antidotes to madness | pull up a chair

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

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 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?

8 Comments

April 25, 2025

Dear God, thank you.

Dear God,

Um, I hate to be so bold but we could have used him a little bit longer. (You undoubtedly already know that.) Things are pretty rough around here. Whole swaths of this holy earth, and the people who populate it, seem to have lost their minds. And maybe their souls.

As You most certainly know, and definitely must have heard, his was the rare voice that could drown out the ungodly noise. The cacophonies of greed and grievance, the ugliness of sin and the Self that thinks it’s higher and mightier. He didn’t let up when it came to the terrible, terrible traumas of war—newborns bombed in hospital nurseries; toddlers drowning in turbulent seas, washing to shore, as if cast-aside flotsam; whole families entombed in the rubble of raining-down concrete and rebar in murderous twists.

He called it where he saw it: called out the avarice of modern capitalism and consumerism, diagnosed it as the fundamental root of the exploitation and suffering of the poor and the vulnerable. Named it “the Devil’s dung.”

He minced not a word in a letter to American bishops this February, when in the wake of the current administration’s drastic deportation campaign, he wrote that while nations have the right to defend themselves, “the rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.”

He didn’t stop there: “The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.”

Il Papa, il mio papa!

Oh, dear God, thank you immensely for making his lifetime line up, at least for a while, with mine. I was starting to fall off the edge there, till the first puff of fumata bianca arose from the Vatican chimney back on March 13, 2013, and the bells from St. Peter’s rang through the city.

Dear Francis filled my lungs again. He preached the version of You that I’d long pressed to my heart, the One taught to me by my post-Vatican II Sisters of Loretto, they who puffed cigarettes behind the convent, traded in their flowy black habits for street clothes and lipstick, all while strumming guitars and singing kumbaya, and all while watching films like “The Red Balloon,” where we little Catholics were meant to evoke the godly meaning from the metaphor.

He was, far as I could tell, a walking-talking, put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is, “love as you would be loved” kind of a guy. He colored wildly outside the lines, as if to shake us out of our stupors, our thinking the ways of the world were the only ways there were. As if to remind that love, honestly, could shatter the worst kind of walls, break through to the tender core at the heart of us all—the one You nestled inside all of us when You breathed us into being.

His time as the 266th charge of the Church was something of a Kodak carousel of indelible encounters, the ones you cannot forget because they sear you so soundly. (p.s. He was mighty fine with the pen, as well; at least one modern poet called him “the most literary pope of the modern Vatican.”)

He took on no airs. Which made his message all the more of a wallop. He seemed to be saying that we too, in our fumbling, bumbling, banged-up bodies, we too could reach for the heavens.

His message, quite simply, was to remind that we’re all equipped and ready to cut a swath of radical love through this world.

And what I really loved about the beloved Argentian Jesuit were the moments when he reached out his arms, and cradled the sobbing child, especially the little boy whose atheist papa had died, and the boy was so very worried about what would happen to his papa. When the little guy was all but choking on his sobs and the words to his question, “Is my dad in heaven?” Francis called out to the little boy, “Come, come to me, Emanuele. Come and whisper it in my ear.” And everyone sobbed, while Francis quelled the boy’s fears and spoke to the crowd: “What a beautiful witness of a son who inherited the strength of his father, who had the courage to cry in front of all of us,” Francis said. “If that man was able to make his children like that, then it’s true, he was a good man.”

Or the little ones born with an extra chromosome who sometimes wandered curiously right onto the altar in the middle of Mass, or a homily, and instead of shooshing the child away, he stood there beatifically smiling, clutching their soft little hand. And went right on with his papal business.

Pope Francis embraces Vinicio Riva, the man with neurofibromatosis.

Or that indelible image of Your Francis first kissing then cradling the man with the eruptions of leathery tumors curdled across his face, his scalp, and clear down his neck.

And what struck me most, dear God, when I awoke Monday morning to the news that he’d died in the night, was the sudden stunning realization of how breathtakingly he had died—a lesson for us all, and surely for me. I believe he knew these were his last days on earth, when he insisted on leaving the hospital, and knew that until he breathed his last he would teach his last most lasting lessons. In the last week of his life, he visited with 70 prisoners in Rome’s Regina Coeli Prison, from a balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square he blessed the crowds, and in his Easter Sunday sermon he begged for mercy for “the vulnerable, the marginalized, and the migrants.” He also sent an emissary to preach compassion to the nation’s second-highest ranking executive officeholder and fairly recent convert to Catholicism.

And then, and only then, he breathed his last.

I barely have words for the emptiness left in Francis’s wake. It’s rare these days to find a soul who’s proven her or himself worthy of speaking such penetrating truth that the whole world turns an ear to listen.

We listened, and some of us shouted silent hallelujahs every time.

We are a world with a spinning moral compass. Up seems down, and right and wrong are inside out and sideways. Hate is cloaked, too often, as a return to the old ways. Truth is chopped into bits and spit back out in bilious flows.

Are we meant to be the collective voice to fill the new and jarring silence? Is that the point? He constructed the paradigm, handed us the blueprints, and now it’s us who must step to the line, to be brave now?

Maybe it’s a blessing that much of the world is weeping. Maybe, if we follow our tears, we’ll dig down and rise up. Maybe, like Francis, we can look out at the battle field that is the world and make of ourselves the field hospital set to begin to stanch the bleeding, and work to heal some of the wounds.

Anyway, God, we’re on it. And thank you, thank you, thank you.

Love, BAM

what memories or moments of Francis most lastingly speak to you?

photo above is from the little video i managed to capture when i managed to all but stumble into the path of the oncoming PopeMobile this past summer in St. Peter’s Square….

and p.s.s. a letter to God, i figured, called for capitals. thus, i made rare use of the shift key this morning….

22 Comments

April 4, 2025

no exit

there seems so little worth my saying these days. the stock markets plunge. the pink slips abound. research labs, the ones that might save lives, are all but padlocked. it’s been argued that measles might be cured with megadose of good ol’ vitamin A, and why not wipe out bird flu by letting it run rampant? (i could not find either fix in my old nursing texts, circa 1976.)

the urge for me to go mum and wait it out has never felt stronger. i use my political voice in other realms, but feel reticent to bring it here, which has brought me a wee bit of backlash from one or two who think i ought to use this platform as a public square for political discourse.

i’ve always considered this a space away from the melee, a place where we play by otherworldly rules of kindness, gentleness, mercy. (over my dead body, those will never be abandoned—here or elsewhere.) the mission here, from the very start, has been to train our focus on the timeless truths that course through the quotidian. politics, as worldly as it gets, is messy. by definition, a battle of wills and ways. there’s little room for sacred, and sacred is my aim.

maybe 1,217 posts in 220 months is far exceeding my welcome. maybe the age of trump is my flashing exit sign. but maybe that’s false surrender.

maybe i’m just too chicken to face the backlash sure to come even if i try to frame my arguments in civil discourse. the flummox here is that the ones i love who see things another way, they are not hearing the same news i am. that’s the breakdown. or a breakdown. the definition of trusted news source seems to have brittled over the years. when i say trusted, i mean objectively combing through the facts, listening to a swath of voices, each expert in her field. (being a talk show host, or a peddler of ivermectin does not make you an expert, in any way, shape, or forum.) and, forgive my peculiarities, but i like my facts delivered without sass, or ridicule, or put-down. vengeance makes me rhymes-with-comet.

“trusted” in the age of trump seems to mean “you see things the way i do, so i will choose to listen to you.” and, by the way, “i’ll trust you’ve done our homework.” all else is evil. is out to get us. is symptom of demented mind.

we cannot converse if our words and thoughts and big ideas whiz by on orbits all their own. and without a grain of truth to stand on, we’re not standing and we have no standing. if i’m in my silo, and you’re in yours, and ne’er the twain shall meet, then we might as well build a wall and cut the continent in half. you take mountains, we’ll take prairie. no one gets the five great lakes.

even my propensity for gathering bits of poetry and prose is feeling rather flimsy. is it hyperbole to say we’re on the verge of the collapse of democracy? what to call the dismantling of a century of intricate, mold-breaking science and biotechnology? what happened to the beatitudes—blessed are the meek, the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful? whither the golden rule: love as you shall be loved? be it in africa, or gaza, or ukraine; in blue cities, red swaths, or canada or mexico or greenland?

though i’m tempted to hold back on poetries this week, to leave this simply as a placeholder, i shall forge quietly ahead with one or two worth tucking in your noggin.

Once upon a time,
When women were birds,
There was the simple understanding
That to sing at dawn
And to sing at dusk
Was to heal the world through joy.
The birds still remember what we have forgotten,
That the world is meant to be celebrated.

–When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams

from my friends at SALT Project, a bit of anne lamott (whose birthday is april 10) laid out in verse form. this is from an interview in 2011 with NPR’s michele norris, a once-upon-a-time chicago tribune writer, who asked annie how the meaning of easter had changed for her over the years:

When I was 38,
my best friend, Pammy,
died, and we went shopping
about two weeks before she died,
and she was in a wig
and a wheelchair.

I was buying a dress
for this boyfriend I was trying to impress,
and I bought a tighter,
shorter dress than I was used to.
And I said to her,
“Do you think this makes my hips look big?”
and she said to me, so calmly,
“Anne, you don’t have that kind of time.”

And I think Easter has been about
the resonance of that simple statement;
and that when I stop,
when I go into contemplation and meditation,
when I breathe again and do the sacred action
of plopping and hanging my head
and being done with my own agenda,

I hear that, ‘You don’t have that kind of time,’
you have time only to cultivate presence
and authenticity and service,
praying against all odds
to get your sense of humor back.

That’s how it has changed for me.
That was the day my life changed,
when she said that to me.
+ Anne Lamott

and here’s a little nudge from former u.s. secretary of labor robert reich on speaking up in these tough times:

Every one of us has a town square. It may include our social media accounts, our local book club, or our dinner table. Use your town square to speak out in favor of democracy and against what [that which you see as anathema to decency]. Do not shy away from difficult conversations; seek them out. Engage the curious. Educate those who seek information. We all have a role to play, so don’t assume your voice is too faint or your platform too small.

point taken, mr. reich. point taken. i’ll talk decency anywhere and everywhere.

and finally, as i’ve spent these past few weeks tapping out a manuscript for what might be a book, i found these closing lines from WS Merwin’s poem remembering his mentor, John Berryman, to be well worth taking to heart:

I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write

do you remember the most beautiful thing you read this week, or saw this week, the thing that gave your heart a lift????

23 Comments

September 23, 2022

grounding

birdhouse awaiting its post, in my new walled garden

pants for which my mother might disown me.

I wasn’t long off the plane, the suitcase barely unpacked, the clothes not halfway down the chute, and I was leaping into my oldest, most tattered, hand-me-down shorts (I seem to have a whole wardrobe of tattered ill-fitting hand-me-down shorts, these are the ones with the hem that dangles in front and disappears somewhere behind) and the t-shirt so ancient it’s bearing the name of a slick Andy Warhol launched in the very late ’60s. I call these my gardening clothes. The muddier they get, the more merrily I and they hum.

I had grounding to do. Grounding for me is quite literal. It’s a psychological balm and it comes with a trowel. I literally slice into the earth to draw out what amounts to a steadying potion, the closest I know to nerve-soothing elixir.

September had gotten away from me. I’d intended a few weeks of quiet. So go such intentions. The holy communion of saints must be guffawing up in the clouds.

So out I trotted into my back twenty; what once seemed endless expanse is now (thanks to the neighbors’ newly-erected 6.5-foot solid-cedar wall) most generously described as a wee jewel box of growing potential. My plot has shrunk, so it seems, but the newly defined outlines merely raise the ante. It’s a petit point of a garden I’m after. A tapestry of tiniest botanical stitches.

I was soon on my knees. Fitting in ferns with their feathery fronds. Tucking in anemones with upstanding names, names that made them feel like royalty (Honorine Jobert — I imagine an empress) and names that sound like poetry in motion (Whirlwind — imagine them asway in September’s gentle breezes).

Balms come in a thousand disguises. There are balms to swallow, and balms to chew. Balms that cover you in sweat, and balms that make you smell of chlorine. Took me a long, long time to find a balm that didn’t hurt me (plain old eating vexed me for decades). At last, though, I found healing balm in the sacred ground that surrounds this old shingled house. I found it watching the shadows play catch-me-if-you-can. And I found it watching the red bird alight on my window sill. I found it pretending I live in a cloister, and this is my garth. My prayer bench draped in clouds; my kneeler in clumps of compost.

Maybe it was the long time coming that makes it more sacred. Maybe it’s remembering how emptiness once felt. And how distant that hollow is now. Maybe it’s facing the truth that there will still be days when the emptiness rises, when I feel my nerves starting to jangle, and tears are on the verge. Those are the days when I need to remember that something akin to a heavenly flow is just beyond the kitchen door. And I can tap into it with merely a trowel.

It’s quietly waiting there in the garden, my potpourri of barely detectable perfumes (lavender and heirloom hyacinth) and ones that knock your socks off (Korean spice viburnum); and leaves in shapes that might have been scissored in some far-off French lace factory. And then there are all the wild things who know they need no invitation. They’re the animators, the ones that chirp and chatter and squawk and belt out their twilight arias. Wide-bellied bees gather gold dust right before my eyes; butterflies flit and flutter and all but land on my shoulder. Even hummingbirds roll through town, on their way to tropical jungles where they’ll blend in with all the other primal screams of ruby and gold and shimmering emerald. It’s a menagerie out there, and I play the role of devoted observer, the one who quietly putters, poking plants here, there, and anywhere I can squeeze one more in.

It’s all merely excuse for getting as close to the thrum of the earth as I can. It’s there where the worms wriggle, and the trees find their succulence, where the anemone roots and the chipmunks play chase, that I hear the undeniable, deeply permeable notes of heaven’s indelible undying song.

I am grounding myself for the winter ahead. Grounding myself from the September and the summer behind….

welcome to autumn, the season of turning within….

for reasons that escape me, i seem to have decided that i will employ the shift key on my keyboard from time to time, and occasionally tap out a sentence complete with capital letters. sometimes makes for easier reading, i’d imagine. so i am — on occasion — giving it a Whirl.

where or how do you find grounding? was it hard for you to find?

17 Comments

September 3, 2021

it’s the little joys that sometimes carry us…

in which, after a seven-week summer’s sabbatical, our little scribe shuffles back to the table, ferrying a tall stack of books, and the hope of something to say….

well, good morning. i promised it wouldn’t be long, and it wasn’t. really. oh, i’ll admit to all but sitting on my typing hands the first few fridays, an itch to write that nearly needed ointment to make it go away. but i held on, and soon enough, savored the quiet. found plenty to fill the days. in the weeks i’ve been away, tucked behind the virtual monastery walls, i’ve been witness to the scattering of ashes of a woman we loved, i’ve flown across the country, had both my boys under this old roof for one 36-hour slice of heavenliness, cheered on the now dubbed TriathlonMan (aka former architecture critic) not once but twice as he gleefully crossed the finish line (well, he was gleeful the first time, and in last sunday’s 97-degree heat “gleeful” would be the last adjective i’d reach for), and said too many tearful goodbyes at airports and college dorms.

so here we are. not unlike the back-to-school rhythms of clean underwear and sharpened pencils, ready to dive back in. what a blessing that the holiest of holy days are upon us, just as the light takes on its amber molasses glow. and the blood in my veins percolates with its usual seasonal vivacity (i am autumn’s child, to be sure).

one of the truths of the summer — and of this moment — is that i often feel crushed by the news of the world around me. these last few weeks and days offer no reprieve. many a night i’ve lay awake imagining how it is to be sardined in a hangar in qatar with no water, no food, and sunlight beating down, all of it underscored with unchartable fear. and the cries of hungry babies all around. and now we’ve got a lone star state filled with deputized vigilantes racing around to turn in their already broken neighbors. let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

and so i was particularly struck when i stumbled on an essay this week from maria popova, she of brain pickings wonderment, an essay in which she writes of hermann hesse’s belief in little joys. i seem to gather proponents of littleness — dorothy day and her little courages, and now hesse and his little joys. anyway, i ran to the library — the candy counter equivalent for those who binge on poetries and paragraphs — and checked me out some hesse (german-swiss poet, painter, novelist; author of siddhartha*), specifically his collection, translated into english in 1974, titled my belief: essays on life and art.

hesse writes, in his 1905 essay “on little joys”:

Great masses of people these days live out their lives in a dull and loveless stupor. Sensitive persons find our inartistic manner of existence oppressive and painful, and they withdraw from sight… I believe what we lack is joy. The ardor that a heightened awareness imparts to life, the conception of life as a happy thing, as a festival… But the high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy…
Our ways of enjoying ourselves are hardly less irritating and nerve-racking than the pressure of our work. “As much as possible, as fast as possible” is the motto. And so there is more and more entertainment and less and less joy… This morbid pursuit of enjoyment [is] spurred on by constant dissatisfaction and yet perpetually satiated.
I would simply like to reclaim an old and, alas, quite unfashionable private formula: … Do not overlook the little joys!
These little joys … are so inconspicuous and scattered so liberally throughout our daily lives that the dull minds of countless workers hardly notice them. They are not outstanding, they are not advertised, they cost no money!
Hermann Hesse, “On Little Joys” from My Belief: Essays on Life and Art

he echoes annie dillard, another of my pantheon of “little” saints, she who preaches like no other on the sacred art of paying attention, she who indelibly wrote:

The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But — and this is the point — who gets excited by a mere penny?
[…]
It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

keep your eyes — nay, your whole soul — open is her point. and hesse follows suit. leaving little to chance, hesse points to the particulars, and prescribes thusly:

Just try it once — a tree, or at least a considerable section of sky, is to be seen anywhere. It does not even have to be blue sky; in some way or another the light of the sun always makes itself felt. Accustom yourself every morning to look for a moment at the sky and suddenly you will be aware of the air around you, the scent of morning freshness that is bestowed on you between sleep and labor. You will find every day that the gable of every house has its own particular look, its own special lighting. Pay it some heed if you will have for the rest of the day a remnant of satisfaction and a touch of coexistence with nature. Gradually and without effort the eye trains itself to transmit many small delights, to contemplate nature and the city streets, to appreciate the inexhaustible fun of daily life. From there on to the fully trained artistic eye is the smaller half of the journey; the principal thing is the beginning, the opening of the eyes.

yet another wise person i read this week, yuriko saito, a professor of philosophy at the rhode island school of design, calls the little joys “everyday aesthetics,” and defines them as “tiny, perfect things.” it’s the art of the ordinary, and the ordinary is where we live, those of us whose days are mapped by carpools and grocery trips and scrubbing out the bathroom sinks.

the world — even in its brokenness — is filled with tiny, perfect things. the imperative is that we keep close watch. God gave us input pipes — eyes, ears, nose, skin, tastebud. we are meant to notice. invited to, anyway. we dwell in holy kaleidoscope. it twists and turns and sways and dapples minute by minute, season upon season.

and so my days take on a hopscotch paradigm: i skip and hop from little joy to little joy, and hold on tight to those wisps of poesy that fall across my path. i mosey the alley, where wild things bloom and sway, and wander through my garden, clippers in hand, snipping stems for tiny bouquets i tuck all around the house, especially on the windowsills, a perch made for paying outward glance. i tiptoe down the brick walk to my summer porch, and keep watch from behind the screens where the birds take no notice, and carry on their birdlike ways as if i’ve morphed into just another leaf or willow frond and become unseen, no longer alien, no longer brake to their flutterings and chatter. i curl in my reading nook, keeping watch on the world passing by, on the pages i turn.

i keep a silence. a holy silence. the sort from which my prayers take flight endlessly, eternally. i pray for this world which too many days seems to be crumbling. i pray for lives i will never know. but i imagine. and my empathies carry me to faraway deserts, to tarmacs and hotlines where the desperation rises by the hour.

i’m surely not saying that the little joys will mend the brokenness. that takes a whole nother level of dedication and muscle moving. all i’m saying is that if we can fix our gaze on even the occasional tiny, perfect thing, we might stave off the paralysis that comes with the avalanche of awful news. we might gather up shards of beautiful, shards of little joy, and find the oomph to not stay stuck, the oomph to make the blessed most of these fine breaths left in us as we march through the bracketed hours of our days.

for this i pray.

what might be the little joys, the tiny perfect things that carry you through the day, even when the darkness comes?

*starting a new cumulative reading list, and first up, siddhartha, hesse’s 1920 novel which delves deep into hinduism, a religion about which i know not enough….it’s described as the “absolutely amazing and engrossing tale of one man’s journey to find that all-elusive idea of enlightenment.” enlightenment, here i come.….

14 Comments

January 8, 2021

looking for the light

maybe the reason i lurch myself out from under the layers of flannel and cotton, and sometimes wool, in the inky hour before the light comes suffusing through the trees off to the east, is so i can tiptoe out under heaven’s dome in the dark, so i can train my eye on the spot where the sky first hints at what’s coming. the spot where we get to the part of the story where it all begins again, where the sun rises and the light creeps up and through the sky, like a wine spill to a white linen napkin.

it’s that first crack of light that always thrills me; the moment right before, when you wonder if really it will come again. and then–so far, anyway–it does. and you can check that worry off the list for the day.

maybe that’s why papa cardinal is always out there too. maybe papa is keeping watch on the sun, making sure it does its job, does what’s expected. maybe papa’s the sentinel of dawn, the one charged with letting us know if there’s ever a day when the sun sleeps in. so far, hasn’t happened. but always good to have someone in the lifeguard chair.

so this business of keeping watch for the light to creep in, it’s a skill that comes in mighty handy. i’d call it essential for the human spirit in dark epochs. which this sure seems to be. if you keep watch on the headlines, anyway. if all you count is the sweeping arc of the narrative, the parts where the death toll mounts day after day, where the holy relics of the “citadel of liberty” were shattered and smashed and carried straight out the door and down the capitol steps, steps that have given me goosebumps every time i’ve so much as pressed the sole of my shoe to their age-worn edges. the part where the soundtrack is so hateful you wonder if you’ve woken up in rome just before the collapse, or vietnam in the middle of an ugly war. or germany. or the boston harbor before the tea went in the drink.

so pretty much the only thing worth doing right now is looking–hard as you can–for the teeniest sliver of light coming in through the cracks in the door.

because i happen to keep close watch on the doings of our nation’s capital, because i sometimes see it as a laboratory of human character–who’s got a spine, who’s got a heart–it tends to be one of the places where i gather my evidence for how much hope might be worth counting on. i promise you i look broadly, across party lines. if i spy decency in human form, if i hear a tale of heroic-level goodness, if i see someone rise amid a sea of protest to say, “i’ve scoured my conscience, and here is the truth, guided by timeless moral code,” i listen up. pay close attention. get ready to take a deep breath and start all over again. rather than collapsing in a moment of utter moral depravity and defeat.

so happens, it was there just yesterday that a little bit of hope came trickling in. well, more than a little. and it wasn’t actually in washington where i spied it. it was off in what’s now become the staging area of a presidency to come. over in delaware, where, on a stage all bedecked in blue, i saw a man who shook himself from his grieving a couple years back because he felt a call to restore the soul of america. and i saw him explaining to a nation (quietly, in not-fancy words) why justice for all matters so much, so deeply fine-grainly much. and then i heard him say who he trusted more than anyone to press his shoulder against the long arc of justice to try to muscle it toward where martin luther king jr. and saint john lewis and barack obama promised us it would bend. and i watched merrick garland, a man who might have spent the last five years with a really bitter taste in his mouth, i watched him quietly, humbly, step to the podium and consent to the task. i watched him agree to step into the arena where the blood stains of injustice are soaked deep into the floorboards, where the pile-up of truths need hours and hours of sorting through, and i saw something like light out of the far corner of my eye.

and that’s not the only place where i look.

i look right here in the nooks and crannies of my little life and i find slivers of light coming in from the oddest angles. i find light where i hear the things my college kid remembers to add to his litany of prayers right before dinner. i find light when a brother i love leaps out of his own sack of worries to bedeck my birthday with nothing short of an explosion of joy. i find light in the pages of old, old books on my shelves. and, sometimes, not so old ones.

these are the lines i’ve recently tucked in my “words and lines worth keeping” file (it’s the third of three such files, because i tend to find many many words worth keeping):

“God does not want to be believed in, to be debated and defended by us, but simply to be realized through us.” Martin Buber

“‘When the evening of this life comes,’ says St John of the Cross, ‘you will be judged on love.’ The only question asked about the soul….‘Have you loved well?’”

“Each of us is the midwife of God, each of us.” St. John of the Cross from Daniel Ladinsky. Love Poems from God.

‘You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.” (Annie Dillard)

and, because i am feeling a wee bit queazy here this morning, i’d best sign off, and ask where do you find the light creeping in?

11 Comments

June 5, 2020

great cloud of witnesses, all right

early this morning, i opened a package i’d been waiting for all week. it was a great fat book titled, a great cloud of witnesses, and it’s a compendium of saints, so ordained and otherwise. i find myself most drawn to the “otherwise,” the ones whose lives of holiness — a definition worth a lifetime of delving into — the ones whose unheralded kindness, the ones whose courage in the face of attack (be it rubber bullet or tear gas, the lynching tree or one man’s knee), the ones whose words, whose acts of noble defiance, whose everyday living-breathing gospel hold a candle in the darkness.

i’m bringing five of them here to the table this morning, to let their voices be the ones you weave into your day, your soul, your imagination. they are the ones with something wise and beautiful and riveting to say, something worth listening deeply to.

my posture today is one bent low in the sacred prayer of listening.

the ones i’ve gathered here are imani perry, interdisciplinary scholar of race, law, literature, and african-american culture at princeton university; the late great poet and writer james baldwin; michael curry, presiding bishop of the episcopal church; otis moss III, senior pastor of the iconic trinity united church in chicago; and, not least, late-night comedian and cultural critic, trevor noah.

first up, imani perry, with these excerpts from her june 3 essay in the paris review, titled, “a little patch of something,” a meditation that begins with her growing a flat of microgreens on her bedside table, and takes us far far beyond the endosperm of germination. we pick up a couple paragraphs in….(to read the entire essay, click the hyperlink above.)

By any measure of politics and civil order, Black people in the antebellum and Jim Crow South existed in a cruel relationship to land and the agricultural economy. Exploitation happened from birth to death, from the fields all the way to the commissary where people overpaid landowners for minimal goods. Black people gave birth in the cane, died in the cotton, bled into the corn. But out of little patches of something, carefully tended to because beyond survival is love, came reward. The earth gave moments of pleasure: Latching onto a juicy peach—your teeth moving from yellow to red flesh. Digging up a yam, dusting off its dirt, roasting it so long the caramelized sweetness explodes under your tongue. Running your hands across the collard leaves coming up from the ground rippled flowerlike. That green is as pretty as pink.

…But during shelter in place it seems touching and tending to plants has become both more universal and more essential.

Soulful even. I watched my friends and family on screens as they delighted in collards, berries, tomatoes, and chives. Small joys as death rolled by. At first there was a rumor that Black people didn’t get COVID-19, as though by some miracle of our physical constitution. Then we were told it cast us all in the same boat, a virus couldn’t discriminate. Finally, we saw that though a virus doesn’t discriminate the persistent ways a society does had us falling fast. And it seemed we, Black people, all knew someone, or knew someone who knew someone, who died alone in a ward, or a home, or at home. Caresses of loved ones were verboten in the final moments. You had to stay safe from the virus.

This was the context in which the world shifted for the second time in the same season. Police officers killed Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and more, and more. So many in fact that even if I gave you the whole list I know I would be missing some precious lives that also deserve to be remembered. Being killed by police officers is the same old same old for Black people. Same rage, same sorrow, same politicians’ calls for quiet protest but never remedy. The protests grew like wildfire. People emerged from their homes, hungry to stand with each other, to beat back loneliness and fear, angry, resistant and insistent. From every quarter and dozens of states and nations, people have stepped outside to say:

“Enough!”

The plants are growing too. Their slowly spreading leaves are synchronous with the shattering glass, the rubber bullets, the gouged-out eyes, the tanks and bullhorns. That synchronicity is not new. When the Klan mobs charged into Black homes, ripping out someone who was loved, dragging them in the dirt, dismembering his body bit by bit before stringing him up, the turnips kept growing. When the bombs shook Dynamite Hill in Birmingham, and the hoses knocked over skinny brown children, the pecans fell from branches. Plums hung heavy, purple and sweet as hot rage bubbled from the gut through the vocal passages.

…I’m remembering all that, looking at my little tray of microgreens, sleepless with fear about the devastation just around the corner, yet hopeful too because the dam holding back rage has broken. I want to hold hands with my friends who have been tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed, who I have seen stumbling yet still holding a banner aloft: BLACK LIVES MATTER. The grace of a shared meal seems so remote now. But those days will return sooner than we think. And if this moment of righteous rage turns into a movement that will be sustained, we will need to both fight and nourish each other. We will have to bolster and build more networks to share food and provide care and shelter, not as an alternative to protest but as an essential element of it. It is a lesson we learned over centuries. Freedom dreams are grown and nurtured out of the hardest, barely yielding soul. Our gardens must grow. That is a metaphor and a literal truth. When the bruised and battered seek refuge from the storm, may all of us who believe in freedom remain ready to feed and sustain them.

briefly, we turn to the words of poet-activist james baldwin, spoken back in 1970, when he and anthropologist margaret mead took to a new york city stage for seven and half hours of “brilliance and bravery,” as described by cultural critic maria popova. mead and baldwin’s entire conversation was later published as a book, a rap on race (1971), and is worth pulling from a bookshelf, your own or your library’s.

baldwin’s words, wise to press against our hearts, include this one searing truth: “we’ve got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other’s only hope.”

bishop michael curry, the first african-american presiding bishop of the episcopal church, took to the op-ed pages of the washington post last weekend (before the travesty of tear gas and rubber bullets that cleared the way for the president of the united states to walk through lafayette park to the steps of “the presidents’ church,” st. john’s episcopal church, to wield a bible as if a cudgel (by my eyes anyway). bishop curry wrote, in part:

Our nation’s heart breaks right now because we have strayed far from the path of love. Because love does not look like one man’s knee on another man’s neck, crushing the God-given life out of him. This is callous disregard for the life of another human being, shown in the willingness to snuff it out brutally as the unarmed victim pleads for mercy.

Love does not look like the harm being caused by some police or some protesters in our cities. Violence against any person is violence against a child of God, created in God’s image. And that ultimately is violence against God, which is blasphemy — the denial of the God whose love is the root of genuine justice and true human dignity and equality.

Love does not look like the silence and complicity of too many of us, who wish more for tranquility than justice.

next up is otis moss III, senior pastor of trinity united church of christ in chicago. moss is as brilliant a preacher as i’ve heard in a long long while, and i’m thinking some sunday morning i need to hop in the car and drive to 95th street on chicago’s south side. moss, an all-american track star at morehouse college who says he heard a call to the pulpit and switched his major to religious studies then went on to yale divinity school and the chicago theological union, has deep roots in the civil rights movement. his father, otis moss jr., was an affiliate of martin luther king, jr., working together in the southern christian leadership conference, and serving in 1971 as co-pastor with king’s father, martin luther king, sr., at atlanta’s historic ebenezer baptist church.

more than worth your time are either or both of these video sermons posted on the church’s youtube channel:

last weekend, as the nation erupted in a firestorm of protest (and, sadly, pockets of violence), moss preached When Is Someday? , a sermon on the murder of george floyd and its aftermath, framed as a prelude to moss’s unforgettable sermon of the week before, The Cross and The Lynching Tree, in which he addressed the horror of the murder of yet another unarmed black man, this time ahmaud arbery, killed for the crime of taking a jog on a warm spring day in georgia.

and finally, not to be missed is trevor noah‘s powerful 18-minute video posted to his youtube account a week ago friday, reflecting on george floyd and racism in america, in which noah says:

“i don’t know what made that video more painful for people to watch. the fact that that man was having his life taken in front of our eyes, the fact that we were watching someone being murdered by someone whose job is to protect and serve, or the fact that he seemed so calm doing it. there was a black man, on the ground, in handcuffs, and you could take his life, so you did. almost knowing that there would be no ramifications.”

may these voices stir you, revivify you, and bring a speck of light and hope to this dark moment in the american story.

your thoughts always welcome here….

and before i go, happy blessed birthday to two of the chair’s dearest, amy and nan, back-to-back blessings, both blowing out candles on what i hope are sumptuous birthday cakes all across the weekend. xoxoxox

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pull up a chair

Tag: antidotes to madness

January 23, 2026