It’s that time of year again; I’ve been considering what to give up for Lent.  Giving up chocolate seems too easy and self-serving.  My chocolate cravings would abate after a few days, and I would no longer experience its loss as a prompt to pray.  I might actually lose...

“My sheep hear my voice, and I know them and they follow me.”  John 10:27

The way Jesus speaks here is weirdly subtle.  I think that I’ve always subliminally read this as “my sheep hear my voice and THEY know ME.”  But that’s not what Jesus...

O brook, older than
any generation can recall,
drafting ferric-red
through mountain gullies,
eons of erosion
scraping sandstone
to the sea;
superannuated,
yet running faster than
all the memories
that teem and tumble
from my brain,
sweet reminiscences
as well as pain, all
churned and pushed
farther and further
...

When my child was gravely ill
I would feed birds
from plexiglass shelters
suction-cupped
to the kitchen windows;
there I first met
black-capped juncos.
I learned that they flew to us
from distant Oregon;
such tiny wings to carry
such a long, long way. 
How did they do it?
What instinct
brought them...

Inauguration day arrives, and I am the most politically hopeful that I have been in fifty years. I know that sounds odd, even crazy, given all that is happening, so I’ll explain:

I was raised by dyed-in-the-wool, rock-ribbed Republicans, a whole slew of them: aunts, uncles,...

I was recently watching the film “Born Yesterday”…the 1950 version with Judy Holliday, William Holden, and Broderick Crawford.  I’m quite familiar with it.  In the 1970s I acted in two different productions of the Garson Kanin play, originally written in 1946....

I remember it so vividly.  I was standing in the Gap store in Old Town Pasadena, when my heart started racing and I began to hyperventilate.  What was happening?  I was much too young for a heart attack…it was clearly some sort of anxiety.  Agoraphobia?  There...

“Make haste to deliver me…to help me.”  Psalm 70:1

What does this mean?  The God who knows no time constraints has us pray for his speed, his haste.  Doesn’t “haste make waste”?  Don’t we already live in an impatient day, when we want...

In the weeks before his death Jesus says, “Listen to me carefully. We are on our way up to Jerusalem. When we get there, the Son of Man will be betrayed to the religious leaders and scholars. They will sentence him to death. They will then hand him over to the Romans for mockery and torture...

“let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put on manure.”  Luke 13:8  ESV

During summer’s scorch the birch tree withered,
so many dead branches, leaves shriveled and brown.
“Cut it down,” he said, but that sounded so cruel.
“Prune it...