antidotes to madness | pull up a chair

for weeks now, i’ve been toiling on the latest iteration of the manuscript for a book in gestation*. and this week, i came to the writerly part known as the “end notes,” as in dotting every i, and crossing every t, to be certain all is as clean as clean could possibly be.

and, most of all, should anyone someday reading said book become curious about the source of this or that line, the author (that would be me in this case) must leave a perfectly followable trail of breadcrumbs through the woods, so that the curious someone can find exactly the spot where i, the author, once found those very words.

in other words, fastidiousness is not negotiable. it is a must. (and i might as well sleep with the chicago manual of style, 18th edition, under my pillow, for i consult it every other breath, at a minimum.)

per than manual’s strict instruction, and to be sure that every last page i cite is the exact page in the exact edition of each and every book in my notes, i have been skittering hither and yon to those temples of bookshelves known as public libraries.

i gather up books by the armload, and haul them off to a library table, where i dutifully record (in image and scribble) all pertinent info.

of all the books i’ve scooped up and returned to the shelves, there was one—and only one—that i chose to haul home once again. it called me to do what i’m not so adept at doing these days: to dilly and dally inside its pages. to read for the holy essence of it, not merely to cross off the last of the end notes (currently numbering 103).

the book i brought home was the gift: poems by hafiz the great sufi master, translated by daniel ladinsky. and it is exactly what it purports to be: a gift.

its poems, quite often, are short, not too taxing on the eyes or the brain. and yet, and yet, they do pack a wallop. concentratedly so.

in this era of emotional saturation, when every day seems to bring reams and volumes of terrible news, a droplet of wallop is just about all i can swallow.

but even before i got to the poems, it was the backstory of the sufi master that held me. (sufiism, in the west, is regarded as a form of islamic mysticism; its name is derived from the farsi word meaning “wisdom,” “purity,” or, curiously, “wool,” so drawn from the coarse woolen garments of wandering dervishes.)

hafiz, a persian poet of the 14th century, has been called “a poet for poets” by emerson, who wrote “he fears nothing. he sees too far; he sees throughout. . .” goethe enthused that hafiz “has inscribed undeniable truth indelibly,” and called him “mystically pure.”

such superlatives can get you in trouble, it seems. it’s estimated that 90 percent of his work was destroyed over the centuries by clerics and rulers who disapproved of what he wrote in his poems.

“hafiz was viewed as a great threat, a spiritual rebel, whose insights emancipate his readers from the clutches of those in power—those who exploit the innocent with insane religious propaganda. for hafiz reveals a God with a billion I.Q.—a God that would never cripple us with guilt or control us with fear.” so writes ladinsky in his preface.

it’s said that hafiz’s poetry can be read “as a record of a human being’s journey to perfect joy, perfect learning, and perfect love.”

that’s a journey for which i’ll buy a ticket.

here are a few stops (poems) you might find along the way:

the lessons from 14th-century persia: hold tight to each other, for that is love; allow the light to unfurl your beauty; every cell in all of us, in all creation, yearns for God—or however you name the Holy Being, the Author of Us All.

sustenance in small sips: more than plenty for this day.

what inspired you to hold on this week?

*the book in gestation, you might have read here earlier, though i’ve yet to officially unveil it, is for now titled When Evening Comes: An Urgent Call to Love (Brazos Books, Spring 2027), and it’s a book about being broken open (by whatever the cause) and discovering that in between the brokenness, amid the puzzle of shards, a light finds its way in. i’m currently on the third round of edits with the main editor, and soon will be moving to copy editing, and then production, when the boxes of books will land plop on my stoop. call me crazy (a redundant suggestion perhaps) but i tend to find the imperative fastidiousness of end notes an exercise as delightful, engrossing, and challenging as a 100-piece jigsaw puzzle. in this case, 103 pieces.

8 Comments

January 23, 2026

apologia to the world

“polioplus” (1991), bronze sculpture by glenna goodacre

dear world,

i fear we must be seeming pretty ugly these days, those of us of huddled here in this nation built on what we’d deemed monumental pillars that would not, could not, be crumbled.

but for all the world, and certainly from the wobbly chair where i sit, the granite, the marble, the impenetrable ore looks to be crumbling into fine, chalky bits.

i am—we are—so, so sorry.

mortified is more like it.

in the last 48 hours, i’ve heard the titular head of the land once home of the free labeled a.) “a national embarrassment,” b.) “unhinged,” c.) and the right-wing belgian prime minister put it this way: “it’s up to him to decide if he wants to be a monster, yes or no.”

of our american president’s words from the podium in ski spa switzerland, even the conservative bret stephens of the new york times wrote that it “sounded, in places, as if it had been ghostwritten by mario puzo [author of epic crime-family novel, the godfather]. wrapped in self-aggrandizing boasts and exaggerations, along with ugly jibes, meandering asides and shopworn grievances, lay a premeditated threat worthy of a padrino [mob boss]: ‘you can say ‘yes’ and we will be very appreciative,’ the president said, in reference to his demand for greenland. ‘or you can say ‘no’ and we will remember.’”

the so-called “board of peace,” convened by our very own national embarrassment, has been populated by “three ex-soviet apparatchiks, two military-backed regimes, and a leader [wanted for] war crimes,” according to the financial times. with an entry fee of one billion per pop. peace needn’t be so exclusive a club.

let me put this plainly (and plaintively): we are not, most of us, bullies. we are not always crude. we do not lie awake at night imaging the gilding of our toilet bowl, our hearth, the chairs upon which we perch.

the people i know here—plenty of them anyways—will race you to the ER on a second’s notice, ferry in casseroles of steaming hot chicken and dumplings, and should someone without a home need a warm shower, clean clothes, and a sandwich, well, my street number is 522.

my distaste for bullies is not new. i’ve had a lifelong aversion. could sniff out a skunk in disguise as far back as first grade.

in the house where i grew up we made shoebox hospitals for dinged baby birds, and cardboard villages (complete with a church and a steeple) for ladybugs who’d shimmied in through open windows. oh, and early on we were taught the tenth commandment: “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods.” so i went to confession to divulge to the priest my longing for my next-door-neighbor’s rainbow-colored toothpicks. yes, toothpicks. (a counting device in first grade, so mandated by the nuns.)

and believe you me, toothpicks pale in comparison to coveting the island nation of the arctic north, where threats have been made and the stomping of combat boots could be heard in the distance.

all i’m trying to say, dear world, is that we too are shuddering, and shaking our heads, and seeking any possible exit from this existential yet very real nightmare. and we are not, most of us, in any way, shape, or form seeing any bit of ourselves, our souls, reflected in this national madness.

we’re clanging the five-alarm fire bells. some days, weeping into our palms.

we yearn to return to the U.S. of Compassion, the flotillas and flanks that race to the rescue whenever, wherever, there’s rupture—earthly or otherwise.

there’s a statue i pass on the way to church (or trader joe’s) of a kindhearted doctor, (you can sense the kindness even in passing by; i’d imagined it to be dr. jonas salk, developer of the polio vaccine, though turns out it’s just your basic good doctor) with wee ones clambering onto his lap, as he plunges a dose of vaccine into the mouth of one of the babes, part of a worldwide effort to eradicate the godawful scourge. it makes me weep when i pass it now. as it’s the antithesis of our national policy and our re-ordered global health agenda, and i cannot believe that in my lifetime i am watching this obsolescence.

i fear you’ll shove us from your sidewalks, should we dare to set foot in your lands. i fear you’ll see hate when you look at my weathering face.

and i’ll understand. though it will crush me.

all i want you to know is that we are, mostly and deeply, a rather good people. and if there’s anything you ever need, please knock at my door. i promise gentle, warm welcome. and chicken and dumplings to go.

speaking of scandinavian environs, it just so happens that i found a breathtakingly beautiful poem from a reclusive norwegian poet, emil boyson, as i was reading one of my favorite new thinkers recently. my poet friend kathleen hirsch pointed me to norwegian bishop erik varden a while back, and ever since, his wisdom illuminates my days. this poem was found in varden’s 2023 book, Chastity).

i love that it speaks to that delicate beauty inside all of us, a beauty that we ourselves often shy away from, demur. but in truth we yearn to be seen, and maybe most important to see for ourselves our tender, unbreakable beauties. it sounds to me as if some celestial wisdom, maybe God, is speaking in whisper to a precious child who is blind to her own beauties.

here tis:

To the Body
by Emil Boyson

Life is made bearable because, in this world, you exist.
You are the hidden songbird.
You are the new moon’s beauty.
You are the white cloud of yearning.
You are the tornado that pulls us out of ourselves and lets our sweet pain know that all will be changed like a garment and that one day when fate’s measure is full the face of this world must pass.

Who would have thought that YOU, who hold in your hand ultimate secrets known otherwise to God alone,
should be a shy young girl whom thousands pass in the street,
about whom nought is known except that you like crosswords,
do housework for your mother, speak sense about the weather,
and knit little vests for the child your sister expects in March.

Are you never fearful, in the quiet of the night, of your being’s enigma?
Is it your unfurrowed brow that obliges us to brood?
What do you know of questions and answers?
You smile as you pass on your way to reality’s frontier, strangely united with your fate;
while our hearts quiver you are again transformed,
finding, lost in a freedom you have never sought to fathom,
the rigorous paradigm of grace made one with your body,
then collapsing as if dead at the end of your last dance.

what brought any droplet of anti-madness to your world this week?

27 Comments

January 16, 2026

undocumented deficiency: medical thesaurian urgently needed

in which we duck out from the horrors of this tinderbox world—for just a moment’s pause—to unfurrow our overworked brows, breathe out the voluminous tensions, and inject a brief interlude of jocularity into the day. in other words, to laugh a bit when we might otherwise weep, because even in—especially in—these times that try the soul, we must exercise the human capacity for humor. science now tells us (with tape recordings to prove it) that even baboons giggle and guffaw. though we might still be the only species who knows just how to tell a joke.

and sometimes life just makes you laugh…

thus, and herewith, i benevolently offer my linguistic services to those in the medical world whose lexicon is so severely lacking and ill-equipped in the adjectival realm. i beg consideration for my application to a most necessary, and clearly overlooked post: that of human medical thesaurus, aka thesaurian.

for your adjectives, dear doctor world, are limpid, frail, and just plain rude.

it’s come to my attention (abruptly so) that those who peer into our every sinew and synapse might well be adept at pinpointing our deficiencies and odd bits, but the lack of gentility in affixing descriptors to those diagnoses is so sub-par that we’re left gasping, listing toward the cold hard floor.

case in point: just yesterday morning, when word arrived that my latest bone scan report (after a year of monthly pokes in both arms, in hopes of building up my chalky bones into something more substantial), had been filed by the radiologist, and was ready for viewing, i opened said report and nearly toppled.

there, in black and white, the impolite and overwrought label they’d pinned to my condition: not only was i osteoporotic in the extreme, they went one descriptor further, dipping deep into their shallow pool and dubbed my affliction, senile osteoporosis.

senile? really? how ‘bout just plain forgetful (as if a bone, the ossification of calcium and protein, contained capacity for confusion)? i looked it up just now, and see that the term is applied to “a long-standing imbalance.” (it gets worse the deeper i dig….)

now, i might be daffy, and i might lose track of why i’ve walked to the pantry, or climbed down the basement stairs, but i’ve otherwise no hard evidence that i’ve been pushed into the realm of the senile. i can recite my name, birthdate, and at least four times out of seven i’m likely to know which day of the week it is. i’m older than i was (aren’t we all, all of us who can read these words), but am i now old enough to be objectively labeled senile in any way, shape, or bone form?

apparently so.

my bones, no longer merely osteoporotic; they’re now flimsy with a side of senility.

and, mind you, this is not my first go-round with doctors’ adjectival idiocy.

a quarter-century ago, when i found myself miraculously (though not immaculately) “with child” at 44, after eight years of futility, infertility, and heartbreak, the good obstetrician looked hard at the ghostly image from inside my womb, and confirmed my condition. but, no, she didn’t just proclaim me pregnant, plain and simple. oh no. she couldn’t leave well enough alone—this ebullient news that me and my last little egg had defied ALL odds and were forging ahead gestationally.

no, she and the medical world in all its lexicographic obsolescence tethered yet another adjective to my case. i was, forthwith and from that day on, the proud custodian of my very own “geriatric pregnancy.”

perhaps realizing the arthritic creak in those words, my beloved OB-gyne coined yet another way to phrase it, and every time she burst into the wee exam room, my belly bulging by the month, she greeted me as if borrowing from a swashbuckler’s or a swindler’s saltiest address: “you old mother!!” the words she swung my way.

in the journalism biz, the one in which i traded for some three roller-coaster decades, there’s a faulty maxim that if you can find two points and a draw a line between, you’ve got what’s called “a trend.” so let’s say we’ve got one here, one worthy of consideration and at least a dash of commentary.

the common tie between the two aforementioned adjectival assaults seems to be age, as in old age. as in a prejudicial slant not favoring those of us who’ve accumulated years.

as opposed to theologians and philosophers who seem at least cognizant of the wisdoms so acquired, the medical among us seem hellbent on shoving us into the aged cage. my futzy bones aren’t just futzy, they’re senile futzy. my pregnancy at 44 wasn’t purely gift from on high, its medical moniker inspired images of bent and wrinkled me shuffling into delivery, unable to hoist myself upon the bed, let alone shimmy into birthing hardware (aka those unforgiving cold metal stirrups).

i’d like to remind those in the naming department of medicine’s world headquarters that sometimes the assaults on our little old selves are plenty enough, without them playing pin-the-nasty-name-on-the-doddering-old-soul.

a bit of dignity is all we ask. slight consideration for how it might read to those of us who don’t fling such hard-edged modifiers willy-nilly and with abandon. discovering that all those shots did not one thing to make me stronger, nor lessen at all the chance that should i slip i’ll shatter, that alone was plenty sobering.

did you really need to top it off with a good fat dollop of senility?

next thing i know you’ll tell me i’m a geriatric mother. oh, wait, you told me that. . . twenty-five short years ago.

have you ever been pinned with a medical moniker that might do well with a spin through the softening machine? or, more broadly, did anything find you giggling this week, or simply, plainly amused?

14 Comments

January 9, 2026

keening.

the winds have been howling all night, a rushing, a roaring of air on amphetamines. sometimes the sound rises in pitch, almost a keening, the sound of a soul in mourning.

keening, a word that draws me half around the world to the banshees of that faraway island from which my people came (a good half of my people, actually, but it seems the half i’m rooted in). it’s a word that places me in a dark and damp room where a fire roars, and the people are circled in sorrow, cloaked in black woolen wraps. swaying and rocking, the sound that rises up is the sound that lives at the pit of us, the sound that rises when our heart or our soul is shattered. cracked wide open. it’s the ooze of anguish that comes without volition. keening sometimes comes without knowing. it just is. it’s primal. a reservoir so deep inside us it takes velocities of sorrow to tap into it, to draw from its well.

i might have keened once or twice, but i barely remember. both times someone had died, and it felt like part of me did as well. i remember the sound, remember i barely knew where it rose from, or that i’d had it inside.

the God who imagined us imagined so far beyond the imaginable. the God who imagined us gave us a sound, buried it deep, deep inside, where it awaits necessity. there are in our lives times when only that keening will do. that high pitched guttural whoosh that captures the unspeakable, a whoosh that rises and falls, traces the scale from basso, the animal roar, to mezzo soprano, up high where it’s piercing.

and why would the wind be keening?

look around.

listen.

don’t let us dull to the litany.

waking up to find we live in a pariah nation is one. but that’s almost too big for my head. i tend to operate in the finer grain. and the closest i came to keening this week was the news that the poet had been shot through the head.

what poet, you might ask?

the one in minnesota. the one whose first description i read was “37-year-old, mother of a six-year-old, award-winning poet.”

who shoots a poet? how often does the descriptor of a violent death include the word poet?

poets are porous. poets live in the world permeable to the little-noticed. poets process what’s breathtaking and put it, miraculously, to words. poets, the ones i love, the ones whose words put form and frame to unutterable parts of me, they’re among the most gentle-souled humans i’ve known.

renée good was a poet. a mother. and she died at 37, in the front seat of her maroon van we’ve all now watched over and over.

renée good, back when she went by the name renée nicole macklin, won the 2020 academy of american poets prize. that’s not a prize for a piker. that’s a real-deal prize, a trophy worth tucking on the highest shelf in your house. she won it for a poem curiously titled “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs.” now, that might not be the first thing that stirs me to want to write a poem. but poets begin in curious places sometimes and take us into terrain where wisdom or epiphany comes.

when we become a nation where a poet is shot through the windshield, just minutes after dropping her six-year-old off at school, we need to ask who in the world we’ve become. it only becomes more twisted when we can see for ourselves how the scene unfolded, and the people in charge, the ones holding the guns, the ones not letting a doctor rush to the scene, tell us that we didn’t see what we saw.

i wonder how apt this headline would be: good is dead.

that would be the headline atop the poet’s obituary. rachel good, award-winning poet and mother of three, was shot through the head. by federal agents. who then refused to let a doctor rush to the front seat of her bloodied, bloodied minivan. and waited too many fading heartbeats before giving the okay to call 9-1-1.

no wonder the wind is keening.

no wonder the world is tapping into its most guttural cries.

not long before i’d found myself tripping over the violent death of rachel good, i’d been thinking deeply about poets. thinking about a breed of poets i’d likened to “a tribe of saintesses.” that’s a feminization of saint, an intentional genderizing, if you will, because the poets i’m most drawn to might technically, and in an old-time world, be coined poetesses, and because the ones to which i am most deeply drawn are ones who weave the sacred, even the liturgical, into the vernacular from which they write. because the saintesses to whom i am most drawn are the ones whose verse scans the divine, shimmers at the edge of the ineffable, catches me unaware, but grounds me in a certainty more certain than many a gospel, i turn to them for edification and plain old uplift of my weary soul.

i keep them in close reach.

sitting just beside me here at this old maple table are two such poet saints, the ones whose lines leave me gasping, my spine tingling as if something holy has just wafted by and through me. because it has.

here’s one. her name is kathleen hirsch, and this is from her mending prayer rugs (finishing line press, 2025). it’s the last stanza of her poem “prayer rugs” (emphasis mine):

I bend in blessing toward all that breathes
May each hour enlarge the pattern—
rose dawn, wind song, tender shoots of faith—
that I may see the weft of the hidden weaver.

or, also sitting right by my elbow, jan richardson’s how the stars get in your bones: a book of blessings (wanton gospeller press, 2025), i flip through pages and pluck just one, titled “the midwife’s prayer.” it begins:

Keep screaming, little baby girl.
Keep practicing using those lungs
and do not stop,
because hollering will help
to ease the shock
every time you go through
another birth.

the saintesses, i swear, speak from a godly vernacular. they see deeper than the rest of us, dwell deeper too. their gift is the gift taken away at Babel. while all the rest of us were stripped of the powers of universal understanding, the saintesses kept on. they speak words that speak to all of us—if we listen closely. if we trace our fingers across the lines they offer, sacramental lines, lines that lift off the page, lift us off the page and into the transcendent, where for just a moment we get to reside.

i don’t know the rest of rachel good’s poems. but i know she was a poet. and the silence where once she spun the words of the unspoken, the little-heard voice, that silence now is cacophonous.

and even the winds are keening.

you can read the whole of rachel good’s prize-winning fetal-pig poem here.

and here are the first few lines…

On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs
by Renée Nicole Macklin

i want back my rocking chairs,

solipsist sunsets,
& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.

i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores
(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—
the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):

keening in minnesota on the block where rachel good was killed

what shall we do to quell the need for keening? and what poets draw you into the depths of the Holy?

16 Comments

December 12, 2025

oh, the places we’ve come . . .

winter, i’ve always sensed, is the curling-in time, the season of unseen stirring, and in an octave of dawns, dusks, and nightfalls, winter will be upon us.

but even now, it’s a season for quieting, for simmering thoughts as well as saucepots of cinnamon stick, star anise, and clove. my simmering for the last nineteen years picks up the pace as the page turns on another year of pulling up chairs to this imaginary old maple table, one where the indentations of long-ago math homework are pressed into the grain, where so many coffees and juices have been poured and sipped and spilled and sopped up with sponges. over the course of these nearly two decades, it seems i’ve developed a knack for simmering while tapping away at the rows of alphabet keys—some 1,255 simmers and counting, all under the name “pull up a chair,” now tapped, posted, and filed away.

only a handful of the very first chairs—bless them, those stalwart humans—still pull up a chair, at least every once in a while. but along the way, so many chairs have been added, and multiplied. and our polestar has never shifted: to carve out a sacred space where questions are asked, and stories are told, where hearts are bared, and above all where gentle, gentle kindness is the metronome by which we set all our rhythms. once in a while, over all the bumps and bruises encountered along the way, we’ve been known to bow our heads and pour out our hearts in holy, holy please God, pray for us.

on the twelfth of december, 2006, our firstborn had just been bar mitzvahed, and our then so-called “little one” was but a kindergartener, not yet reading or writing but melting my heart by the minute and filling our notebooks with his stories and antics and an encyclopedia of unforgettable “teddyisms.” (some kept alive to this day; for the sheer pure joy of it). the firstborn, now law professor, insisted at the dawn of the self-published blogging age that i, his little old mother, could figure out how to “blog,” a verb that’s always sounded to me like a crude guttural effusion, a burp perhaps. and back in the day, he gave me his hand-me-down laptop to do it. to prove i could blog, that is. (as has so often been the case, he even then was wiser than me…)

back then, the question that had captured my attention was the simplest of notions: i believed, after a few years of keenly observing, tagging along with, and writing long newspaper stories of families in the thick of life transitions as a reporter for the chicago tribune, that life’s biggest questions aren’t reserved for colloquia and global summits, nor do they wait for podiums and percussive applause. they are the stuff of the everyday. and if we watch closely, pay keen attention, we can lift those universal, deeply-human questions and struggles from the quotidian stream, hold them to the light for closer consideration, and reap their wisdoms and epiphanies in real time. now, before the moments pass us by and we come to the saddest realization of all: that it’s too late, and our chance at most wakeful living has slipped into the distance.

all these years later, life certainly has galloped along here at the table. this ol’ chair has seen the growings up of two boys, buried parents beloved, moved another from her home of sixty years. taken a tour of cambridge, mass., and a second helping of college. trekked across the pond, set our sights on war zones, and been rolled into surgical suites and recovery rooms. we’ve feared for our country, for humanity, for civility, and plain old decency. and we’ve refused to surrender to the crude and cruel ways wielded by those who seize power. we’ve kept our minds opened, and tried—oh, we’ve tried—to emphasize the imperative of objective, double-sourced truth, and the slaying of hearsay and heresy. we’ve laid out worries here, and plenty of joys; we’ve marveled and wondered and been gobsmacked aplenty. i’ve pondered cancer and the physics of time, and the holy shimmering presence i know as God.

lately i seem to have taken to gathering up wisdoms far greater than mine will ever be. i am, as a beloved friend of the chair once put it, something of a magpie. a magpie mostly attuned to seeking the sacred amid the plainstuff of living. the idea of the commonplace book is one i heartily embrace: bring on the poets and sages and prophets, and let me invite you into their brilliant notebooks and minds and unfurl for you their passages and poetics that take away our collective breath and find a way of percolating for hours to come.

this ol’ chair has given me a place to keep on tapping away at the keys. i realized long ago that i untangle the knots of my life by stringing out sentences. and trying on thoughts. thank you for indulging me, those of you who choose to read along. thank you for pondering the questions at the end of each post, in the quiet of your own soul, or by leaving a note at the table.

you are, collectively and individually, humans who restore and buck up my faith in the inherent majesty and wonder of the shimmering undying spirit that populates this earth with more than a modicum of heaven’s best offerings.

bless you, bless you, a thousand times thousand, bless you.

this week i am bringing a little birthday bouquet of beauties that struck me across the week, all of them tied together by the beautiful idea that the birthing of holiness is a sacramental act of which we must partake. it’s one that entails unlocking our hearts, making room in the manger within, and allowing the Holy and Sacred to form within, and to birth it with our words and our love in the act. it’s quite the trinity here: a benedictine monk who practices and teaches meditation in the french countryside at a monastery known as bonnevaux; st. john of the cross, the great mystic, as translated by the poet daniel ladinsky; and the late, great luci shaw, a beloved british-american poet and essayist who died at 96 on december first.

first up, the idea of birthing God within us from the benedictine monk, laurence freeman, whom i’ve been learning from for years…

In the 14th century, Meister Eckhart enjoyed waking people up in his sermons by expounding some uncomfortably new perspectives about their standardised faith. He must have stirred a few dozy parishioners when he asked: “What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly, but does not take place within myself? And, that it should take place within myself, is really what matters.”

Actually, the great Augustine had asked the same question a thousand years before and added that if we are the children of God, we must become God’s mother as well. If, he said, this birth of the eternal word as Christ in the soul is to happen, our heart – the deepest centre of our being – must become the sacred manger. If we are filled with egocentric distraction there is ‘no room at the inn’ and so the heart must become that empty and open space where the birth takes place and through which he is welcomed into our world.

In today’s gospel, John the Baptist is usually and badly translated as saying ‘repent, for the reign of God is close at hand’. Basileia, the Greek word we think of as ‘kingdom’, is feminine and so could equally well translate it as ‘queendom’. It doesn’t mean a juridical area but the space in which the presence and grace of God is acknowledged and welcomed. The gospel word, badly translated as ‘repent’, is ‘metanoia’: a change of mind and heart. It is not about feeling sorry for past mistakes. It means spinning round 180 degrees and entirely changing your perspective on and approach to reality.

Living in the desert, wearing a garment of camel hair and eating locusts and wild honey, John seems to us a bit extremist. People who reduce waste and get back to essentials are often called crazy. But because of his spiritual sanity he drew the crowds who asked him ‘what shall we do?’ because, like us, they lived in confused, divided and dangerous times. He told them simply to live honestly and justly but that this lifestyle would prepare them for the imminent – and immanent – coming of the great transformer of all things.

Meditation is the great simplifier. It reduces the way we waste both time and life’s opportunities. In daily life it is the catalyst for ongoing metanoia. The medicine that loosens the grip of illusion. Usually, we start enthusiastically but before we get to the full 180 degrees we slow down and say, ‘this is quite good, let’s stop here’. Fortunately, if the birth process has already started, it will not allow us to arrest or deny it. We have to see it through until it breaks through into our world and we are happy and lucky if we do.

—Laurence Freeman

and from the sixteenth-century mystic St. John of the Cross there comes this interpretation/translation of what daniel ladinsky calls one of his “love poems”…

IF YOU WANT

If
you want
the Virgin will come walking down the road
pregnant with the holy,
and say,
“I need shelter for the night, please take me inside your heart,
my time is so close.”

Then, under the roof of your soul, you will witness the sublime
intimacy, the divine, the Christ
taking birth
forever,

as she grasps your hand for help, for each of us
is the midwife of God, each of us.

Yet there, under the dome of your being does creation
come into existence eternally, through your womb, dear pilgrim–
the sacred womb in your soul,

as God grasps our arms for help; for each of us is
His beloved servant
never far.

If you want, the Virgin will come walking
down the street pregnant
with Light and sing …

—St. John of the Cross, “If You Want” in Daniel Ladinsky, Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West (New York: Penguin Group, 2002), 306-307.

and, in closing, here’s a classic from blessed, blessed luci, whose great contribution to the canon of Christian poetry would be her capacity for drawing big truths about God and human experience from viscerally pulsing fine-grained images and objects. she is the perfect voice to close out this nineteenth year of the chair….

Kenosis
By Luci Shaw

In sleep his infant mouth works in and out.
He is so new, his silk skin has not yet
been roughed by plane and wooden beam
nor, so far, has he had to deal with human doubt.
He is in a dream of nipple found,
of blue-white milk, of curving skin
and, pulsing in his ear, the inner throb
of a warm heart’s repeated sound.
His only memories float from fluid space.
So new he has not pounded nails, hung a door,
broken bread, felt rebuff, bent to the lash,
wept for the sad heart of the human race.

amen.

may this blessed week bring softening to the walls of your heart, and a widening within those chambers so that Holiness, however you name it, might be birthed there….love, b.

25 Comments

November 21, 2025

the not-so-simple tasks of being alive

life, sometimes, makes like it’s an arcade of carnival challenges, and to make it to the other side is, in fact, something of a triumph we barely take time to note.

we shouldn’t, though, take it for granted. we are mightier than we think. and there will come times when we truly need to believe how mighty we can be. we’re not here on this earth to dawdle around.

as this week draws to a close, i can testify that these things happened: a new used car was found, bought, driven home, and will soon be ferried to another state; a kid wrestled through the decision of which of three job offers he’d choose, and started the one; husband down for the count with a cough that sounds like it’s hollowing his lungs; cavity filled in the way back of my mouth; latest peek at my lungs behind me (now awaiting results, a fraught interval that always leads to some trembles); and the latest round of edits on Book No. 6 at last sent off to editor (i had to wait till her calendar cleared).

not included in the list, but very much there, are the facts that i spent the week dodging the heck out of whatever virus was mucking up the works, for fear my scan or my cavity filling would get bumped; also, never mind the “check tire pressure” light that went on halfway home from the car lot, and the hurdles to get that untangled. in addition, i arose each dawn, never crashed my own car, swam a few miles, cooked a few mediocre dinners and one or two fair ones, and grocery shopped what seems like ninety-five times.

such is the business of living. each week throws at us a spaghetti bowl of hurdles, some humdrum, some of dimension that leads us to gulping.

it’s the quotidian stuff that comprises our day to day. and to make it through and to the other side is a feat that draws on cords and gears we barely acknowledge. to miss the chance to take note, to not ponder just how resilient we are, just how swiftly we can untangle ourselves from houdini’s chains is to short shrift our capacities.

we live our lives amid stories of what seem insurmountable feats: folks rolling into surgeries that untangle their insides, or shave off a lump on their spine; house fires that leave lives in ashes and soggy remains; kids finding out their cancer is double-D badd. (and those are stories plucked only from the last 48 hours, each one devastating and true.)

the news of the bad guys around us might distract and infuriate and leave us in tears. but the hard work of being human is never far from home. it’s the pit in our belly we awake with, and the headache that drums us to sleep. it’s what we might face before breakfast, and what comes with an unsuspecting wallop midway through the day. it comes in the phone call we never expected, and the one that makes us fall to our knees.

i’m not trying out for a part as the voice of doom here. i’m simply saying what we too often forget: no matter the circumstances, nor the twists in the story, we are all made of strong stuff—stronger than we remember to note.

to get to the other side of the traumas and troubles that hurtle our way is worthy of note, if not ovation. it might do us well to take count of the muscle it takes, and the grit, and the intense imagination, to merely get to the other side.

and here we are, on the far side of all those things that a week ago seemed insoluble.

that alone might stand as proof that even the frailest among us are tough as tough can be. and we can take on just about anything. we are breathed into life with every capacity our lives will demand. and we are living proof of how much we can survive.

you needn’t share this with anyone other than yourself, but perhaps you might find strength in looking back across the arc of your life and seeing what a marvel you are, and all the impossible hills you have climbed. what marvels you the most?

as antidote to all that, i bring you a bit of wonder in the form of the latest book that crossed my transom. it’s titled bellyache: poems for sensitive souls (harper one, 2026), and they had me at the subtitle. it’s by brianna pastor, a poet described in her bio as “a queer writer, empath, advocate, and author of the poetry collection good grief.” the book isn’t due out till february, but i got a review copy, and i’ll share a few marvels here. pastor’s poetry is rooted in childhood trauma and what it means to heal, with sensitivity and love as the non-negotiable parts of the deal. she writes, according to the author note, “about the raw, the uncomfortable, the overlooked, and makes clear that at the root of all things, is love.” it’s not every day that you open a book and find yourself in the midst of a poet whose heart feels so immensely attuned to the pain and the preciousness of tender, tender feeling.

here’s one of my favorites….

and here are two others (the spare simplicity is everything in these love-drenched poems):

and this:

13 Comments

November 14, 2025

the ol’ ticker still ticks. and then some.

a rare peek inside this ol’ house, where three of us nestled by the fire, catching a moment that no one saw coming…

because of the way my heart leapt midafternoon yesterday as i bumbled into the house, hands all muddy from tossing out the ferns that had frozen in the snow snap, i can claim with absolute certainty that i’m nowhere near dead yet.

what might i mean by such a rash—you might say “obvious”—pronouncement?

well, quite simply, my oft-tired ol’ ticker fired off a triple flip the likes of which simone biles would be proud soon as i glanced down at my phone, that indispensable appendage i always forget to keep indispensably by my side, and noticed a smattering of words that seemed to be spelling out something about “the trip to Chicago” followed by “keep the drive daylight” followed by “i will just hit the road,“ all walloped with “on the off chance that you guys aren’t busy tonight.”

and thus i discovered the manchild who’s been heavy on my heart all week, as i worried about the car that was stuck in the tow lot, and the miracle that he’d not been slammed into metal or glass when his car fishtailed on a slick, dark country road, i discovered there’d be three not two at our dinner table last night. and how perfect that i’d just made a triple-size batch of one of my autumnal mostly vegetable stews.

never mind that he’s 32, and a law professor these days. never mind that i’ve been at this mama gig for rather a while now (well, 32 years plus the duration of mammalian gestation), it’ll never get old. it’s pretty much an indelible truth that until my last breath on this planet the number one zone in my heart will forever be the can’t-get-enough-of-my-boys zone.

and so, in less time than it takes to spell indefatigably up to the task, i had fresh flannel sheets on the bed, a basket of farmer’s market apples on the bedside table along with a mason jar of my fresh-made granola, and if i’d had time to string up holiday lights in the room where he grew up, i’d have done that too. along with a chorus of night-crooning angels.

why the back-flipping joy?

well, living as i am in a personal epoch of carpe diem, in which nearly every dawn i flutter open my eyes and unfurl a big fat gratitude prayer for making it to the sheer marvel of watching sunlight stream in, while simultaneously existing in this moment in history when good news is as infrequent as a meadow of daisies in november, the sheer joy of surprise, especially in the category guess-who’s-coming-to-dinner, is of the highest order.

and sometimes it’s just plain rejuvenating to remember your heart still knows the steps to the happy dance, and can leap into it on a moment’s notice.

my zeal for making each moment count is not a dynamic that’s waning. it only gets more and more intense as the chapters of living press in from all sides.

i seem to have been catapulted full time into that real-life equivalent of frank lloyd wright’s architectural jujitsu compress-and-release, in which the master architect squeezed in the walls of an anteroom so that once you stepped into the chamber beyond you felt the whoosh of expansiveness as the walls and the ceiling let soar. so too with life and its tough spots. in time, they finally relent and release. and you breathe deeper than you remember breathing in days.

our lives are undulations of breath, on both a grand and an intimate scale. the pattern set soon as the umbilical cord is cut—the lungs, the diaphragm, the ribs rise and fall, empty and fill accordingly. and so it is with our lives on a larger scale, as life seems to toss us into the vise, only to at last let us out. let us breathe.

i am breathing today. i am breathing as my house fills with people i love to celebrate the birthday of a woman we love, the matriarch of us all. my mama, who’s shown us grace, resilience, and who these days unendingly charms. we’re not marking the date of her birth, she tells us, but we are marking our love. and we are doing it the best we know: we are gathering in joy, and in love, from corners hither and yon.

and in this old house, when the three of us sat down to stew, we got an extra dollop of breath out of the deal. it was—and is—delicious.

a bit of social action here at the chair, for anyone who might be so inclined. here in chicago, and even here in the leafy burbs we’ve been shattered by the roving bands of federal agents decked out in the camo gear, faces covered in masks, as they’ve rough-armed and thrown to the ground dozens and dozens and dozens of those whose skin might be brown. contrary to federal messaging, these are good folk earning meager livings the hard way: cutting grass, raking leaves, tending to kids in strollers or buggies, pounding shingles to roofs. and for the sin of trying to live unnoticed lives in a country meant to be safe harbor from thugs and militias, they’ve been plucked from the streets, or their cars, or their classrooms, and sent to a hellhole, leaving behind families to fend for themselves. a little band of us here where i live have armed ourselves with whistles and courage, to stand up to the thugs. and to help in any meager way we can. one among our little band offered this possibility to help stock the grocery shelves at a free market in chicago’s mostly hispanic little village neighborhood, where the fear is rampant and the streets have been swept of their usual buzz. it felt mighty good to send off a grocery cart of simple sustenance. and, indeed, i felt the breath fill my lungs.

here’s what my neighbor wrote….

For those that are looking for an option to offer concrete support to Little Village families impacted by ICE…one of my [neighbor’s] dearest friends (Keri Krupp) is a school social worker at Little Village’s Zapata Academy, which serves 500 kids from pre-k to 8th grade and is in need of support for their free “store” Mercado Zapatista. The Mercado is completely reliant on donations and has become a source of support for many of Zapata’s families — while typically focused on winter apparel and toiletries, it is now also distributing food to families that have been hit by both the loss of income due to ICE and the disruption to SNAP benefits. Her stories are heartbreaking. You can quickly donate through by selecting items from this Amazon wishlist or by sending an Amazon gift card to her work email (kbkrupp@cps.edu).

https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/291BEA7WRUHZ9?ref_=wl_share

At a time when it can be hard to know where to best focus donations, [my neighbor] can personally vouch for Keri’s commitment to the Little Village community and prudent stewardship of Mercado Zapatista, which she began in 2024. Any donations, big or small, will make an immediate difference to Little Village children and their families!

and thank you for considering.

bless you all. what filled your lungs this week?

10 Comments

November 7, 2025

remedy against despair

sometimes, it’s just not so complicated.

how to survive in the modernday melee, i mean.

how not to get sucked into the cesspool, or the tarpit of utter despair.

there are flocks of us, bumbling around, looking down at our weathered, timeworn selves, our selves that are wrinkled or missing some parts, wondering what in tarnation little old me can do about this. all of this chaos, all of this cruelty, all of this jaw-dropping gilding and seizing of power, all of this thuggery, what in the heck can i do?

it’s pretty much the question that runs on auto-pilot through the spheres of my brain.

what oh what oh what?

i turn to the poets, i turn to the pacifists. this week i found myself in the pages of history. more and more i am drawn to the plain old truths of our not-yet-extinguished civilization.

as a species we’ve been cruel from the start, that’s a streak that runs in us. we’ve had so much darkness it makes me want to run for the hills. no wonder the desert elders of the third and fourth centuries did just that, ducked out in far-flung caves and barely ever came out. they just prayed and prayed, imagined God as their next-door neighbor and turned their humble selves into living, breathing prayer altars.

but, just as emphatically, there’ve always been those who turned the other cheek, who refused to partake in whatever the scourge of the age. who did not give up on the vision of radiance, of equal justice for all. there have always been those who heeded the words of the jew from bethlehem: blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, those who hunger for righteousness, blessed are the peacemakers. jesus didn’t even make it to ten. he cut off the list at eight. later on, he threw in “love as you would be loved,” which is actually a teaching he would have learned in the temple, leviticus 19:18, “love your neighbor as yourself.” (i hate to break it to christians, but we’ve no corner on that commandment, it’s as old as time, and core of nearly all world religions.)

it’s the revolutionaries, the radicals, the refuseniks who would not succumb, they’re the ones who might hold the clues: how to be a force against daily injustice when all you’ve got is your will and your hope and your deadset compass pointed at kindness, at mercy, at justice for all.

their point, the refuseniks, ever has been thus: we cannot decide that we’re not equipped. we cannot throw in the towel. the heroes of history usually don’t come with superman capes. it’s people like us, with a limp or a lisp, figuratively or literally, who might look in the mirror and decide, “i’m all i’ve got, so i’d best get to work.”

which brings us back to the cruelty and chaos du jour.

this week, beating back the latest bout of teeming futility and powerlessness, against the backdrop of scenes i’d not imagined emerging from the american landscape—federalized gangs knocking heads against pavement, crushing ribcages under the weight of full-body clutch holds, beaning clergy in the head with pepper balls, and most recently dragging a preschool teacher from her classroom in front of her gaggle of toddlers—i found myself once again on the prowl for what in the world little old me might do to push back against any of this, to counter the cloak of rampant despair.

and i found it—curiously, plainspokenly—in the introduction to a book of letters from prison, specifically the gdansk prison during poland’s communist takeover by the totalitarian regime that clamped down cruelly on every facet of daily life in the last decades of the 20th century.

adam michnik, an irrepressible political activist, is the writer of the letters, a lifelong dissident first arrested at 18 for partaking in the writing and dissemination of “an open letter to the party,” critical of the communist regime. he would become one of the leaders of the solidarity movement that in 1989 ended communist rule in poland, and went on to become editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, credited with elevating the newspaper to become “a sort of conscience of the New Poland.” he rightfully lays claim to a life spent provoking debate on democracy and human rights.

during that lifetime, punctuated by intervals of activism followed by imprisonment, again and again, michnik often found himself in jail cells where he forged his activism with pen and paper, his letters and essays smuggled out of prison, and widely distributed on the far side of the prison walls.

what i find especially notable about his essays, as i rail against blatant mis- and dis-information in our clickbait age, is that his essays were then and still now are considered models of balance and fairness. what drove him was a singular concern for “deepening his own and others’ understanding, and therefore he [could] not afford the luxury of distortion for partisan reasons.” (emphasis mine). oh, that we should emulate his restraint, seize his clear-eyed purpose.

while ours certainly isn’t a national moment that rises to the level of “organized evil” of poland’s totalitarian regime, it seems fair to say we’re witnessing “authoritarian adjacent” dictates and dramas, particularly in the demonization of the helpless, and the thuggery thrust viciously upon them.

and so, turning to even darker moments in history, we find our cues.

in the introduction of michnik’s letters from prison and other essays, the new yorker’s longtime foreign policy analyst, jonathan schell, captured michnik’s revolutionary counter-revolutionary approach.

he leads into it by first laying out the norm in mapping revolution, and illustrating how the poles turned it on its head, ultimately triumphantly: “the classic formula for revolution is first to seize power and then to use that power to do the good things you believe in. in the polish revolution, the order was reversed. it began to do the good things immediately, and only then turned its attention to the state. in a sort of political and moral version of the hedonist’s credo, ‘carpe diem,’ the opposition proceeded directly, and without postponement toward its goals. its simple but radical guiding principle . . .”

what comes next seems to me the wisest, most doable action we might take:

“Start doing the things you think should be done, and . . . start being what you think society should become. Do you believe in freedom of speech? Then speak freely. Do you love the truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in an open society? Then act in the open. Do you believe in a decent and humane society? Then behave decently and humanely.”

do not succumb to the ways of the demonizers, the clickbaiters, the shills for distortion, deceit, and demagoguery.

put simply: love as you would be loved.

or, in the words of james baldwin: “the place in which i’ll fit will not exist until i make it.”

so, go make it.

how would you describe the world in which you pray to live?

9 Comments

October 31, 2025

when war games are played on your streets

ICE agents on the campus where my mama now lives

there is nothing make-believe about it. the leafy lanes and brick streets of the little village where i live have been invaded this week. not by distant armies, but by thugs of our country’s own making. men—yes, always men—dressed in combat suits, their faces covered in balaclavas, wearing boots made for stomping and crushing, roaming the streets in vans with darkened windows. traveling in patrols of two vans or three, they cruise slowly, surveilling, and when they come to a stop, when they burst out of the vans, i’m told you can smell the testosterone in the air. they are armed for conflict. they are on the hunt and ready to snatch.

they’ve cruised down our alleys, parked near our grade schools, stopped across from the library, and set chase across the manicured lawns where my mama and some 300 of her fellow nonagenarian, octogenarian, septuagenarian compatriots live out their days in what’s meant to be peaceful harmony. how many they’ve “caught” is unknown (these are not folk who disclose, whose m.o. is secrecy and surprise), but tallying anecdotal reports, the number is somewhere between five and seven, and, mind you, that’s merely the count from these quiet little streets where violent crime is nearly unheard of, and the only gangs you might see are the preteens and their too-many motorized scooters clogging the lanes.

whom might you ask is the target of all this slo-mo patrolling?

it’s the gentle brown-skinned folk who change our children’s diapers, who warm their lunches, and tuck them in for naps, who rock them in their arms, singing lullabies in spanish, and who rinse off the scrapes and the cuts on their knees, and smother them with kisses. or they’re the gentle-souled men who cut back our hydrangeas at the end of the summer, or trim our lawns to manicured perfection. or the ones tacking shingles to roofs, to keep the rains out. they might be the women who shlep into homes lugging vacuums and pails spilling with bottles of cleaning supplies. the women who scrub the toilets, and change the sheets, and fold the laundry in crisp four-corner stacks, so meticulously they rival the stacks in the boutiques at the mall.

thug is not a word i use loosely, and for a peace-making girl it hurts to write it. but i cannot think of another word to put to souls who sign up for a job of cops-and-robbers gone rogue. when i was little i watched my brothers move little green plastic soldiers around the basement floor. they made guttural sounds and knocked over the men with their green plastic rifles and hand grenades. i’d wander away with one of my dolls clutched under my arms. when it wasn’t “war” on the basement floor, they took to the yards and the street where we lived. they’d hide in bushes, leap out, and “capture.” the same guttural sounds, only this time with humans as soldiers. the boys on the stingray bicycles versus the boys on the run.

we are a nation obsessed with our war games. from what i read, basements and rec rooms these days are filled with big loud screens and folks with their headsets and clickers, controllers and keyboards, killing and maiming with automatic rat-a-tat-tats and bombs exploding in cauliflower clouds. i imagine the guttural sounds now come from the screens, in digitized amplitudes. obliteration, i’m told, is the aim.

and we are now a nation that’s bringing its war games to our own backyards. especially if you happen to live in a city deemed blue, with a president who’s never been keen on the city that didn’t embrace his big shiny skyscraper with his name in football-field-sized letters slapped on the side.

i know full well that this is albino-pale compared to gaza or kyiv, but a “federalized military presence” complete with long guns and tear gas is not why we pledge allegiance to the flag. it’s a war of terror. parents afraid to take children with fevers to the ER, children watching their parents handcuffed and hauled away at school drop-off or pick-up. taquerias that now lock their doors. street vendors who’ve locked up their pushcarts and turned off the lights in their kitchens. a people on lockdown is inhumane, unconscionable, and unsustainable.

all because their skin is brown? these are not the criminals, rapists, drug dealers, human traffickers once upon a time purported to be the sole target of this racist campaign. there’s no reading of rights, no miranda anywhere in the vicinity. if you’re brown, and you’re out on the streets, you’re a target. and being a target often means being thrown to the ground, hands tied behind your back. doesn’t matter if toddlers are watching in horror, screaming for their mama, or their nanny. doesn’t matter if you have a u.s. passport back home in the top drawer of your bureau.

but that’s not even the worst of it. the worst is that the folks they snatch are then “disappeared,” a word that means precisely what it says. where you land is a wild-eyed guess, and the people who love you will need to pony up cash to track where you are, and to get you the heck out of the hellscape of a jail, where toilets are few and lights buzz 24/7. too bad if you need pills for your heart, or inhalers so you can breathe.

but here’s a faint glimmer of light: the ones of us whose skin happens not to be brown, we are not having it. and we are leaping out of our complacencies, and in the company of others finding something akin to solidarity, to resilience, to compassion that compounds through the magnification of the many.

chicago, hog butcher to the world, is a fighting-back town. you don’t send your thugs to our streets and expect that we’re going to hide behind the couches. we are whistling our lungs out at the first sighting of a slow-rolling, dark-windowed van. towns that aren’t usually in the news pushing back against men in camo suits, towns with names like naperville, mt. prospect, wilmette, they’re in the resistance.

1939 berlin isn’t too distant for too many of us. i sat next to a woman at an organizing meeting the other day whose hands were quaking as she said she can’t stop thinking of her grandfather and wondering at what point he realized he needed to send his wife and children out of the country, to that faraway place named america, where the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free were welcomed, were harbored, were the name of the game.

where did that america go?

that question has been haunting me for months now. but what’s happening here on the streets of chicago is giving me hope. we are many, and we are not about to surrender to thugs. we are bursting out of our cloistered existences, and doing what we can to be our brothers’ keeper.

when crews are harbored in your garage for hours, hiding, awaiting the nightfall retreat of the thugs, when you are ferrying out water and oranges, when you’re dashing down the alley to tell the construction crew that ICE is nearby and you see the sheer paralyzing terror on the face of one of the workers, you do not forget. you see the humanity that is all of us. you feel the horror, sense the gentle kindness, get sick at the thought of these men who got out of bed expecting nothing but another day’s hard work now wondering if they’ll ever get home.

you cannot for the life of you figure out why no one in charge can stop this. but then you look over your shoulder and see that there are those around us who are not waiting for help from beyond. the people who live down your very own block, and just across the way, they are showing their muscle, their hearts, their humanity. and for the first time in a long time, you think maybe there’s hope. maybe, just maybe, the good guys can win.

and that’s a war game i’ll play. though i play by pacifist rules.

here, my beautiful friends, is something i truly hope you will read. it’s a little bit long, but i don’t think you will find it in your scrolling around the internet, and it is just what we need in this moment.

it’s a view from the front row of the horrors russia is visiting on ukraine, and the profile in courage that is ukrainians and their unwillingness to surrender to evil. this comes from the Peace Prize acceptance speech of german author Karl Schlögel, and is “a powerful summons to relinquish naivety and wishful thinking, to think hard and to act bravely.” the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade is a major literary award “for authors who have contributed to peace through their writing.” recent recipients include historian Anne Applebaum (2024) for her work on autocracy, author Salman Rushdie (2023) for his defense of free expression, and historian Karl Schlögel (2025) for his work on Eastern Europe and warnings about Russian expansionism. these are Schlögel’s words, and i found them soul-stirring to the highest order. if ukrainians can push back against evil, so too can those of us here on our leafy little streets, and our concrete corridors….

Learning from Ukraine. Lessons of Resistance.

No one is more interested in peace than the Ukrainians. They know that an aggressor with limitless determination cannot be stopped with words. They are realists who can afford no illusions. Their refusal to be victims drives them to fight back. They are prepared for anything. They fight for their children, for their families, for their state – they are prepared even to die for their country. What amounts to television footage for others is firsthand experience for them. Ukraine’s defence at the front would be nothing without the army of volunteers behind it. They have survived the winters and braved the nightly terror of drones and missiles for weeks, even months on end. The IT experts of yesterday are the drone pilots of today. The festive dress women don for the theatre or a concert betrays an attitude that holds firm even in a state of emergency – the club is where young people draw strength to continue the resistance. They are heroes in a post-heroic world, without making a fuss about it. They keep their transport system running, and with it their country remains whole. The howl of sirens is background noise for their everyday lives, not just a fire drill. They have learnt how drone strikes differ from ballistic missile attacks. They are helping us prepare for the time after this historical turning point. They are teaching us that national defence has nothing to do with militarism. Soldiers, and above all women soldiers, are respected because everyone knows that they are performing their duty and doing that for which they are prepared. The citizens of Ukraine are teaching us that what is happening is not the ›Ukraine conflict‹, but war. They are helping us understand whom we are dealing with: a regime that hates Europe and that seeks to destroy Ukraine as an independent state. They are showing us that accommodating the aggressor only increases its appetite for more, and that appeasement does not lead to peace – it paves the way to war. Because they are on the front line, they know more than we in our still-safe confines of the hinterland. Because they are at the mercy of a superior enemy, they must be faster and more intelligent than their foe. Ukrainians, who are generally suspected of nationalism, are showing us that patriotism has not become obsolete in the 21st century. They are ahead of us in terms of military technology, as they were forced to fight at a time when we could still allow ourselves to ponder questions of eternal peace. They took it on themselves to develop weapons that were withheld from them out of hesitation or fear. They are the mirror into which we peer, reminding us what Europe once stood for and why it is still worth defending. They are calling out to us: do not be afraid – not because they are not afraid, but because they have overcome their fear. Ukraine’s writers do their utmost to express what those farther away lack the words for. They have taken the Ukrainian language out into the world and performed a literary miracle. Their poets speak with deadly seriousness, while some have even paid for it with their lives. Their president is a man who expects the truth from his compatriots, no matter how bitter he knows it may be. They are well versed in the behavioural tenets of resistance and are teaching the Europeans what to expect if they continue to fail to prepare for the worst-case scenario. They have learnt from experience that when threat levels are high, decisions are made overnight, while in quieter times they are put off until the day after tomorrow, if even then. Stoic aplomb is a luxury they can only afford once the war is over. To endure, to persevere, despite unspeakable exhaustion – this is the revolution of dignity in permanence. They are the ones to whom we owe our peace, while they pay a price both incalculable and unfathomable.
—Karl Schlögel

how will you stand up for justice, give voice to the voiceless, be home to the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free?

*thank you to the dear friend who sent the photo above. best close-up i’ve seen.

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October 24, 2025

brokenness abounds.

the siege of rebar and rubble seems endless. there are shards on our streets, and in our hearts.

the images stun me every time. images find their way in where words sometimes take roundabouts. of all the thousands and thousands of words that have passed before my eyes this summer past, that have sometimes settled into the nooks and crannies of my brain where i can’t shake them out, the images are otherwise: immediate, gut punch. they demand no absorbing. they are all but instant. as fast at it takes for the pupil, retina, and occipital lobe to zap into action. 13 milliseconds; a measure i can’t even measure. another name for instant.

no wonder we feel assaulted. the assault is everywhere.

this week i felt gutted. i am almost ashamed to hold up images of war against images of destruction that i cannot shake. the destruction that gutted me most this week was wrought by the sin of hubris, of addiction to power and greed. what’s rebuilt will not be a hospital for the deathly ill, the dying, the shattered. it will be for the clinking of crystal, and the lifting of forks that are gilded.

in a world of brokenness, we go dizzy sometimes thinking that all there is is evil. we don’t know how to stop it. which is why i spend my hours poring over the pages of sages and everyday saints, not the ones beatified and sanctified, the ones ushered into the hallowed halls of a hierarchy that’s laid out miles and miles of rules and red tape. the saints i search for are the ones whose names you would never ever know, the ones who populate the checkout lines at the grocery, who drive the buses and never fail to wait for the kid loping to the bus late and frantic, or the lady with the pail of cleaning supplies and the limp that won’t let her hurry.

henri nouwen was a dutch-born priest, psychologist, and theologian who left the vaunted podiums of yale and harvard divinity schools to devote his life to those who might be seen as broken, broken of mind by worldly measure but not of spirit. he became pastor of l’arche daybreak, an interfaith, non-denominational, shared community where both the intellectually challenged and the not intellectually challenged live as one. it consists of eight homes, an old barn, and 13 acres in the rolling hills of ontario, about an hour north of toronto. its core belief is that beneath every brokenness there is light. radiant light.

henri nouwen is no longer; he died of a heart attack at 64 in 1996. but his books, some 39 translated into 35 languages, live on. his radiance, his wisdom, is without end.

nearly every morning, i read henri. he glides into my inbox deep in the night, awaits my morning. he sets me straight for the day. this week, one morning, he reminded this:

Everyone is a different refraction of the same love of God, the same light of the world, coming to us. We need a contemplative discipline for seeing this light. We can’t see God in the world, only God can see God in the world. That is why contemplative life is so essential for the active ministry. If I have discovered God as the center of my being, then the God in me recognizes God in the world…. The spiritual life requires a constant and vigilant deepening and enlivening of the presence of God in our hearts.

if we can look into the brokenness, beyond the brokenness, if our guiding principle is a belief that the Sacred is inextinguishable, cannot be broken, then we might, just maybe, find fortitude in setting our sights on seeing the God in our midst.

i know the nature of God is twisted and sometimes torn, depending on our stories, our pasts, those who taught us or not. i know that some refuse to utter God’s name, and some to deny God’s presence. but i use the name, the knowing, as that for which there are no words. the inexpressible, the depths that defy expression. i know God as the tender force that draws even strangers together. i know God as the hay bale into which i fall when i am afraid. i know God when i look into the eyes of pain without end, and a glimmer is caught, and love is made real, and by only the grace of God we pull each other out of the darkness, the impossible darkness. i know God as the depth and the light of me.

so when henri nouwen reminds me that if i keep God in my center, if i sense the palpable presence as often as i turn my attention that way, then i am equipped for what so often feels impossible: i can search for and find the sparks of the Divine in most any tableau i encounter. in the joyous laughter of the jamaican nurses who love my mama, who make her giggle like a schoolgirl. in the friend down the lane who is crushed and crushed again and again by the cruelties of someone she birthed, someone she will love fiercely forever—no matter the cost. in my absolute favorite grocery store checker, the one with the pink or purple hair, the multiple piercings, and more ink on her skin than it took to write Webster’s first dictionary, the one who holds my hand tight as the tears pour down her cheeks as she tells me the tale of her beloved who’s died, as she tells me how hard it is to still be alive.

these days i’ve shifted my orientation, my seeing. i’ve slipped out of the worldly paradigm, a paradigm that crushes me daily. i’ve moved into the realm of the sacred, the holy. the only way forward, as the rubble and rebar compounds, is to do as nouwen teaches: seek the sacred, be it the faintest of sparks or a bonfire. seize it, hold onto it as long as you can. even amid the rubble there will be the faintest stirring from under the dust, under the twisted steel rods. when the broad view, the overview, dares to pummel us, for all we can see is the evil, the hubris, the cruelest of cruelties, maybe the wisdom is in shifting our sights to whatever is holy and unfurls right before us: the faintest of kindness, of improbable light, of love that refuses to whimper or die.

the world beyond our reach is going to break us every time, but the world we can touch, the world we can sense with all our own God-given senses, that just might be what saves us. and the way we too can take part in the saving.

may it be so.

what broke you this week? and more urgently: what stirred you to see the Sacred?

the images above are of gaza, kyiv, washington, d.c. can you tell which is which?