Month: November 2016

The Eyes of God don’t see

You don’t see, do you. You can’t see what a stupid plan this is. Don't open the door. Stay in heaven. Helping people will only infuriate the power structures of the church. This year, before you do the whole swaddling clothes bit, think it through. Emmanuel is a generous offer...

a simple season

(Please excuse the interruption in the Daily Sip.  The Pledge Campaign required every moment of some exhausting  days.  Happy advent - Charles) I watch television with commercials the way a house-cat goes swimming - - that is, infrequently, and with no small amount of annoyance. Recently I was home with...

party no matter what party you are from

On the Sunday night after the election, in the smokey darkness of the great cathedral nave of our church, people gathered. They gathered because they always do, but only half of them.  The other half of them arrived never having visited before.  Can you imagine?   Arriving for a church service...

listen

  "Sometimes it seems as if we do everything possible to avoid the painful confrontation with our basic human loneliness, and allow ourselves to be trapped by false gods promising immediate satisfaction and quick relief. But perhaps the painful awareness of loneliness is an invitation to transcend our limitations and...

discretion is not secret-keeping, it is spiritual practice

One Christian practice with which I am slowly and needfully becoming acquainted is the practice of discretion.  Now by using that word I do not mean the “discretion” that most modern ears hear when they hear that word.  Today, in modern speech, discretion has taken on a different tone than...

huddled by a door, face protected from the wind

This is an East door of the cathedral.  A homeless woman is sleeping there with hear head protected by the stones of our cathedral.  She had approached me earlier that day and I tensed, assuming she would be asking me for money and I hate being asked for money by...