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Easter Monday
Reading this morning in Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God, I felt as if the old monk were aiming some of his words directly at me across the centuries. In his eighth letter, he tells the person to whom he’s writing: I do not advise you to use multiplicity of words in prayer; many words and long discourses being often the occasions of wandering… And in his ninth letter, discussing a mutual acquaintance, he tells his correspondent: She seems to me full of good will, but she would go faster than grace. One does not become holy all at once. … These two subjects, verbosity in prayer…
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Harness On Our Back
I gin to be aweary of the sun, And wish the estate o’ the world were now undone. Ring the alarum-bell! Blow, wind! come, wrack! At least we’ll die with harness on our back. MacBeth, by William Shakespeare (Act V, scene 5) We went down into town today to do some grocery shopping and to buy a new vacuum cleaner. Truly, appliances and tools are no longer well-made. They are disposable junk, without a crumb of craftsmanship in an entire acre of store. While in the store, I heard my wife mutter something with outrage under her breath. She pointed out a woman who looked like Oprah Winfrey’s big sister,…
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Eyes Without A Face
On the drive to work, the approach of summer announced itself with the early bright sky. I am still pleased with how clear the skies are these days. Ever since this manufactured worldwide crisis began, the murky web of vapor trails in the sky has been almost completely nonexistent. To my eyes, the sky seems bigger, clearer, realer. Even at night, the effect seems pronounced, with the stars appearing nearer and more…present with me. When I arrived at work after a week away, the tree beneath which I park seemed fuller and lusher, its purplish leaves nodding in the morning breeze. I touched my cheek to one of the leaves…
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Holy Regret
A friend and I were talking early this morning about our respective experiences in the institutional church. The conversation was like a ride in a crop-duster, full of swoops and dives and wing-waggles, sometimes peaceful, sometimes thrilling, constantly flowing. And after the conversation, I sat at my desk, thinking about the things he’d told me and the things I’d told him, and I reached a conclusion. I’ve committed many sins and made many stupid decisions over the decades. But I don’t regret any of those things with the intensity and shame that I feel when I think of the pious boilerplate that I offered so many people when talking about…