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  • Normal

    Normal

    “I just can’t wait until this is all over and things can go back to normal.” I felt the fatigue and worry in my friend’s voice as she spoke these words, and I feel it, too.  I want to see my preschool music students face-to-face, want to gather with my friends and family.  I want…

  • Real

    Real

    I remember one morning from a few years ago.  It was very early, before the sun was even up, and I was driving my high school daughter to a waiting bus for her Washington DC class trip. I hugged her and watched the bus pull away, and on the way home, saw the sun was…

  • Crown

    Crown

    I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.  Not even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when the sky was empty of planes and no one knew just what horror might come next.  Back then, it took a few days for me to feel safe and appropriate about bringing my babies out for a…

  • Fire

    There was a fire in my church.  Thankfully there wasn’t a lot of destruction, but the smoke damage remediation will take several weeks and so we’ve been unable to have mass.  It brings me back to the catastrophic fire which took place at Notre Dame in Paris almost one year ago and how the devastation…

  • Four Words

    Four Words

    One of my favorite authors featured a short video on her Instagram last week and I cannot stop thinking about it.  In an interview, Kate Bowler speaks about her initial steps into the bewildering and scary journey of stage four cancer and she highlights an interaction with one of her nurses, Meg.  At the time,…

  • Cradle

    Cradle

    I’m a Catholic music minister, and I’m wearing gray as I stand at the front of the church and sing the opening notes of the entrance song.  A gentleman from the funeral home leads pallbearers with the casket down the aisle, and following them are a group of tearful mourners, wearing black and clinging to…

  • Bean

    Bean

    Oh friends, watch this bean. It was dead, basically, the by-product of an earlier productive and blossoming life.  Found itself dried out and useless, buried in the quiet and the dark.  It stayed like that for a long time. Then something within itself started breaking and shifting.  Preprogrammed for growth, it sent out roots and…

  • Walk – 2020

    Walk – 2020

    For the past several years on New Year’s Eve, our sweet hosts have pulled out a sheet of cardboard on which everyone writes their goals for the year ahead in permanent sharpie.  One year I wrote that I would find our dog, Bailey, and I did. Another year I wrote that I would run a…

  • Wiffleball

    In the springtime when we were kids, we’d pick lilacs off of the bushes in our backyard and wrap a piece of aluminum foil around the stems to bring to our teachers. In the summer, we spent full days in our four-foot above-ground pool, the hopeful smell of charcoal briquettes and lighter fluid in the…

  • Gravity

    Gravity

    In April of 1970, a team of engineers, astronauts, and support personnel put the finishing touches on the Apollo XIII mission.  Their aim was to be the third crew to land on the moon, but the lunar landing was aborted when, two days into the mission, an oxygen tank failed due to the ignition of…