“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you,” Jesus said to the disciples at their last meal together. For most of us, peace has come to mean the absence of major wars, but in Hebrew, the word for peace is Shalom, meaning Fullness, Harmony, Wholeness.
One of my all-time favorite authors is Annie Dillard, and I am loving spending a few weeks this November discussing some of her essays in Teaching a Stone to Talk. One of the earliest offerings that I gleaned from reading her books was this relatively straightforward quotation, “We catch
In June, I learned of the death of a friend and mentor, the Rev. Nicolette Papanek. Nicolette taught me much about how to appreciate God and God’s creation. She was a quilter, both with fabrics and words. She had a gift for weaving disparate patches of cloth and ideas into a unified vision that brought
Many of you know that a few weeks ago Ardelle and I walked a leg of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Spain. This is the third such trip we have taken with a group. Something I love about this strange pedestrian endeavor is the movement back and forth between solitude and
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is the title of the best book I have read in a very long time.
Written by James McBride, acclaimed author of The Color of Water, The Good Lord Bird, and Deacon King Kong (oh my gosh, what a deacon!), The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is a rollicking, smart,
I spent last Saturday at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, helping make a new bishop. I can say that I was actually helping because I was part of a group of people who surrounded my friend to officially present her at the start of the liturgy. Projecting (as
Thursday of this week, Sept. 14, was Holy Cross Day. One of the most important parts of my recent sabbatical was making a pilgrimage to visit crosses that were important in the story of my family in our ancestral homeland of Scotland. It
Recently, a paperback copy of The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen showed up in the little library at our house, and I decided to give it a read. It’s the story of a trek into the mountains of Nepal with the field biologist George Shaller after Matthiessen lost his wife to cancer. Shaller
For reasons that no amount of therapists, counselors, or doctors have successfully rid me of (so far), I have had an irrational fear of flying since I was twelve years old. It has not stopped me from traveling extensively with my husband who never heard of a place or country he didn’t want to visit,
In May, the Surgeon General of the United States issued a warning about an epidemic, not of a new strain of COVID or some other infectious disease, but of loneliness. You may not have read the bulletin from the Department of Health and Human Services, but you might have noticed an uptick this