This is the day when sickened, condemned man collided with everlasting Love. “How could He have called us if He had not been crucified, for it is only on the cross that a man dies with arms outstretched?” (St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation)
“The Lord approves and commends all our labor. He desires that we wash our souls in tears, wring them out with repentance, press them with compunction of conscience and clothe them with good works” (Saint Nikolai of Zica)
At the end of my workout, I see Stephen Caleb coming down the hall. Inspired that now might be one of those rare opportunities to change his musical tastes for the better, I put my iPod buds in his ears. Simon and Garfunkel’s “Feeling Groovy” is playing. Caleb screws up his face into something like gentle …
“My heart only has entrances. It doesn’t have exits. Whoever enters remains there. Whatever he may do, I love him the same as I loved him when he first entered into my heart.” (Elder Epiphanios of Athens). This is a heart, as Father Stephen observes, like the heart of God, burning more fiercely with love …
The writer who has inspired me more than any other, on the birth of the God-child: “But if there is the beauty of what is majestic and powerful, there is the beauty also of what is humble and powerless. Like any child, Jesus as a child has one power only and that is the power …
A MEDITATION ON THE INCARNATION BY ST EPHRAIM THE SYRIAN We confess one and the same individual as perfect God and perfect Man. He is God the Word Which was flesh. For if He was not flesh, why was Mary chosen? And if He is not God, whom does Gabriel call Lord? If He was …
He sees her as we circle the parking lot a second time, an aimless, wandering circle, a time-killing circle while we wait for their mother to finish a bit of shopping. I have already seen the woman — a girl, really, with tangled dark hair and downturned gaze. She sits on a little concrete median …
You yearn for a holy place because, in the time between waking unable to recall where you are, and drifting again into the half-sleep that is all you’ve known for the longest time, you stand in the darkness of your sterile hotel room, peering into a mirror to see that you are nothing like what …
“Give thou me this stranger who from his youth has wandered like a stranger. Give thou me this stranger whom his kinsmen killed in hatred like a stranger. Give me this stranger at whom I wonder, beholding him as a guest of death. Give me this stranger who knoweth how to take in the poor …
It seems churlish not to say something about what has happened in this country that less than a lifetime ago could not guarantee every black man his right to vote. If nothing else we can be thankful that the world has changed in that respect. Is Barack Obama made of more solid stuff than the …
“I mean if I have any inclination at all, or you, to start being whatever in God’s name it means to be a ‘child of God’ — and let’s say there is no argument for having such an inclination, but let’s just suppose that at certain unguarded moments we have it, this inclination to start being …
Yesterday I led our church in a prayer of confession, and enough people asked me for it afterward that I figured I ought to type it up from my notes: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us — sinners all. We confess that you are rarely what we most desire, though your desire for …
A Confession for the Modern Conservative Christian Read More »
“Dad,” Eli asks me in a whisper, “why did Abraham kill Isaac?” We are in his bed, looking out at the darkening sky and listening to crickets. In his bed across the room, our Isaac is already asleep, a lamb clutched to his chest, his mouth agape. “He didn’t kill Isaac, remember?” I kiss Eli …
This time of year always brings to mind my own graduation experiences, which are paltry. I was valedictorian of my high-school class, but several teachers, administrators, and other denizens of public-school officialdom felt it best that I not speak. My Latin-conscious friends pointed out that this made me a “valetorian.” They thought it was funny …
The Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday doesn’t prompt much consideration. It’s a nothing day, wedged between man’s greatest shame and our greatest hope. To the people who had followed Jesus like fools through the land and across the water, it must have felt like the day after a funeral, when clouds continue to …
As best I can remember, my first publication was in the high school paper. It was an editorial, of course, and it was funny and mean and wrongheaded. I’ve put words into the public domain for 23 years since that day. I’ve been wrong a lot, and I’ve picked a lot of fights. At times …
When I was a boy, my mother would sometimes let me fall asleep on her bed while she watched television. I would drift between sleep and wakefulness, my thoughts penetrated by the sound of Johnny Carson’s chuckle, or the earnest baritone of a news anchor. One night, when I was maybe ten, I woke to …
Today is one of those bullet-dodging days. You’ve had those, right? A day when you will learn something about work, or a relationship, or your health, or perhaps the health of someone you love more than yourself? I think of them as bullet-dodging days, because you can’t do anything but stand up against the wall …
We sing because Isaac felt left out. Caleb practices piano, Eli the violin. I sit with Eli as he practices, pushing his fingers to their proper positions, helping him with rhythm, chastising him when he claims a sudden injury that prevents him from playing another note. Isaac hovers when I do this, alternately jumping off …
It was a scene we’ve witnessed before, from the safety of our living rooms and offices: a school building that has become a slaughterhouse, and scores of police officers arrayed outside, waiting for . . . something, for orders perhaps, or for the specially trained tactical units, or perhaps just for the shooting to stop, …
And so they led him up the hill, and they nailed him to a cross, and they watched him bleed and die. From Frederick Buechner’s Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith: “What was brought to completion by such a life and such a death only he can know now, wherever he is, …
I’m learning patience from the lady who is teaching Eli how to play the violin. She is a long-time public school music teacher, the kind we wish or imagine still ran things there, kind and competent and able to talk to little ones in a way that makes them feel listened to and special, yet …
An acquaintance once told me about a wealthy benefactor in his church, a man who likes to point out that he “isn’t one of those Bible thumpers.” He just believes that it’s a good thing for families to go to church. So he’s donated millions over his lifetime to the building of churches. He is …
Several people asked me yesterday if I had heard the news that Anna Nicole Smith was dead. It was as if the whole world had been there to see her collapse, and had no one left to tell, which is always the secret pleasure of dreadful news, that we get to be the first — …
Something inside draws us home. Last year, two swallows built a nest on the narrow ledge above my front door. We tried to shoo them off, used a broom to sweep away their construction a few times, but they just kept rebuilding. They kept on keepin’ on, as Caleb might note. Eventually they won, and …
“Only too soon personal experience and the experience of others teaches how far most men’s lives are from being what a man’s life ought to be. All have great moments. They see themselves in the magic mirror of possibility which hope holds before them while the wish flatters them. But they swiftly forget this sight …
Did I ever tell you about our house in Wichita? It was a beautiful, three-story, 1912 box colonial, with hardwood floors and the kind of molding that our nation has forgotten how to produce. The den had a fireplace of painted brick, a tin ceiling, and wood-paneled walls (1920-style, not 1970) with an etched and …
