Category: Uncategorized

Christmas sunrises

This Christmas morning sunrise today, on this little New Mexican farm, held the characteristic colors of New Mexican sunrises and sunsets.  The sassy soil has pinks in its hues from the red clay which has, for centuries, flowed down into this valley created by a violent rupture in the earth’s...

A new pilgrimage: day four of Iona

This is the approach to the Island of Iona from the east with the little village off to the left and the 12th century Benedictine abbey to the right. This abbey replaced Columba’s which would have been round, made simply of stick and mud with thatched roofs. Today we are...

Another Lord’s Prayer

God, you are The Supreme Existence. We, and all creation, are in you; and you are in us. “Father” is not who you are, as much as Cosmos, or perhaps, Supreme Lover of Souls. You exist in what we call “heaven” because we have no language which fits time outside...

Charles’ Lord’s Prayer

Matthew 6:9–13 (ESV) "Pray then like this: 'Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead...

Let God make you

This is one of my favorite pieces. I made it five years ago in the studio of my New Hampshire farmhouse. The purple glaze is a Korean recipe which blushes purple when thick, but stretches to corn-flower-blue when it gets thin on the clay. This pot I designed to hold...

The Beautiful Shepherd

  Jesus was surrounded by politics.  City.  A city is, in Greek “polis” and is full of people, noise and activity.  People want what they want and they fight to get it. So politics is part of our life as we move among people.  When we are told to be...

Go quiet, and let it happen to you.

We carry things, tremulously,  into holy spaces, hands clutching at out throat. When my crucifixion icon cracked, it made sense. We carry our suffering to the cross. Two people carry the water and wine up and into the area around the altar to be given to the deacon as they...

Please, I need your help

Friends, my name if Charles LaFond and I am the writer of "The Daily Sip," a blog of what I call "domestic spirituality." I am writing to ask a favor from you.  Do you have a memory of a "daily Sip" which impacted you?  Are there one or two you...

Fluent in Thunder – A Holy Week Poem

Nature. She has Her languages too, in which we are not always fluent. Lest we understand her cries for mercy. It is hard to imagine what She felt that week. She quietly covers the planet in green, brown, blue and every color of the rainbow-reminder. She waves as wheat. She...

Home

I think that what each of us want is home. We make a house, a home. Home. That is what we want. Most of us here have at least houses and some have homes. We are busy building 50 homes across 14th street for people who, last night, slept on...