I’m not much of a biblical literalist—you won’t catch me worrying about empty tombs, or wine from water, or broken bread that never runs out—but somehow the annunciation always catches me and makes me wonder. What I wonder is what it was really like. Films and novels always struggle here: is there a voice? a …
Monthly Archives: March 1999
Sunday Week 4 of Lent Year A
We only see by not seeing. We have been learning from birth not to see. Not to see the full spectrum. Not to see the chaos of light that pours into our eyes. The art of vision is exclusion. To learn not to see everything at once so that we can see anything at all. …
Sunday Week 3 of Lent Year A
When Isaac, the son of Abraham and Sarah, is wandering in the wilderness thirsty he comes across a well and as he waits to quench his thirst he is met by a foreign woman come to draw water. She is Rebecca who will love him and be his wife. Many years later, Isaac’s son, Jacob, …
Thursday Week 2 of Lent
When I was a teenager I read a book that shaped my life. The book itself wasn’t much but it had a poem, a Shakespeare sonnet, right on its front page. And that poem seemed to capture an adolescent ideal that with an adolescent naivety I thought might save me: They that have power to …