Eleventh month, eleventh day

I don’t really have a personal connection with Veterans’ Day.  One of the many variable and uncertain stories of my father’s life was whether he had fought in the Second World War; he was of an age to do so, but sometimes he said he hadn’t, and sometimes he said he had.  I’m not sure [...]

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Where it all began

My first memories of anything religious are of a Lutheran church. My sister, eleven years older than I, had been confirmed at a Missouri Synod church in the neighborhood with the entertaining name of Martini Lutheran. She was still a church-goer when I was five or six and she was sixteen or seventeen, [...]

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We shall see him (and ourselves) as he is

See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that [...]

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A holy day

Holy is the True Light, and passing wonderful,
lending radiance to them that endured in the heat of the conflict,
from Christ they inherit a home of unfading splendour,
wherein they rejoice with gladness evermore.
Alleluia!
from the Salisbury Diurnal by GH Palmer

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Well, duh

I consider myself a fairly sophisticated if amateur thinker on theological/religious issues. My gentle readers all know that I have tried and practiced multiple paths of the spirit, sometimes more than one at a time. But I *just* figured out something so obvious that once it hit me, it was like Homer Simpson suddenly attaining [...]

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The holiness of beauty

Today is our neighborhood’s annual community yard sale, situated in the park that divides the main street into north and south (or, more precisely, northwest and southeast).  My husband went out around nine a.m. to get a cup of coffee and browse the offerings; he came back around ten-thirty with a buttered bagel for me [...]

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A pause on the road

I may try to ignore it, but I feel the energies shifting around me.  It hasn’t really been summer for weeks.  We had three weeks of our worst heat and humidity at the beginning of August, after a comparatively mild summer; when it broke, driven away by tropical storms drifting up the Atlantic coast, I [...]

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Names, teachers, images, and the Work

I was baptized Methodist and confirmed Episcopalian.  I discovered paganism when The Spiral Dance was published and waffled back and forth between Christian and pagan for the better part of twenty years, until I began practicing a form of Hermetic magic that pointed me to Buddhism, and I took refuge.

I am an Anglican, a Druid, a witch, [...]

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The view from the hermit shack

There is a large chessboard laid out on the floor in the central court of the library where I work. The chess pieces are three or four feet high.  Two men are playing a game, while a couple of others stand watching.  I think this is for National Library Week.
I keep reading on our local weather [...]

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And the smoke is briars

I alluded to this segment of Eliot’s “East Coker” the other day when I quoted Rowan Williams, and thought of posting it today. Ironically, Dogo Barry Graham beat me to it, but I shall post it anyway.
The wounded surgeon plies the steelThat questions the distempered part;Beneath the bleeding hands we feelThe sharp compassion of [...]

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