A Call for Me?
My dad was, in his own words, “just a country doctor with a sniff and sneeze practice.” It was his way of downplaying the extraordinary effort that it had taken him to work his way through medical school during the Depression because he wanted to help people. I also knew that he felt called to […]
The Power of Ritual
Last winter, I listened to an episode of the podcast On Being featuring Katherine May, in which she discussed the importance of ritual in our lives– to mark the passage of time, to give us hope, to bring communities together at regular intervals. I found the interview so compelling that I’ve been thinking about ritual ever since. […]
Going By Another Way
I’ve heard and read the story of the Magi visiting the infant Jesus* so many times that the words slide past me without registering anything other than a slightly bored familiarity. T.S. Eliot’s poem, which once upon a time startled me with its immediacy and particularity of detail, has now become yet another expected, regular […]
What Did I Expect?
When I agreed to follow Jesus, I had no idea what I was getting into. I was forty years old, and had spent most of my life alternately yearning for and avoiding a deeper relationship with God. When I was in my early teens, I went to a Jewish summer camp in the San Bernardino […]
