When I was 18, the summer after I graduated high school, my school offered the opportunity for seniors to travel to Europe. It was about a two week trip and while there we traveled from Italy through the Swiss Alps to France and finally to England. While we were there we were fortunate enough to see the Louvre, and the Arch d’triumph, and Versailles. We got to boat past the White Cliffs of Dover and spend an evening in the theater district in London where we saw Phantom of the Opera and shop down in Piccadilly Circus. And in France and London all the sights that we were lucky enough to see were incredible. But the place where we spent the most time was Italy. We spent lots of time touring the cities, Florence, Venice, Rome, Vatican City and they all are, as you might imagine, visually stunning. There is history and architecture and fountains and statues seemingly around every corner. On one day we saw the Pieta, on another the David, on one day St Peter’s Basilica and another Trevi Fountain and looking back now, maybe even more so than when I was experiencing it, it was one of those opportunities that remains with you for a lifetime. But perhaps the part of the trip that has stuck with me the most ever since our return was not the David or the Pieta, the leaning tower of Pisa or the ruins of Pompeii. It was something that I saw while staying at an inn overlooking the Italian countryside.
The Good Shepherd
There is this time of morning that comes, without fail, every morning, when, in the quiet of my still slumbering household I try to silently slip out of the backdoor and out to my quiet of quiets and inner calm, my back porch. I had been searching for such a place when we were looking for houses. I had lacked anything like this in our previous abode and 10 months out of the year in New York our beautiful back deck was either covered in snow or just too dang cold to even think about sitting out there in peaceful silence. But, when I walked onto this porch for the first time while looking at the house, I knew that this would be the perfect location for what I was looking for. So each morning, I rouse by the sound of the grinder on my coffee maker, spend the next 15 minutes in that liminal space between awake and asleep, and then with the duel effort of the alarm on my phone and the ding of the coffee maker signaling it is done doing its thing, I grab a mug and head out to the back porch for sabbath time.
Finding the Light
For the past few weeks many in the nation and much of the world have been riveted by the story of the Thai soccer team that went exploring in one of the caves in Thailand only to become trapped when an early arriving rain storm that heralded the commencement of the monsoon season flooded the pathway back to the surface. And setting aside the degree to which the world invariably scratched our collective head at trying to discern what spelunking had to do with soccer and how exactly this soccer coach thought it a good idea to take a bunch of 11-17 year old boys a couple of miles into this cave and a half a mile under the earth, there was a period in which all the world came together to send thoughts, prayers, good vibes to the boys and their coach.
Growing Our Love
A few years back, for Christmas, my elder son received a most excellent gift from his grandparents. It was a set of Magna-Tiles. Now, if you have never seen or heard of them before, that’s ok because neither had I until my wife discovered them and put them on Jameson’s Amazon wishlist. They are plastic shapes, shapes with hard angles, so squares, rectangles, triangles, you get the idea. And on each of them is a set of magnets with the north and south poles of the magnets pointed outward so that if two magnets repel one another while you are trying to build with them, you just flip it over and the other side attracts. And this was what we call in my house a home run present.
In the Storm with Jesus
Growing up on the coast of North Carolina, I spent a fair amount of my time in fishing boats. We owned an old Jon boat that had a trawling motor on it for fishing the lakes around my house, a bass boat that we would take out on the Lumber river or the intracoastal Waterway, and a canoe that we could use in the ponds that dotted the county. However, my greatest joy growing up was any opportunity that we had to go out on the ocean and fish along the gulf stream of the Atlantic Ocean. That was where the biggest fighting fish existed.
New
She pressed her infant child closer to her chest, his tiny body wrapped in shredded and torn cloths that still had golden-brown strands of hay stuck to it the way hay always sticks to things. The heat of the day had dissipated and the chill of the night air had started to cut through every part of her body as she offered whatever warmth her slight and worn out frame had to the baby suckling at her breast. The baby, too young to have any appreciation of what was going on found himself in that place where newborns often are—that place where the comfort and nourishment offered by their mother’s milk brings about feelings of contentment and well-being and as he drank he drifted in and out of sleep, unaware that at this moment, he, along with his parents were on the move, trying desperately to get out of a country and a civilization that had been their home, their ancestral home for as long as anyone could remember. Now, that home, that civilization, so often a source of strength and resiliency seemed to be collapsing all around them.
Recommitting Ourselves
St. Francis of Assisi, the venerated saint of the Catholic Church and patron of animals and the environment, lived in Italy in the middle of the 13th century. Growing up as the son of a wealthy silk merchant, Francis enjoyed a high-spirited life of plenty. As he entered adulthood, he joined the military of Assisi in their campaign against Perugia and then reenlisted for service in the army of the count of Brienne before having a vision from God that convinced him that military service was not his true calling and instead, he was to serve the church. This service took many forms, from rebuilding old churches that had fallen into disrepair to founding three orders of monks and nuns and living the life of an ascetic. Perhaps most famously, we think about his care and concern for all God's creatures--a familial relationship with all parts of creation, brother bird, sister wolf, brother sun, sister moon. Indeed, throughout the history of the church it is hard to imagine a more beloved saint within the whole tradition.
Out in the Wheat Fields
In my mind, there is a place that I go to with great regularity as a means of calming myself and finding that inner peace that dwells in all of us. A mental time-out in an existence that seems like it is in constant motion It is a stretch of coastline that sits on the southern side of Grand Cayman island where my family lived for three years. Now, this stretch of beach was far enough from the cruise ships and hotels that visitors would have to rent a car to get out there and even then, you would have to know that it was there, and so, more often than not, we were able to be there completely alone. There is a small dock there that we used to walk to the end of and my older son and I would alternate between throwing stones into the ocean and watching the fish that would gather around the pilings. In my minds eye, I can see him standing there, his long Caribbean hair flowing in the warm breeze that seemed to be ubiquitous on the island.
In the Middle of the Night
Have you ever had one of those moments that were so filled with the holy, so alive with the spirit, so present with God that all you could do was sit and be in it—one of those moments in which words, descriptors, even superlatives utterly fail to capture the splendor, the majesty, the beauty? Maybe it was sitting on a high mountaintop with the whole of the world on display just below you or perhaps it was sitting on the coastline of the ocean with powerful waves crashing and the whole of God’s firmament above you, the salt in your nose and your feet dug into the sandy ground and all your senses are being moved at the exact same time, it might even come one morning while sitting on the back porch, the first cup of coffee in your hands as you are surrounded by the sounds of birds chirping in the trees, or the spring breeze dancing through your hair, or the sight of verdant trees and grass reminding you that life is all around you, that spirit is surrounding you. Those are the moments in your life that exist just beyond the reach of language or pictures—those instances of simplicity and artistry when time and space seem to come to a stop if only for a few seconds.
On Fire
One of the first things I noticed about this space, the very first time I walked in here was the art that adorns the walls throughout the building—little explosions of color against a blank canvas of taupe. My parents, especially my mother, who had taken several art history courses in college, raised my brothers and I with a deep appreciation for art and on the coffee table of the living room of the house we grew up in—a room seldom opened to the rambunctiousness of three boys—sat a large book of historic paintings that spanned the Renaissance and, on occasion, we would sit together and thumb through them with her as she would explain the history of the artist and the symbolism of the piece. My love of art reached a zenith when I was 18 years old and went on a school sponsored senior trip to Europe.