable paradox—literally. We cannot believe it. The miraculous appears in the ordinary, the eternal hides among the transitory, the universal lays in the lap of the particular . . . and we can’t see it. That’s because in our yearning for the divine, we’ve always been taught to […]
The Lantern Never Lies
On the odyssey of life we need some way of knowing where we are, and whether we’re headed the right direction. In English, to be “oriented” is to know where east is. Historically, church buildings are situated so that the altar is on the east wall, and almost always a window opens to receive the […]
The God of Disruptions
Often it is some brush with mortality that awakens the heart. Annie Dillard lived a long time beside Tinker Creek, but it wasn’t until she nearly died of pneumonia that she began to go down and sit by that creek, watching the frogs and the bugs, the birds and wildflowers. She jotted down notes, kept […]
God is Not Urgent
I was asked to speak to a group this week on New Year’s Resolutions, and I decided instead to speak on new priorities. I don’t care much for resolutions, since they are mostly attempts to arm-wrestle small problems into submission without having to look plainly at one’s life. As soon as I focused on priorities […]