More on: Essays

A hen, however, is not a word. Let us be clear. She is a living creature, a being to be experienced. She is her own center of consciousness. She cannot be explained, will never be solved.

Though my answer wobbled on the edge of insincerity, I knew it was the right one. I have always known how to give the right answer. The cost of giving the wrong one was too great.
I knew it was the right answer because Brother Mark savored it. His face relaxed into admiration, as if I were a young dog who had just accomplished a complex trick.

We watch as the cross is carried out of sight. The land is speaking here. It says: Be patient. You do not need this. You cannot tame me with this cross. You cannot replace me. Be still. Listen.

WHEN SOMEBODY DIES, I WATCH MOVIES. The day my grandmother passed, I sat at the altar with the brothers in The Darjeeling Limited. Watching Adrien Brody embody the sense of utter emptiness left by his character’s father’s death somehow helped get me a little closer to my own experience, though I couldn’t articulate it to anyone…

Midwestern reticence is respect for the unspeakable, the unknowable. What we do and what is done, to each other, to ourselves. What do you say to the flood, the tower, the burning bush?

Olivia was about as high-Wasp as anyone I’d ever met, with her undergraduate degree from Smith and, before that, her four years at an all-girl’s boarding school in Pennsylvania, where she claimed she’d learned a song called “We Are Anglicans.” She loved to regale us with it when she came over for Shabbat.

The world that we still live very much in the midst of, the illusory rocks that slice us open and the faces made of infinitesimal and untouchable grains that we touch and love with everything we are—this is Jesus on the earth.