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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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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Alban Elued: Ending and beginning

Today like every other day
We wake up empty and scared.
Don’t open the door of your study
And begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do
There are hundreds of way to kneel
And kiss the earth.
I looked for this poem of Rumi’s this morning because it perfectly captured how I felt upon [...]

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A vaguely political passing thought…

I do most certainly approve of a holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.  It’s a tribute to the whole Civil Rights Movement as well as to a noble individual.  However–

I think it should be on April 4th, the day of his assassination, of his martyrdom, really, for what he believed was the will of God–equality [...]

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Gratitude

For some people, a shadow hangs over this day: the tangled and bitter history of the relations between European colonists and Indian natives in the Americas.  It began so well, with the natives helping the clueless settlers, but the Puritans were precisely those Europeans who had severed themselves from the old Catholic peasant agriculturalist ways [...]

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Between the darkness and the light

As I walked home yesterday, in the hour just after sunset, I came up the hill to the old townhouse where our apartment is and saw, in the house next door to ours, lights.  White lights.  On wreaths in the second floor windows, and on a tree, a Christmas tree, I suppose, in the living [...]

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The urban druid is a curmudgeon today

The holidays are upon us.  So the television commercials tell us, and the radio announcers, the advertising on Amazon.com, and pretty much every oracle of popular culture.  This urban druid wants to know: “Which holidays?”
Yes, I know that this politically correct phrase, “the holidays”, really means the secular Thanksgiving and Christmas, a time of overeating [...]

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