by Guy Sayles | Apr 29, 2015 |
Years ago, near President’s Day, some of the kids in our church’s Childhood Development Center made newsprint posters which bore the heading, “If I were president, I would. . . .” With the help of their teachers, the children imagined what they would do if...
by Guy Sayles | Apr 21, 2015 |
The Book of Common Prayer incudes a grateful and humble acknowledgment of “this fragile earth, our island home.” It’s a moving phrase; and, on this Earth Day, I pray that we will love this fragile earth with courageous and tender love, realizing that it’s not a...
by Guy Sayles | Apr 15, 2015 |
Have you tuned-in lately to the running play-by-play commentary on your life that is constantly blaring away in your heart and mind? 24/7/365, whether we’re conscious of it or not, harsh natter and chatter away with messages which belittle and berate us....
by Guy Sayles | Apr 5, 2015 |
Across my years as a pastor, I learned that people didn’t like it when I talked about death. So, fair warning: though this post is actually about joy, it’s about the kind of joy that finds us in life’s hard experiences, including death. Early in Holy Week,...
by Guy Sayles | Mar 16, 2015 |
I recently spent a couple of hours at the DMV; it was time to renew my driver’s license. The place was crowded with, in the words of the old Prayerbook, “all sorts and conditions” of people. It was a multiracial and multigenerational melting pot....
by Guy Sayles | Mar 9, 2015 |
”My heart isn’t in it any more.” When we feel that way, we’re in good company. Twice in 2 Corinthians 4, early and late in his reflections on the relationship of our humanity and the good news of Jesus, Paul claimed: “We do not lose...
by Guy Sayles | Mar 3, 2015 |
Over the last few years, through some hard and holy experiences, I have heard rising in my mind a few summaries of wisdom, summaries which crystallized discoveries I had made but did not know quite how to phrase. Compressed into them is a tangle of emotions: struggle...
by Guy Sayles | Feb 22, 2015 |
At Promise Academy, a school for at-risk students in the Harlem Children’s Zone, teacher Sophie Richard tutored a child to prepare him for a crucial test. One afternoon, when the young boy was tired and frustrated, she tried to offer him words of encouragement, but he...
by Guy Sayles | Feb 11, 2015 |
Dr. Seuss said that “Adults are obsolete children.” Many of us fear that obsolescence. We don’t want to be unrelentingly grim and somber and to shoulder so much “grown up” responsibility that it breaks our backs and our spirits. We want to keep or,...
by Guy Sayles | Jan 27, 2015 |
In his autobiographical essay, “The Crack Up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” And, physicist Niels Bohr once said: “A...
Recent Comments