Once when I was a boy I was trying to find something — I don’t remember now what it was — but this thing ended up being right there on the table in front of me. My father laughed as he pointed it out to me and said, “If it had been a snake, it would have bitten you.” As a child, that metaphor scared me a little. What IF it had been a snake? What IF I hadn’t seen …
Category: Creativity
When Fr. Jan Michael Joncas composed the song “On Eagle’s Wings” four decades ago, he was trying to comfort a friend whose father had just died of a heart attack. He wrote the song on guitar in the days following the death and then performed it at the funeral, and that might have been the end of the story. But God, Fr. Joncas said in a recent interview, had other plans. …
Welcome to the first installment in an occasional new series of blogposts called “Games We Played.” The idea behind this series is to — in a quick and hopefully fun way — pass on to my grandchildren’s generation the games we played as kids. And by games I don’t mean Monopoly and Chinese Checkers and I certainly don’t mean any game that can be played sitting on the couch with a computer, tablet or phone in your hands. I’m talking …
I recently came across this line of poetry from the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda: “Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood.” And, of course, that’s right. Take, for example, the pick-up games of some variation of baseball (fuzz ball, Indian ball, Wiffle® ball, cork ball, kickball, step ball) of my childhood in North St. Louis in the early ‘70s. …
Like many, I was impatient and restless as a young person. My favorite prayer was something along the lines of, “That was fun. What’s next?” What I learned as I grew older was the importance of savoring the gift of the present and the little. …
We live in unsettled, dangerous, destructive, confusing times, and it would be easy to allow our only response to be one of resignation, of saying to ourselves and to the rest of the world, “I give up. It’s just too big. It’s just too destructive. I have nothing to offer that will make a difference.” But such a response is lazy and not a response of faith. A response of faith allows us (perhaps propels us) to roll up our …
This weekend, Sue and I are in southern Wisconsin, and yesterday I walked through a broad swath of wildflower prairie adjacent to the place where we are staying. I stopped in amazement of what was before me: a noisy, ever-moving and always changing sea of grass, flowers, bees, birds and shifting light. When we stand in the midst of such natural glory, we stand at the center of creation, and we can begin to find our place in the world. …
Why study the past? Why look at an ancient piece of rock or an early Wright Brothers Flyer? Beyond our curiosity and perhaps our own deep desires to somehow change the world, perhaps the answer lies in something a bit deeper. For those who profess a faith in a loving and creating God, perhaps it lies in our yearning to find a connection between our world, its innovators and their creations, and our faith and the God who creates and …
Somehow, it’s January 1 once again. We have made yet another trip around the sun. I’m not one for making public declarations of my resolutions (although I do need to step up my walking and watch my portions once again…) but today I return to a question that might lead to a good resolution for all of us to consider on this first day of a New Year: How do we begin each day? …
I am pleased to announce that my American roots music band, the Mo Bottom Project, will release our long-anticipated first CD this October. …