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Gambling chips
Poetry

Decreasing Heat

How has so much of your on-fire certainty cooled despite your tossing on another slab of cedar and more kindling? Surely this is a failure of your divine pursuit, you think, believing the heresy that passion is the logical outcome of faith. What of the dark night of the soul? What of wrestling questions into a chokehold only to have your grip pried away? Like Peter, you say, Lord, to whom should we go? That is what you return to,…
July 1, 2015
These Hands
Poetry

Prayer Diagnostics

Most often, your trouble is beginning – so many activities more alluring. Try as you might, you’ve never regretted having prayed (once you’ve finally started). You know of others in your church life who gush, sincerely, about prayer times. These people discomfort, fascinate you who can’t view yourself in a drenched state. And yet (and yet), you are jealous, desiring what you do not possess. You know their pools of deep communion did not create themselves, did not appear some…
July 1, 2015
Essays

Merciful Children of the Most High: Deification in the Gospel of Luke

Luke’s gospel witness to the life of Jesus from Nazareth comes to an astonishing and climactic ending. As Jesus ascends into the heavens, his followers worship him. Among the clues Luke gives that Jesus shares in God’s divine identity, this is perhaps the most clear. Elsewhere, Luke corrects every impulse to worship a human being (see Acts 10:26 and 14:15). But when Jesus receives the worship of his followers, Luke shows us that Jesus receives what belongs properly only to…
July 1, 2015
Inside Out

Exploring the Attic

When I was growing up, my parents would send me away for a week or two in the summer to my grandparents’ house. I looked forward to these weeks in the season of long light. Grandpa and Grandma had a tract of acres, a garden, an apple orchard to climb in, an old barn filled with tools, rusted machinery and tractors from a bygone season when the land was farmed. But my favorite place to explore was the attic. Upstairs,…
July 1, 2015
Essays

Why Go to Church When You’re on Vacation?

This past January in Ecuador, in the middle of a conversation about Darwin and the Galapagos Islands, my taxi driver looked me in the eye and asked, “What religion are you?” The first thing I wanted to answer this multitasking man was, “Do you mind keeping your eyes on the road? I’m not planning to meet my Maker quite yet.” The second was, “Could you slow down when you talk?” I was doing my best to keep up, but my…
April 23, 2015
Poetry

Under This Roof

My brother has come to live with us and how could we know how deliberate his hands would be: at the sink, thawing beans stringy from too hot a June, smoothing hairs that whisper about my sons’ ears, locking the door against the snow. His hands move slow as a dream, the kind where no one watches out for you as you slip over the edge and sprawl wordlessly down mountains of air or time or floors of people doing…
April 23, 2015
Poetry

Saint Gabriel

Here they brought thousands of the hurricane’s dead. Even the dogs knew to stay away, low rumble in their throats, September begun with a lurch and a dream. My husband teaches sixth-graders, cannot explain why here, town of the archangel, bodies keep coming, their second deaths: his students have started school with Call of the Wild, and where in the past girls blanched and resisted the chapters of blood and rage, boys triumphing with their own pubescent gestures— they don’t…
April 23, 2015
Reviews

A Kindly Ballet of Serious Questions

Lila, by Marilynne Robinson LILA MARILYNNE ROBINSON FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX, 2014 $15.60 (HARDCOVER) 261 PAGES Marriage counselors would certainly have discouraged talk of a marriage between an aging Presbyterian pastor in Gilead, a small Iowa town, and an orphan 40 years younger who had only years of wandering with an itinerant group to show for her life. This novel, the third in a trilogy that includes Gilead and Home, builds on the lives of ministers Ames and Boughton –…
April 23, 2015
Essays

Praying in the Dark: Lament, Providence and Protest

A cancer diagnosis occurs in a moment, but the losses it brings come in slowly yet steadily, like a tide pushing against the shoreline, again and again. In the days after my own diagnosis, I sometimes felt resignation rather than anger or protest. “I’m not the center of the universe, after all,” I told a friend. “The world will continue just fine without me.” But that was just for some moments. Particularly as I considered the implications of this incurable…
April 23, 2015