Being Bread
After a late dinner, we were walking back to our hotel when the breeze brought a whiff of freshly baked bread. I turned and stared through the darkness at an arched opening backlit by flames. A glistening shirtless man was lifting loaves out of the brick oven with a long paddle, balancing, turning, then sliding […]
Names and Stories
When I lived in Israel in the early 1970s, I visited a lake in the northern part of the country that Israelis call Kinneret. It is called that, I was told, because its roughly triangular shape resembles a kinnor, a certain kind of hand-held harp mentioned many times in scripture. Some linguists say this is […]
A Stormy Season
Recently, I heard a group of liturgical scholars refer to these long months of pandemic as “Covidtide,” almost as if it were an official season of the church year. Unlike the joyful twelve-day period of Christmastide, which leads to the celebration of the unveiling Christ’s glory at Epiphany, the season of Covidtide has been marked […]
Being Saved
As more and more people in the US are vaccinated against the dreaded COVID-19 virus, the instructions keep changing about what we can and cannot do. Who is allowed to hug friends and family and who should wait? How many people can be in a room together? Do they have to wear masks? Who, if […]
