Two years ago at this time in mid-September, I attended funeral services for a young man named Josh who was the oldest son of family friends and the older brother of a good friend of my youngest son. Josh was 31 and had struggled for a long time with addiction and depression. I don’t know […]
“I believe in aristocracy, though — if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the […]
A week ago, after his second football game of the season, my thirteen-year-old son climbed into the back seat of his grandparents’ car and sat down next to me. My parents came from out-of-town to watch him play, and he played his heart out for nearly every minute of the game. Fifteen minutes or so […]
when I drifted I cannot remember into the throb of unrelenting impulse then engulfed, captive to the spectacle within relief ever closer, yet never in grasp words dripped from my throat, glutted like voluptuous beads of nectar, heavy hanging in lush garlands, suspended then released shattering into fragments of truth at my feet driven into […]
fierce young man stone-faced, with warrior gaze uninitiated on the battlefield uncertain of your foe your enemy is upon you but is unrecognizable to you you will not see it advancing this time until it is too late for this rival you cannot prepare with flintlock, with sword or with any man-made weapon though you […]
there could be as many ways to make love as there are ideas when the way is made clear love can pour unceasingly like water flowing downhill seeping freely into the small hidden places and soaking deeply into the ground the physical body is one way everyone knows about that about tongues and lips and […]
my mother, the incarnation the real presence she is attuned, she heals me baptized in her womb she pushed me out into the world to be delivered again and again by the miracle of her love mother, she is giver of life and my salvation
it looked so ordinary, inert, that rock on the ground but underneath was a whole world seething with life a thousand things you upset with your profound ignorance and offhanded curiosity in addition to the grains of sand and dirt there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of beating hearts, tiny lives you disrupted some burrowing deeper […]
You, with your relative youth your pout, your upward gaze. A young stellar object. And me, in front of you by decades. I see you as if in a mirror, behind me coming up fast in your body a month now perhaps for every year I’ve practiced being alive. I’m a supernova to your protostar. […]
So we wait to hear the words of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old suspect apprehended for the Boston Marathon bombings and subsequent spree of murder and mayhem. This kid lies in a hospital bed in serious condition with a throat injury, intubated and sedated, while an elite counter-terrorism team stands by to interrogate him the moment […]
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