Will this be your first? they ask. So what do we say? That before you was another who got lost on the way? Unviable, out of place, yet loved, oh how loved. How do we name the agony of hidden loss, and a treasure held only by us? No: not only us. For before thereContinue reading “Little Brother”
Category Archives: Devotional
Retreat
…you will not find my actual life in these pages so much as my thoughts on the graces Our Lord has given me. I have reached the stage now where I can afford to look back; in the crucible of trials from within and without, my soul has been refined, and I can raise myContinue reading “Retreat”
Unownable Things
It’s become a bit of a tradition for me to write gratitude lists on my birthday, yet each year it feels like I am discovering gratitude anew. While I always remember doing it the previous year, it never comes naturally to me. Instead, I find myself thinking that another strategy might be better this yearContinue reading “Unownable Things”
Unexpected Faith: Terrence Malick and the “Love that loves us”
American philosopher-turned-filmmaker Terrence Malick does not make crowd-pleasers. He does not even feel any great compulsion to actually make films, although he has made more films in the last decade than he did for the first 30 years of his career. A little like Marilynne Robinson’s novels, Malick’s films emerge from some slow, meditative, beauty-processorContinue reading “Unexpected Faith: Terrence Malick and the “Love that loves us””
Philosophical Crumbs: Haiku for Kierkegaard
A friend of mine recently said that he had tried to read Kierkegaard but hadn’t made it. “I need the children’s book version,” he said. Probably not an unusual experience. While I’m not sure I’m the one to provide the children’s book, I thought I could do the next best thing: to try to putContinue reading “Philosophical Crumbs: Haiku for Kierkegaard”
Clutching at Light: For Leonard Cohen
…everything that is illuminated becomes a light… (Saint Paul) Too dark, Leonard. Just after Solstice, the days still short, the dark surprised me in its early arrival, and your first song grabbed me with its midnight-pitch grip, and Isaac bound by demons, crying, Here I am, Lord. These days are dark enough; I turned fromContinue reading “Clutching at Light: For Leonard Cohen”
Light and Momentary
True – but the wait weighs heavily now. So many delays, and you can expect more road blocks through the coming weeks as rolling closures right across the north-west make violent signs of little worth. Light and momentary? Perhaps; so, at least, we trust, yet faith not sight must rule the game if there’s toContinue reading “Light and Momentary”
Meditation
If it had roots, the pulling-out would be easy, but, being rhizome, it tangles its way far, far out, as though sending emissaries, ambassadors; but which way do they travel? Do they depart or return? The beginning hides sneekily under soil, like a power-line, a waterpipe, some subterranean transport network, while the visible growth burstsContinue reading “Meditation”
In Translation
If you find them worth publishing, you have my permission to do so – as a sort of ‘White Book’ concerning my negotiations with myself – and with God. (Dag Hammarskjöld, in a letter to Leif Belfrage)* And so they sat together, the poet without “a single word of Swedish” at hand, and the translator,Continue reading “In Translation”
No Ordinary Sundays
Before you lies my strength and my weakness; preserve the one, heal the other. Before you lies my knowledge and my ignorance; where you have opened to me, receive me as I come in; where you have shut to me, open to me as I knock. Let me remember you, let me understand you, letContinue reading “No Ordinary Sundays”
The Consolations of Writing 