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Wide Spot, October 2021: Revisionist History
Last night, out of the blue, an email arrived bearing a 43-year-old video. Sent via a chain of friends and relatives, the clip showed me at my first wedding, singing ...
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Wide Spot, August 2021: Cooking the Potatoes
It’s a fallacy that deer don’t eat potatoes, or at least strip the plants naked. I guess I should be grateful for the stalks and tubers left behind, and hope ...
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Wide Spot, September 2021: Words Matter
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” When I was a kid, that children’s chant was a talisman to protect us from the startlingly ...
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Wide Spot, July 2021: The Answer, My Friend…
If you’re as old as I am, you’re already singing the next line in this iconic Dylan song. You also know that the answer “blowing in the wind” is both ...
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Wide Spot, June 2021: Fresh New Hell
The line “What fresh new hell is this?” was famously coined by the American critic Dorothy Parker when her writing was interrupted by the telephone. There’s something deeply true captured ...
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Wide Spot, May 2021: Moral Proximity
I am an avid reader; unlike my high-minded family and friends, however, I prefer novels to non-fiction. A well-written novel can introduce me to a whole new way of understanding ...
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Wide Spot, April 2021: Close the Language Door
I thank my lucky stars (as my mom used to say) that I have a dog. Among other things, having a dog means that I am committed, no matter how ...
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Grace in a Fractured World
This wonderful conversation between Krista Tippett and the theologian Serene Jones is WELL worth the time required to read or listen--lovely work on the move from grief to genuine mourning, ...
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Response to reading Mark 11:1-11
by Anne Voegtlen March 27, 2021 Let’s say there is a village on our path. Let’s say we are asked to go ahead, to find a colt tied by a ...
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Wide Spot, March 2021: Fact or Feeling?
Two conversations and two questions: in the first exchange, a woman assured me that she was right in her stance about wearing/not wearing a mask because she could “feel it ...
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If you love the justice of Jesus Christ more than you fear human judgment then you will seek to do compassion. Compassion means that if I see my friend and my enemy in equal need, I shall help them both equally. Justice demands that we seek and find the stranger, the broken, the prisoner and comfort them and offer them our help. Here lies the holy compassion of God that causes the devils much distress.”
— Mechthild of Magdeburg
Your heart knows the way, run in that direction.
–Rumi