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In Search of Salted Shrimp
I’m glad I can have an experience of being an outsider, because it’s humbling and hilarious, and one has to be bold to find what one needs in the place where one’s own culture is not king.
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The Healthy Group
The predilection of groups for immoral behavior has been so widely studied, identified, acknowledged, and deplored that I hardly need to point it out. Research shows that people are much more influenced by group dynamics and the expectations of authority figures than we think.
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Shadow
This past weekend I had the privilege of witnessing a courageous confrontation. In this situation, although many of us had felt disturbed by behaviors going on in the classroom, no one had mustered the courage to say anything, myself included. Finally, though, one of us decided to confront the situation.
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As If It Would Never End
An airport is a vacuum, a place of an unwelcome sort of timelessness where one can introvert and come to three hours later like someone who has been knocked unconscious. I’ve been knocked unconscious. Lately it has been impossible to get the sort of time alone I need. I wonder from time to time this…
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Rolling Out the Red Carpet
We had company over for dinner Saturday night. I spent half the day bustling around, tidying and cleaning, placing candles and choosing music. I burned a cooking CD (Music to Cook By, Vol. 1), and prepared to cook what our daughter, Rosemary, has dubbed my Red Carpet Sauce. “It’s Red Carpet,” she explained, “because it’s…
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Purifying the Vessels
Our ancient rituals and symbols, whatever they are, and wherever we practice them reverently, have this life-renewing power. They have the potential to give us new birth, if only we will let them.
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I Feel the Ancient Pulse
I kneel, and the smallness of the chapel is a welcome. It’s eternally quiet; no one seems to breathe. The sun is low in the sky and the wine in the chalice on the small altar glows with a fabulous fire. I can’t take my eyes off the wine.
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Beloved Fools
Yesterday morning, I read a brief article by my friend Renaissance Guy about an incident in which a small wafer of unleavened, wheaten bread called the “host” or the “Body of Christ,” or the “Blessed Sacrament” was pocketed and taken out of a Catholic student worship center’s celebration of the mass.
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Where Your Treasure Is . . .
Stuck between two women who are, presumably, adults with options, we have a helpless infant or child who cannot care for himself, protect himself, or make sense of the fact that he is part of his adoptive family because of losses so large that even God says they cause unrequited yearning.
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I Believe in the Fall
Although being old doesn’t give a person wisdom, learning by experience does. I am finally old enough to be able to look back on a lot of events and old enough to have learned from them. But I’ve been surprised to discover that, for the most part, this wisdom is for myself.
The Third Eve 