by Guy Sayles | Dec 19, 2017 |
I’m allergic to sentimentality.I break-out in heart-hives when I brush up against counted-cross stitch samplers of motivational quotes, with greeting cards that feature babies, puppies, kittens, and balloons, and with rhyming love poems printed on a pastel background...
by Guy Sayles | Dec 4, 2017 |
This post is the last of three in which I respond to themes in Paul Kalanithi’s beautiful book, When Breath Becomes Air. Kalanithi’s said: “Severe illness wasn’t life altering; it was life-shattering” (120). I agree.To observers who don’t have (because no...
by Guy Sayles | Dec 2, 2017 |
Here is the second of three posts in which I respond, out of my own experience with serious illness, to a few themes in Paul Kalanithi’s beautiful book, When Breath Becomes Air. I ended the first with this resolve: The only way to live is to live.In tension with that...
by Guy Sayles | Nov 29, 2017 |
A friend recently invited me to meet with a book group that was reading the late Paul Kalanithi’s beautiful memoir, When Breath Becomes Air. It describes his heartbreaking but heart-mending sojourn through cancer into an all-too-early death at age 37. ...
by Guy Sayles | Nov 20, 2017 |
Maybe, later in the week, I’ll write about the numerous extraordinarily ordinary and ordinarily extraordinary gifts which are part of my everyday life and for which I am grateful. Thanksgiving’s origins, though, are civic: they have to do with the condition and...
by Guy Sayles | Nov 8, 2017 |
Saturday morning, at Barnes and Noble, I was in the café line to order my venti Hot Cinnamon Spice tea. Just ahead of me was a young family. Dad pushed a stroller with a sleeping 8 month old boy, dressed in Carolina blue inside. Mom paid gentle attention to a four...
by Guy Sayles | Oct 31, 2017 |
This morning, I had the opportunity to preach a “Reformation Day” sermon in Mars Hill University’s Chapel. People who know something about my preaching will recognize that I’ve used, yet again, a Raymond Carver poem, the description of an...
by Guy Sayles | Oct 22, 2017 |
This morning, I had the joy of sharing in worship with, and preaching for, the good folks of All Souls Episcopal Cathedral. I’m grateful to Dean Todd Donatelli for the invitation. To the words from Matthew, I add the gospel according to Aretha...
by Guy Sayles | Oct 15, 2017 |
These days, finding silence is both difficult and necessary. It’s hard enough to find external silence. Even in the early morning hours, I hear the low hum of appliances, the whirring of fans, the on-again, off-again cycle of the HVAC unit, and the faint sounds...
by Guy Sayles | Oct 6, 2017 |
Maybe you remember the desperate and destitute sharecropper in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath who was being evicted from farming the land by its owners who had to return it to the bank. The “owner men,” as Steinbeck called them,. . . were all...
Recent Comments