As I wrote last year, I know that a novel has me hooked when I start praying for the characters. And such it was again with my recent return to John Steinbeck’s classic novel of the Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939. My husband and I listened to the CD of the…

Having lived all my life in the Northeast, I associate the liturgical seasons with certain weather. Advent is snow-blown and dark, as is Christmas. Ash Wednesday ranges from hard-packed ice to melting-snow mud; Easter ranges from the chilly beginning of brightness to sunny warmth and the first green shoots. Wintering this year in southern Arizona,…

I’m sitting at my home-office desk, unable to concentrate because the men painting the outside of my house are scraping the wall exactly two feet from my ears. It isn’t the scraping sounds that distract me, but their conversation, which I can hear every word of through the wall. The older man—I’ll call him Evan—is…

Once I asked my neighbor, the composer David Liptak, why listening to classical music can be so meditative. David offered: “when your mind is focused on following the pattern in music, other preoccupations tend to drop away.” As I expand my skills in knitting (which I’ve mused on in earlier posts such as this oneand…

Everyone knows Rumi—thanks in large part to Coleman Barks’ rich, delightful translations. But how many know the other early master of Sufi poetry: Hafiz of Shiraz? Now, thanks to a new translation, Hafiz too can become a joyously playful companion on our spiritual journeys. Like Rumi, Hafiz was Persian, living in the fourteenth century—just a…

I can tell that a novel is top-rate when I start praying for the characters. And when, on finishing the book, I sit immobilized, loathe to break the spell of the world it has brought me into. A world drawn from our own but given a shape and meaning that allows us to see something…

This post isn’t just for knitters. It’s for anyone who reads poetry—or prose. I’d love your help in sleuthing for knitting metaphors: in poetry especially, but wherever they happen to turn up. In my previous post, I mused on knitting as a way of meditating with poetry. Today I want to turn the tables and…

Knitting is my current obsession. I began learning just a year ago, after I won three classes at a silent auction for a community organization in my town. When I decided to bid for the knitting classes, I was thinking: yes, in my grandmotherly years, this is the perfect craft to teach my young granddaughters.…

Laura Miller announces her nonbelief right in the subtitle of her recently published The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia. And the explicit premise of her book is that an avowed non-Christian can love The Chronicles of Narnia despite their Christian sub-text. So I must confess that I opened Miller’s book with some skepticism…

I missed the film Chocolat when it ran the theaters in 2000, so just recently first saw it on video at home. I was enchanted, as the film intends me to be. To my mind, it’s a story about incarnational joy—and the transformative power of the generous dispersal of the luscious in our lives. For…