A prayer for the hospital setting Loving God, Holy One, We pray for the power to be gentle. The strength to be forgiving. The patience to be understanding. We pray for vision to see and faith to believe in this new day, this new opportunity. Help us to devote our lives to your work of healing and peace. Amen.

Look, even now you must remember that the rains will come. The land is parched. The sun is hot. The day, it never ends. …

Arise. As they say. Shine. The light is upon us. A new day has come. Few will see what you’ve accomplished and where you’re headed. You will not make the Times or E! or even your favorite journal. Arise. As they say. Shine. Anyway. Despite all of that. You are not that which in days of old moved heaven, earth Or mountains. The light has come. A new day is here. Go to it. This longing, this calling,

A MOMENT OF LOVING REGARD FOR WHAT IS The silence is all there is…Annie Dillard Is she here or is she there? The elderly asked of her elderly mother, who lay dying, quiet and still as an August wind. Blazing sun. Already the morning dripped. Nearby a fly buzzed. Get. Scoot…

Uncrowd my heart, O God, until the silence speaks. Thomas Merton I found briefly, briefly, briefly The silence that makes the heart. The stillness that has legs and Breathes and dances in your rib Cage: whispering, this is the nothing You were born into and the nothing You’ll return to, which is to say the Nothing that…

A poem about listening to the same kind of music as an adult as my ancestors, the kind of folk music that has to do with lament and sorrow and loss. Of course, I did not know I could eat the plastic grapes Assembled in my grandmother’s kitchen. Not the grandmother of…

(A Mother’s Day reflection) In our house, when a liturgical season came around, Advent, Lent, etc., our family would sit around the kitchen table on a Sunday evening and talk. Norah, our oldest child. Nick, our middle child. Nina, our youngest. They now range in age from 20–16. Growing up, they did many peace…

My aunt married an Italian man, Bruno. Who would spin us around, us boys, at Christmas time in China Grove, North Carolina, on the rare occasions he came to be with us. Him and my aunt Okla. She was born in Oklahoma, as you might surmise. Okla was — to…

Then word came that the man she was with Was the one she loved in the darkness And though she tried to claim the light It was never good…