Tag Archives: reconciliation

The spring of life

I was mulling over what I would say to you today when I met Steven Spielberg for lunch and we started talking about his latest movie, The Fablemans. The film unlocks the meaning of most of Spielberg’s earlier movies – E.T. and Close Encounters, Jaws and Jurassic Park, the Indiana Jones films, Schindler’s List, Saving […]

The choice

It has been called “the most misread poem in America” (David Orr, The Atlantic, 19 May 2018). The poem is Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” and Frost seems to have shared that opinion. He warned his readers, “You have to be careful of that one; it’s a tricky poem – very tricky.” The way […]

Praying with bloody knuckles

If you feel tired and worn out, discouraged, and disengaged from what’s going on around you, if your energy and your hope for the future are fading and your insecurity is rising, you may take comfort in knowing you’re not alone. Judy Levitz, founding director of the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Study Center in New York City, […]

The key to abundant life

“Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice” (Luke 17:15). If you’re confused by the gospel of Jesus, you might have good reason to be. Jesus said he came that we might have more and better life than we ever dreamed of having (John […]

Finding the missing piece

There used to be a feature in the Sunday Buffalo News called The Magic Eye. At first glance, it appeared to be the kind of image you’d see on your computer screen when the mother board was failing, a mass of colorful, squiggly, incoherent lines. But if you changed your perspective and focused your eyes […]

Listening to the Spirit

The best place to start if you’re serious about living a Christian life is in a relationship with a spiritual guide or companion, someone who can listen deeply to you and help you explore your relationship with God. And the first and best spiritual guide we have is the Holy Spirit. Briefly, there are two […]

A gospel of cooked turnip greens

Among all the favorite foods my mother served up when I was a child, there were some that made me gag: liver and onions, for example, or cooked turnip greens. When Mother served something I thought for sure was going to poison me, there was one simple and firm rule. I didn’t have to eat […]

The gospel on a level place

A long time ago I learned you don’t mess around with someone’s favorite passages of scripture. The connection people feel with their favorite passages is deep, even holy. There’s a reason, sometimes many reasons, why those passages are dearly held. Upsetting those connections can be more than disturbing: it can be deeply harmful, so proceed […]

Our work of reconciliation

Most of the parents of children in our Child Care Center are tired of the restrictions and quarantines of the pandemic, some of them desperately so. Most of us are, too. We grieve what we’ve lost and yearn just as desperately for a return to normal. We want to gather for worship the way we […]