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Grateful for Gratitude Itself

by | Nov 24, 2016 | 2 comments

I’m grateful forFamily and friends (including the shaggy, four-legged one, Ellington)Colleagues and studentsBuskers on the streets of AshevilleFinely crafted sentences and intricately simple musicStreams, rivers, peaks and hollows (hollers)Soaring hawks and swimming...

Here and Now: Little, Local, and Daily Things

by | Nov 20, 2016 | 6 comments

Leaves whirl like dervishes in the insistent wind. The smoke of burning forests bites my eyes. Sunlight shines through cloudless skies onto parched ground. The mountains moan for rain; stubbled valleys echo their wordless, desperate prayer.Fall’s changes anticipate...

When It Feels Like the End of the World

by | Nov 13, 2016 | 9 comments

I’ve not known what to say in response to the election; but the challenge and gift of preaching on Sunday, November 13, at All Souls’ Episcopal Cathedral resulted in this sermon. Rather than try to edit it for a blog post, I am simply posting the entire...

Dying to Live in the Moment

by | Nov 5, 2016 | 7 comments

Yesterday afternoon, as the last Bioethics class of the week began, a student said, “Let’s not have a downer today.” I understood completely.  For several days, we’d talked about life and death—about how we know when someone is clinically dead: when...

Name-Calling and Ivory Soap

by | Oct 29, 2016 | 0 comments

Name-calling and “cussin’”were bad things my grandparents, parents and teachers told me not to do. My grandmother Ada once took a chunk of Ivory Soap (“99 44/100 pure”!) in her hand, held it less than a half-inch from my lips, and threatened to wash my mouth out with...

Making the Days Count

by | Oct 23, 2016 | 16 comments

This past week, in a conversation about my ongoing journey with Multiple Myeloma, a friend said, “If you hadn’t gotten this diagnosis . . . . ”  I didn’t hear the rest of her question, because I was so startled by my immediate internal response: “I wouldn’t want...

Being and Becoming Ourselves

by | Oct 14, 2016 | 0 comments

Though my children are well into their thirties now, my heart hears echoes of “Daddy, tell me a story.” I cherished story-time with Amanda and Eliot. Sometimes I read other people’s stories to them; it was a delight to watch their eyes widen as we traveled through the...

Autumn

by | Oct 7, 2016 | 16 comments

Bruce Springsteen is 67, and Bonnie Raitt will soon be. Eric Clapton is 71; so are Van Morrison and Steve Martin. Lucinda Williams is 63. David Letterman and Emmylou Harris are 69.Some of my students at Mars Hill University have grandparents who are younger than these...

Wordlessness and the Witness of Listening

by | Sep 24, 2016 | 3 comments

I’ve ransacked my mind and heart, looking through stacks of ideas and poking around in boxes of feelings, to find something helpful to say about the police shootings of African-American men in Tulsa and in Charlotte.I’ve come up empty.My search for words has confirmed...

Not-Doing as a Way to do What Matters Most

by | Sep 17, 2016 | 2 comments

What do we do (or not do?) when we feel hollowed-out and ground-down by life’s pressures and demands?Either George Patton or Vince Lombardi or Aphoristic Anonymous said that “fatigue makes cowards of us all.” Whether or not it always turns into cowards, it is...