E.B. White puts words on the tension we feel everyday: I arise in the morning, torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. That is clearly the healthy tension in which we all live and move and have our being. Between our obligation to those who gave us these undeserved inheritances and those to whom we shall pass it on in the generations to come. Grandaddy had a useful term to describe the first phase: Beholden. “Beholden” means to be obligated, especially in gratitude. To […]
Body Parts
In early January, back before this ubiquitous pandemic, I acquired a new knee to replace the one my mother knitted together for my date of birth back in 1942. All those years and untold miles made parting with the old one a form of sweet sorrow. However, as they say in some body shops, “parts is parts”. I picked up a new hip several years back and a brand new ankle from Duke. So it will be hard for me to claim that I’m made up of original equipment. But, hey, who’s to say that we need to stay in […]
Easter in an Egg
Easter has a way of bringing out my childhood faith full of eggs and bunnies and family photos after church in that new Easter outfit. Back in those good old days in order to continue to hoodwink you, your parents would buy special eggs made of sugar and filled with the risen Jesus. You must remember them: in one end you could peer into a peephole and see the graveyard and Jesus with a raised hand and the sun glowing behind him. It was such a neat way to bring all of it together: eggs, rabbits and resurrections […]
The Hell of Easter
When people ask me what I think about hell, I have a very limited repertoire of images and anecdotes. My favorites is to clump a lot of my bad memories about Easter into how that first day in hell would be spent. It would begin with the proverbial sunrise service in the high school gym [due to rain on the football field] with the junior high band playing “Up from the Grave He Arose!” This would be followed by a men’s breakfast in the church kitchen with sordid stories from their worst Easters ever. You would move to the morning […]