The first sermon at the first church I ever served (which is also the only church I have served) was called “Swimming Lessons.” Countless seminary papers and exams had brought me to this moment. Now, time had come to climb into the pulpit to impart the great wisdom available to a young man with a Divinity degree on his wall.
Here’s the gist: as a swimmer learns to trust that water will hold a body, so, too, must a person learn to trust in the Holy. Have you attended any church in the world for, say, four or five Sundays? If so, you yourself will have heard a take on this very same sermon. It’s like arguing that people should remember to floss when they brush.…
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I bring a newspaper to act as talking stick.
The back page stows away a story about
the imaginary future of capitalism
and its artifacts. Photos of oil cans
and fluted orchids graze inside copy.
The question I pose to the students is:
What’s inside your shrine? I pass the stick
around the circle. Deafening silence.
Not since a question on self-identity has such
an iron curtain of reticence taken hold.
The talking stick returns to me as wrinkled
as a shorn Shar-Pei. “Okay,” I acquiesce.
“I’ll add a few relics to mine.” They’re
as familiar as dying embers slumming
in my right ear.…
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The tradition of sausage making required the meat grinder.
The crunch of the crank. A long lever
with an almost shine to it. An animal stacked on the counter,
bleeding. Room temperature.
A bowl of red spices. It’s the only difference
between us and other beasts.
Mother feeds the machine. I sit on linoleum and sip bird’s milk
out of a small, chipped mug.
I watch the blood leak through the seams of the shanty kitchen,
down the wooden paneling, warm.
I feel as if it were my own blood. I taste it.
I can’t stop chewing the inside of my cheeks.
Pink and festered. We sing through bells.
It’s almost Christmas. The smell of garlic enters
and we are on the verge of prayer
when it begins to scream and gurgle and scream again.…
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Adults were giants when I was growing up in the 1950s. My parents were gods, powerfully stomping into the village of my childhood. Their forbearing “fe-fi-fo-fum” lauded over my brothers and sister and kept me in a perpetual state of intimidating awe. My mother and father hoarded information like misers garner gold. If I asked either one how old they were the answer was “over 21” or “old enough to vote.” They usually responded to questions with “go look it up.” If it wasn’t in Funk and Wagnall’s encyclopedia, I was out of luck. Why wouldn’t they just tell me?
Standing on one of the elliptical machines at Gleason’s Boxing Gym in Brooklyn, my eyes followed my 28-year-old daughter Jillian. It was the first night of the qualifying fights for the Golden Gloves in 2016 and the gym was packed.…
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God-With-Us had come to Churchland and, since he was trending wildly across social media, many pastors were inviting him to speak in their sanctuaries and convention centers. They praised him for his authenticity and his wokeness, but they also kept a careful eye on him.
One morning, God-With-Us was ministering in a poor neighborhood when he came upon a line of invalids that stretched for blocks. Every year, a prominent doctor came down to host a one-day clinic for the economically disadvantaged. However many people he could see before sunset would receive professional medical care at no cost, no matter how deficient their health or health coverage.
God-With-Us saw a man who had been in a wheelchair for thirty-eight years and asked, “Do you want to be healed?”…
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In the Smoky Mountains, Tennessee
The license plates line up
in the gravel parking lot of Clingman’s Dome.
The fathers step out, groan, and unfold.
The children crack the road-trip hull
and their mothers do not scold.
The blue fog
of the Smoky Mountains brings them here.
A Cherokee curiosity,
the Shaconage. That sky-colored smoke
is sacred to the dead. The tourists tromp
to sunrise, and disappear—
and now it’s night.
The locusts boil under my feet.
They feed on chalky deer minds, skulls beneath
more skulls, from a thousand hunts
once holy. The topsoil turns
in the larvae-heating roil.…
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My mom died two years ago. It was a long, excruciating process that ended up with her being in the ICU for a month on a ventilator, slowly drowning to death in lungs that were too withered and tired to carry on. The whole experience was God-awful traumatic: heartbreaking, agonizing, ghoulish.
After two years I have found that grief doesn’t recede, it just got molded into my life like a fitted sheet. I sometimes take it for granted, but I have to take it out once in a while, give it a shake and wash it. I can go for days without thinking about it, but it’s always there. I’ll always have it in my life, and it will always be king-sized.
I have three triggers.…
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