just enough light

A few years ago I was given the task of burning the palm leaves from Palm Sunday. The ashes were to be used for the next year’s Ash Wednesday service. Growing up Southern Baptist, I did not know of that tradition. “Cool, I’ll be happy to,” I replied. So on the Wednesday evening after Palm […]

Today is Palm Sunday. Christian churches everywhere will be commemorating the day Jesus and his followers entered Jerusalem in what we have come to call his “triumphal entry.” Children will process down the aisles waving palm branches, the organ will play loudly, and congregants will sing. Despite the legends we have built around this event, […]

Experiencing leg aches as I described a couple of days ago is an apt metaphor for the necessary pain of physical and spiritual growth. The world of entomology provides the most helpful metaphor to me: an insect shedding its skin. Insects do not have internal skeletons. Instead they have an exoskeleton, a hard outer skin […]

Most of my Lenten entries have been about suffering, loss, and unlearning. As I was reading and writing this morning, I thought that perhaps anyone who has been keeping up these entries might be saying, “Enough loss and suffering already!” Yet, these are all necessary and unavoidable parts of life, and to me, frankly, the […]

I had intense leg aches when I was a kid. I did not feel them during the day when I was up, active, running and doing all the things that kids do during the day. But when I got in bed, stopped moving and tried to relax, my legs began to throb. I sometimes cried, […]

A couple of weeks ago, the Lectionary for Protestant churches suggested the New Testament text of Jesus’ temptations. It is a familiar story that took place at the beginning of the ministry of Jesus. The traditional telling is of Jesus, alone in the desert, 40 days in prayer and fasting. Along came Satan who offered […]

“We can be assured that we are creating God in our own image when it turns out that God hates the same people we do.” Ann Lamott While preparing a sermon a few years ago for my home church in Illinois, I consulted the lectionary for the suggested texts for the day. The lectionary always […]

For a person like me who grew up in a religious home, who attended church and read the Bible regularly, whose life was dominated by the admonition to “follow God’s will,” unlearning God is a real challenge. Yes, unlearning God. The lectionary text for this Sunday in many Protestant churches is the verse that reads, […]

In my reading this morning, Natalie Goldberg reflects on her life after the death of her teacher with whom she had studied for years. She described her-face to-face meetings with him, “I had friends, acquaintances I interacted with, and we sat facing each other across luncheon tables, but this was a man whose life work […]

I’m never upset for the reasons I think. Students who came to the Counseling Center seeking help were asked to fill out a form with some biographical information. This gave the counselor a little background before the student walked in and took a seat in the office. On the form was a space for the […]