Articles

. . . faith in the faith that the way the story ends
is not the story—

May some mercy find them both.

Deacon Nkosi, a member of the church, told the newspaper,
“The pastor taught us about faith on Sunday last week.”

I don’t exist independently of the world around me, that all the boundary lines I like to think keep me separate from others are in some sense imagined and temporally bound. I can’t exist without others. And I may not be the hero of my story.  

Maybe I was too bus-lagged to haggle over
the price of a portent, much less a cheap
souvenir. . .

Bible open. On her lap. Same page for years.
Her white hair. Spooky red ink. Deuteronomy.

There are so many ways to fly and walk
in place I never move.

I’m lucky to know a lot of really good, generous people, but they don’t fall into any of those standard narratives of saintly lives. They’re people who just keep on trucking and being good in the face of a lot of injustice and ingratitude.

In my absence, one sprig of English ivy
has crept through a crack
under my window.

All at once the stillness breaks
into a great applause of wings, the mounting up
in doxology, the downsweep then
of many heads in prayer.

Objects, rituals, and sites make the spiritual present, function as witness or proof of the miraculous, and turn individual perceptions into collective convictions.