son

  • Advent

    Advent

    It was the day after Thanksgiving, and the traditional start to the Christmas season, but I didn’t feel like Christmas.

  • Frozen

    I went for a run on a freezing day and I was surrounded by ghosts. Surprisingly, I can run longer when the air is cold and the sun is bright, and it was a day just like that, so I took myself down the road past my kids’ old elementary school. The school is closed…

  • Celebration Song (Red, part two)

    My mother had a print of a painting in her house and I said I liked it, so of course she bought me one. It’s called ‘Celebration Song’, by Tim Steward, and it seems to depict in streaks of earth tones a Heavenly scene of thirteen spirits rejoicing together. It’s a bit abstract, but to…

  • Trust

    Once there was a girl and she walked through the halls of a large, sprawling house which she did not build. She carried a blueprint in her pocket and sometimes she consulted it for direction, but not always. The girl walked, in and out of halls and rooms, through every year of her life. In…

  • Grateful

    Today I heard a homily from our beloved deacon and, even more so than in his words, I felt the force of his message really just in his presence alone. Our deacon lost his wife almost two months ago, and he is in the haze of grief that only those who have walked that road…

  • Waiting

    I don’t like waiting. Waiting for something important feels, for me, like a racing heart and a pit in my stomach and like my small voice echoing in a canyon: I AM ALONE. In the season in which I waited to get pregnant with Brian, I agonized and strived and pleaded with God. Two years…

  • Yarn

    It seems to me that a life spent with young children is made of varying textures and materials. There are the structures that give shape to your daily life, like the school day and activities and sports. These provide the skeleton of a schedule and also tend to dictate your community. These structures are brick;…

  • Feed

    Once I was a baby who lived inside my mother’s womb. There, she housed and fed me and provided everything I needed, but I didn’t know that. I just took what was offered without regard to the source. Later, I was born and sought nourishment, protection and safety from her in other ways, again completely…

  • Son

    A few nights back, my daughter, Maura, and a friend saw what appeared to them to be a supernova, a star that grew bigger and brighter and then was gone from the sky. Both she and my son were fascinated by the idea that if it actually was a dying sun that they saw that…

  • Six

    I haven’t been able to bring myself to really read about it, let alone write about it, but it’s everywhere anyway. My friends and neighbors, and even Rob Lowe and Maria Shriver are experiencing it and writing in excruciating detail. I keep seeing references to that song by Nichole Nordeman everyone is talking about, but…