Thoughts Along the Journey

  John 20:19-31    Easter 2    April 24, 2022 St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, Williamsburg, Virginia                            On October 31, 2006, I nearly died.                Some sort of   mysterious pneumonia had filled my lungs, and I had been in the ICU at Norfolk General Hospital for days, sedated and on a ventilator, as the infectious disease doctors at the Eastern Virginia Medical School struggled to diagnose what was going on.   On October 31, 2006, the pulmonologist had my ventilator turned up to 100% oxygen, but my blood oxygen wouldn’t even get up into the 90s.             I didn’t die.   (You might have noticed.)   Just in time, the infectious disease docs diagnosed a fungus that had taken over my lungs: something called histoplasmosis. ...

  (Another short piece I was happy to contribute to the Lenten devotional booklet for St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Williamsburg, VA) I love the Psalms, because they teach us how to pray.   We don’t need to be polite towards God, or to hold anything back from God.   We can be as honest, and as accusing, and as insulting towards God as we please!   God can take it.   That’s what we see all through the Psalms. But what about when a Psalm makes us ask: Is that what God is like?   That’s true in many Psalms, including Psalm 53, which is appointed for today.   “Fools say in their hearts, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, they commit abominable acts; there is no one who does good…. They have all fallen away, they are all alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no, not one.” I can certainly understand the Psalm writer’s frustration, because I’ve felt that way, too!  Haven’t you?  "How can you be so stupid ?"    (We...

  I enjoyed putting this together a couple of weeks ago, for the Lenten devotional series of St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Williamsburg, VA: One of my heroes, Dorothy Day, once wrote: “My strength returns to me with my cup of coffee and the reading of the Psalms.”   It’s a good way to begin a morning!   And, so, I gravitate towards Psalm 27, which is appointed for this day, and find that it is full of prompts for prayer. “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” For your prayer: Do you believe these words?   Who are you afraid of?   Fear is rampant in our culture.   Fear mutates into anger and closed-off intolerance, which becomes polarization and division.   We become likely to identify enemies, adversaries.   Sure enough, that’s happened with the Psalm writer.   In verses two, six, 11 and 12: “When evildoers assail me to devour my flesh – ...

  John 1:1-18     Christmas 1     December 26, 2021 St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, Williamsburg, Virginia                 In the beginning was the Word.             I love these verses from the gospel of John – which take us deeply into the mystery that is God.   We cannot fully understand mystery.   We can only enter in to what we can only begin to conceive of. In the beginning was the Word.   Can you even conceive of that – “in the beginning” – before there was anything?   When there was only God?             In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.             Another element of the mystery: that God is a communication event!   “The Word was God.”...

 I do believe it's the earliest I've ever been asked the question: "Are you ready for the holidays?" The person who asked me that question today was a very nice cashier at the nearby grocery store, and she admitted that she was confusing herself by asking.  There was a Salvation Army bell ringer outside (earlier than I have remembered a Salvation Army bell ringer) and she said, "The bell ringer is making me panic.  It's making me think I should be doing more than I am to get ready for the holidays."  Then she said, "Last night, after work, I got home and my daughter was playing Christmas music.  I said, 'No!  Too early!'" Did the Salvation Army bell ringer think he was on duty too early?  When I dropped in my contribution he said, "Thank you!  Happy Thanksgiving!"  I'm so old I remember when Salvation Army bell ringers went on duty after Thanksgiving, and they would say, "Merry Christmas!"  (Yes, Salvation Army v...

  Mark 4:35-41     Lectionary 12, Proper 7     June 20, 2021 St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, Williamsburg, Virginia                 My niece and her wife live on a boat.   A few weeks ago, they were docked in Portsmouth and, one night, Patty and I took dinner to them on their boat.   Of course, we had to enter into the negotiations that we’re engaged in, these days: masks or no masks?   According to the CDC, since Patty and I are vaccinated, we don’t need to wear masks around other adults.   But would Rachel and Sarah be comfortable with that?   There was only a moment of awkwardness.   To interject some lightness, I said, “Well, we’re all in the same boat, having to negotiate this every time we get together with someone new!” “In the same boat.”   Heh, heh.   (Get it?   We were, literally, in the same boat!   I wish I could say I...

In a recent “Poetry Unbound” podcast, Padraig O’Tuama featured Molly McCully Brown’s poem, “Transubstantiation.”   I had never heard of this remarkable young woman.   But our amazing Williamsburg Regional Library has her single volume of poetry and her single collection of essays, and I have been reading what she has written, expressions arising from her experience of living in a body disabled by cerebral palsy. In some of her essays, she reveals that she has been on a religious pilgrimage.   I was struck by this sentence in her essay, “Bent Body, Lamb”: “I grew up twenty-five miles from Jerry Falwell’s Baptist mega-church, in the heartland of what often feels like the worst religion has to offer: bigotry and prejudice, rabid anti-intellectualism, the inability to yield even a single hard-edged certainty up to kindness, questioning, or complication.” I am struck by the fact that I read this sentence the day before the Sunday of The Holy Trinity (this past Sunday). ...