More on: prayer

There is a moment prayer occurs to the conscious mind, or rather the absence of prayer in the moment of need hitherto. Experience names the vacuum it has been seized by, only the mouth— the physical fact of the mouth, sensuous, capable of beauty or deceit— can’t form the words the ventral thalamus is telegraphing.…

THE LORD GOD BIRD fled its home on the Singer Tract in the bayou of Louisiana in 1944 and hasn’t been conclusively seen or heard from since. Its official name is the ivory-billed woodpecker. Campephilus principalis. The bird was the largest woodpecker in America until its purported demise. Great God, people were known to say.…

The following passages are excerpted from Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, a “non-memoir” by Lauren Winner. © 2012 by Lauren Winner. Reprinted by permission of HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.   Middles might be said to be under-theorized. There is an abundance of work on opening and closure, but very little discussion of…what…

I have often been afraid to think of Augustine thinking, his mind a field, he confesses, that must be worked with much cost and sweat, and he the farmer laboring. Just knowing how little one can know is enough for most, but not Augustine— whatever crept around in his mind had no right to privacy.…

Since I stole your money, Philemon, and even more, myself, the body that broke earth and stacked stones at daybreak while you slept, you have every right to lash me till the whites of my intestines show, brand FUG on my forehead, or throw me to the lions, who love especially the taste of escaped…

I know a woman who, when she hears wise words uttered, turns her palms upward. She’s as likely to place her hands on my shoulders, to comfort. None of it for show. Palms upward, she’s a basin. Palms downward, a wellspring, rain. May we be basin and well to each other. May we be rainlight…

IT SEEMS TO ME, who have never held a brush in my life except to dip it in a bucket of house paint, that a good reason to become a painter, aside from the enduring mystery of beauty, is to learn how to see. And painters do indeed spend an inordinate amount of time in…

Qui diceris Paraclitus (O Comforter, to Thee we cry) __________—“Veni, Creator Spiritus” Come at me, Comforter. I strain toward your inrushing arrow as it halves then halves then halves the distance that severs us. Till kingdom comes its Zeno-arrow lurches in time lapse, not still where it was, not yet in that place where it…

If it happens, it must be by chance, the one bum note the slight misstep that leads toward an “ageless wisdom that outlasts all things else,” by which Augustine means his god and his god only, and not the Peavey amps, the wires coiled into a snare in the practice room adjoining a neighbor’s summer…

I’M WAITING for the 6:40 am train to take me to Boston. It’s a forty-five minute ride that I use to read “inspirational” works. What’s inspirational? Anything that helps get me through the day with some kind of inner peace, with a sense that what I’m doing is worthwhile. I take a deep breath as…