June 1992
Great Expectations
Bringing someone back to life, going through fertility treatments, spending more time with family
June 1992
The Map I Was Promised
Things I didn’t get to last week: answering the mail, giving up coffee, saving the planet.
Sunbeams
Why 300,000 varieties of beetles? The great English geneticist J.B.S. Haldane was once cornered by a distinguished theologian who asked him what inferences one could draw, from a study of the created world, as to the nature of its Creator. Haldane answered, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”
Encounter Above Tintern Abbey
Then he let go of me, and the meaning of the poem was clear. This man had finally brought me inside of it. Both of us had somehow been given what we came for. On the trail down to the bridge I broke out in goose flesh.
Living Simply
At fifty-five, I look back on a life so complicated that had I set out to make things hard for myself, I couldn’t have done a better job.
Uncommon Prayer
Toward A New Liturgy
There is something that loves you in the world. The voice that speaks to you within, in the worst despair, is not different from the voice that called the world into being.
The Carrion Heart
He came in on a royal blue 1928 Studebaker, the engine rattling, leaving a dusty cloud billowing into the desert air.
The Cruise
“Here we are in Martinique,” the man said. He was standing at the window with his hands in his hip pockets, looking out at the green lawn and the deep woods beyond.