Sometimes Christmas can seem a long way off, even when it’s close. So it was for me when I went to a funeral last Saturday at St. Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue. The music was beautiful”a requiem setting by Gabriel Fauré. And the church was warmly populated. That happens when you die in your fifties, a season of life when the living still outnumber the dead… . Continue Reading »
This past week I attended the “Zoolights” festival at the Smithsonian National Zoo. A friend’s niece was performing with her school choir, and this seemed a good opportunity to partake in one of those delightful but decidedly child-oriented activities without the awkward out-of-place feeling that accompanies a single person on this sort of outing… . Continue Reading »
For the better part of a century, Carl Jung and (later) his estate kept the manuscript of his unfinished Red Book”or Liber Novus, as he originally entitled it”hidden safely away from public scrutiny. Jung’s most ardent admirers, making their hopeful pilgrimages to Zurich, were denied so much as a glimpse into its pages, no matter how plangent their entreaties… . Continue Reading »
Since the early centuries of the church, Christians have thought of giving and receiving gifts as a fitting way to celebrate the incarnation. The logic is simple: God so loved the world that he gave; so should we. But this simple practice embodies not only a profound theology, but a profound vision of community, one that becomes clear when we consider two New Testament passages that quote from the manna story of Exodus… . Continue Reading »
As it happened, I was able to spend a couple of hours between flights with Bob Bork just ten days before he died, and I got to tell him of my gratitude for so much friendship and laughter over the past quarter-century, of my admiration for his depth, and”embarrassing him, as I knew this would”of my love for him. Bob was of the strong stock that keeps emotions such as love to himself. That’s one reason I loved him… . Continue Reading »
I remember Melisa’s mother grappling with her daughter’s death. There isn’t anyone who doesn’t try to make sense of death. We try to make sense of everything. We do not like not knowing, as if motivations, circumstances, some little sense of the casualties will help us scale the ever-elusive summit of “closure.” Some things make no sense and never will, not even after all the explanations have been made, as if anything in this life can close the gash of death… . Continue Reading »
I haven’t enjoyed a novel by Martin Amis so much since his 1995 work The Information. His newest book, Lionel Asbo: State of England, is as darkly comic as its predecessor with a similarly Odyssey-like plot. The protagonist has committed a crime”though in the case of the writer in The Information his crime was an ambiguously attempted infidelity and in Lionel Asbo, it is a real crime, or at least the breaking of a taboo”and then has to attempt to redeem himself… . Continue Reading »
In a sermon broadcast on the BBC on December 25, 1950, Monsignor Ronald Knox observed that “we make a holiday of Christmas only if we have the strength of mind to creep up the nursery stairs again, and pretend that we never came down them.” In my case, the stairs in question led, not to a nursery, but to the children’s bedroom I shared with my brother at 1 Regester Avenue in the Baltimore suburb of Rodgers Forge… . Continue Reading »
Krister Stendahl’s classic 1963 essay, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West” makes the case that Augustine and the Western (Protestant) Christian tradition, preoccupied as they were and are with personal human guilt, present us with a drastic misreading of Paul. Unlike his fourth-century reader who poured out confessions of sin and misery to God, Paul was relatively untroubled by a sense of personal failure. According to Stendahl, himself an ordained Lutheran clergyman, Paul was very different from Augustine and Luther insofar as Paul possessed a “robust conscience.” … Continue Reading »
In his first autobiographical book, The Moon’s a Balloon, the actor David Niven relates a great story about the film director William Wyler, whose nickname”“Once More Wyler””stemmed from his demand for endless retakes by his actors. While working together on a film adaption of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Niven watched Laurence Olivier play a scene again and again for Wyler, while the director read a newspaper… . Continue Reading »
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