What runs through me could hardly be called piety. It’s not patience either, at least not by that name. The pasture’s dissolution into darkness, the cow gnawing obediently without notion of infinity and stars—God, you know all about them. Those evenings I was sure I’d die, you were teaching me to live; I see that now. And the gravity of all you did not say but left me like a map for the intuiting. Slowly, I saw the world for what it was, or was it I who grew familiar, that long habit of me? These were the pains I was granted in this life: my face in cold weather, a thrumming near the temples ..read more

Sirius extends a beam to me. I like to imagine it’s my mother, reaching down for me, her eldest. I want to raise my arm and grasp her numinous hand, just to feel our connection again, even if only for an instant. Instead I cup my hands together like a cracked bowl to let starlight pool in my palms. But when I look, there are only shadows there. The post Weaving a Reverie with a Thread of Starlight first appeared on Braided Way Magazine ..read more

Going off to the seminary when I had just turned thirteen might have seemed stupid. But the decision felt like a response to a calling. I didn’t think God was stupid and my mother was all for it. At that point in my life I’d never call Him anything but Lord, as in “Lord, please help me pass this geometry test.” So there I was, in the freshman class, living in a big dormitory room with about fifteen other boys, donning a cassock every morning and heading off to Mass and prayers and breakfast. This was followed by a rigorous day of rigidly structured high-level classes. Including geometry. Theor ..read more

The post Dialogue first appeared on Braided Way Magazine ..read more

“It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see” ~Henry David Thoreau “Joe,” my mother used to say. “You can’t judge a book by its cover. People look on the outside, but God looks inside. There’s more to a book than its cover.” Mom was a churchgoing person. I wasn’t. One of our divides. I figured if there’s a God up there then why’s the world so messed up down here? When she’d launch into one of her homespun homilies, I’d just nod and say “Yes ma’am,” then fly out the back door with my dog Boeing to explore. Woods and fields. Just the two of us navigating the world. An only child, I ..read more

I mistook the lover for the love, the honey for its sweetness, the starlight for its shimmer. If there be grace, may I, at last, distinguish the Divinity within my perception of god. The post Time and Again first appeared on Braided Way Magazine ..read more

People usually think about the Bible as a book with a fixed number of texts within its pages: 24 books in the Jewish version of the Bible; 66 for Protestants; 73 for Catholics; 81 if you’re Ethiopian Orthodox. Writings that didn’t make it into the Bible, on the other hand, are often called “apocrypha,” a Greek term that refers to hidden or secret things. There are hundreds of apocryphal Jewish and Christian texts that, for one reason or another, were not included in different versions of the Bible. Some simply fell out of use. Some caused theological headaches for later Jews or Christians, and ..read more

Celtic roots shaped my spirit, but my German Palatine ancestors are coiled somewhere in my soul. I wonder if a rabbi grandfather or kohenet grandmother incised my heart with their love of words. I go searching for a name. Myrtle answers me from her place in the shadows of hidden lineage. Myrtle, someone tucked you into the marriage wreath without telling us your name. You were a colorful sprig of scented greenery hidden between roses and baby’s breath, content to be overlooked. You knew it would be safer for your daughters to deny their lineage. Every year you have bloomed without being recogn ..read more

for Josiah Who would want to miss the world? The barn swallow’s nest under the eve, the fiddleheads unfolding in the forest, the patter of spring rain the way the mourning dove speaks to us of our longings and how unfailingly sunlight reminds us that all light casts shadows. The complexities of our lives urge us away from knowing things as they are from realizing, perhaps, that what we are drawn to is God waiting to be noticed. The post Gold first appeared on Braided Way Magazine ..read more

I hear a splashing sound by the creek downhill. The splash is the work of a Coho salmon, pushing her way upstream. First, I pass her by. The splash could belong to any number of creatures. I know salmon lived in this creek, but years of waterways empty of salmon have deflated my hope of sighting this near-mythological creature. I’m on a plant walk, learning the names and medicinal purposes of the plants in a local watershed. We walk through arbors of hazelnut trees once planted by the indigenous people of this land. Wherever they lived, hazelnut trees followed. The land, long colonized, still ..read more