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My Thoughts, They Are Provoked
WJT posted one of his singular pieces that troubled me, delighted me, and had me staring at the floor, lost in thought, long after I read it, just as his classic Supergod Delusion essay kept me chewing on his words for weeks after I read the post. Reading this sort of material doesn’t finally answer any questions for me, but like a good Zen koan, the act of reading and the subsequent attempts to digest such things helps me see myself with greater clarity. For the majority of my Christian life, I saw myself as a pretty smart fellow. It was a liberating but excruciatingly painful day when I began…
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Search, Search
My wife and I took a leisurely drive through some of the small hamlets just north of our little farm. The day was sunny and mild, and the car seemed to pilot itself, looping back and forth on the curves and switchbacks, through the fields of strawberries and tobacco, past the Black Angus, cropping grass with the placid patience of monks who have nowhere to go except to Compline. Great beauty surrounded us on the drive, but so did extended swaths of rusted poverty and squalor. The weathered gray boards of barns stood guard next to the peeling-painted houses with their spare-tire planters and last year’s Christmas lights draped along…
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Those Who Are Aware
Some years ago, we obtained a pretty little house plant with dark green, white-speckled leaves. The plant is known as a scindapsus pictus, or “argyraeus.” Not long after my wife installed it on the baker’s rack in the kitchen, it began to climb the wall behind the rack. We were utterly charmed by the little suckers the plant used to attach itself, and by what a living presence it was, even sitting among some other, more dramatically-leaved plants. Each tiny, pale shoot of jade at the end of the vine was cause for exclamation. Several weeks ago, while cleaning around the baker’s rack, I managed to tear the vine away…
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Sexagesima Snow
If you look closely (or if you can enlarge it) at the photo above, you’ll see a black spot near the bottom, just to the right of the center of the frame. That’s a black bear. I saw him while Jinx and I were out on our walk this morning. The bear was several hundred yards away, loping away from us towards the south, but I knew that if Jinx spotted him, it would be Katy-bar-the-door and every-botty would be kung-fu fighting. I yelled and made silly noises to distract the spotted menace while trying to snap a few pics of the bear. This was the clearest of the ones…
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To Sit, To Dwell
I can still see her sitting there. Unless the day was quite cold, my grandmother did a fair share of her daily work sitting in the battered rocking chair on her front porch. Many’s the time I’ve seen her with a pan of peas or beans on her lap, her gnarled fingers selecting and snapping and dropping. Or with a garment that needed mending, her gray head bent over the fabric as she guided the needle through its proper places. Or with her Reader’s Digest Condensed Bible with its worn, pillowed green cover, open on her aproned lap, bookmarked with newspaper clippings (mostly obituaries) and leaves and pressed wildflowers. But…
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Dancing With God
We have but to live, take each day as it comes, see the Lord in all that happens and have a kind of response to the will of God that is much like dancing. You must work with it. It is not a matter of passive submission. This is no way to dance; it is too heavy, too leaden, too dragging and uninspired. No, you must dance with your partner, you must cooperate, you must work with the will of God. This is the sort of dancing that leads to the kingdom and makes one free. — Brother Paul Quenon, OCSO, in his book “In Praise of the Useless Life:…