Over the past fifteen years the devotional and literary aspects of my spiritual life have taken different forms...
A Mad Tea Party (Part One)
One of my favorite stories has become Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I first met Alice a few summers ago when I learned I would be reading Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There with my eighth graders. Naturally, I thought Alice and I might need to become better acquainted. Sixth months later, I adapted both novels for the stage (with a greater emphasis on Wonderland and a few beloved scenes and characters from Looking-Glass), using Martin Gardner’s annotated version.
The Mystery of the Ordinary: Musings on Communion
Growing up in a Baptist church, I didn’t hear much about mystery. Sermons were deep, but also highly logical, focusing often on analyzing a short text, which was great, and I learned a lot, but each tradition in Christ’s Body has its own set of strengths and weaknesses, hence our need for each other. Some traditions probably focus too much on mystery or use it as an excuse to not think, while others, like the one in which I grew up, tend to be safely cerebral, to the unintentional exclusion of mystery.
All His Grace
Fruitless. Late at night, the word attacks my mind and heart. Worse than failure, this word pierces my feminine soul. Worse than the proverbial feeling of insignificance in relationships or at work, I’m approaching thirty with no children.
“Then You Are Somebody, Sir?”
My Shakespeare professor chanted the first lines of Beowulf in Old English to help us better understand the rhythm of Anglo-Saxon poetry. While I’d read the poem multiple times, I didn’t exactly have the first line memorized, but it didn’t matter. There was magic in these words I couldn’t understand and wouldn’t have recognized if you’d placed them before me. But the archaic words hailed something otherworldly, and my soul longed for it, though I couldn’t tell you what it was.
Votary of the Blue Flower 