You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all … written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. … the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.  (2 Cor. 3, NRSV)   I…

A French priest drifts through an American hellscape of identical rocks. Father Latour needs water if he is going to survive. But the priest, “sensitive to the shape of things,” seems more oppressed by the featureless desert’s lack of form than its lack of water. He needs a landmark almost as much as he needs…

When I select a poem to review from Image’s archives (Do online subscribers realize what a treasure trove lies at their fingertips?), I try to find a piece that connects with current events, the liturgical calendar, or the season. I also look for a piece that is accessible yet not obvious, well-crafted but not exhibitionist.…

This week we are delighted to welcome Jessica Mesman as Good Letters’ new editor.   “Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.” ― Muriel Spark, Memento Mori It’s dark this morning. Sunrise comes later over the cornfield. The maple outside my window is yellowing,…

Like Emily Dickinson, Bray describes hope as thing with feathers, “an eastern phoebe.” Turning on sound and image, the poem “Bird on Knee” subtly shifts, inflecting new meaning. Each element nests in the other, layered, like a bird perched on a lap. Keening sounds repeat in “lightly,” “knee,” “eastern,” “phoebe,” and “me.” The density and…

For my forty-first birthday, I decided to write a personal rule of life. Turning forty hadn’t magically made me wise in the way that translates into action, and I didn’t wish to spend the next decade wading in the same bog of issues and habits and disordered affections that kept me from feeling present to…

Last night, as I walked on the road that leads me home, I saw a deer sitting in the meadow.  The moon was out, and the few stars not clouded with the glow of human endeavors kept their lights unmoving in the endless sea of almost darkness.  The deer sat there, away from the road,…

Sassy wasn’t her real name, and she wasn’t “sassy” at all. But as happens with many grandparents, the oldest grandchild names her—and the name sticks. I was that oldest grandchild. Her name was Sarah, which is what I’d hear the grownups call her. But when I tried, at age one-and-a-half or so, to say “Sarah,”…

I lost it at the dentist’s office the other day. I was there with my mother and had been flipping through copies of Good Housekeeping, waiting for hours. I was hungry and impatient by the time she emerged, then the receptionist presented us with an itemized and very detailed list of expensive dental work my…

According to the Church’s liturgical calendar, this is the twenty-fourth week of Ordinary Time, the numbered weeks between the end of the Christmas season and the beginning of Lent, as well as the weeks following Pentecost Sunday until the first Sunday of Advent. Ordinary Time is the period in which the faithful live not in…