And if life is a miraculous opening, why cannot death be a miraculous opening also? — Brian Doyle 1 In Acts 7:16, readers are told that the bodies of Jacob and his twelve sons were brought back to Shechem and laid in the tomb that Abraham had bought for a sum of silver from the […]
The Holidays Are Upon Us!
This one comes to us from Jesse Pirschel. The holidays are upon us! When I say “upon us,” I mean it in the same sense as “the Philistines are upon us!” The Thanksgiving feast has just wound down and people are busily replacing their faux fall foliage with evergreens and twinkling lights. Ready or not, […]
What Could Be Creepier
This one comes to us from Juliette Alvey. I could never be a hunter. This is not a moral judgment but rather a statement about my squeamishness. I was just driving home and saw a raccoon get hit by the car in front of me. I felt my gut wrench as the animal lay still […]
All Hallows Eve Is for Sufferers
“The harvest was in, the summer done, the world brown and drab and mindful of death. Snow had not yet descended to comfort and hide the bony trees or blackened fields; so with little effort man could look about and see a meditation on death and life hereafter… The vigil for the souls, as well […]
Text Message for the Otherworld
When I was in school, Facebook was young. One evening, I saw a dead classmate’s profile, his picture featured on the sidebar, a recommended friend. I spent the next hours perusing the status updates he had posted when he did not realize his days were numbered. For anyone wondering, now Facebook has an answer for […]
In the Midst of Life We Are in October
What images come to mind when you think of Halloween? Ghosts? Skeletons? Gravestones? Some Christians cry foul at such “morbid” imagery, but it seems to me this stems from a safely modern, bourgeois outlook. Our older brothers and sisters in medieval Europe most assuredly wouldn’t know what to make of the bland, sterilized Christianity regnant […]
Preaching Good News When Clinically Sad
I talk about death and grief a lot. It is a running joke in my house that I am always thinking about death and I am always willing to talk to someone about grief. This shouldn’t surprise anyone given my life (and death) experiences. The work of a priest requires that you be in the […]
Comedians in Cars Talking About Death
This one comes to us from Juliette Alvey. Anytime I hear someone speak positively about death or not fearing death, my ears perk up. I am not one of those people. I am scared to death to die. So when Jerry Seinfeld had a conversation with John Mulaney on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and predicted […]
All the Life We Cannot See (and All the Death We Should Be Doing)
Recently my four-year-old son has become obsessed with all things Hamilton: the musical, the person, the coffee table book I bought my husband and repurposed as a spontaneous gift for my boy, who flips through it daily and asks me to sing him the songs. He’s turned his older brother onto the soundtrack, which means […]
Summer in Omelas: What Are We to Do With All This (Climate) Grief? Part 2
If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it … Scapegoating, exporting our unresolved hurt, is the most common storyline of human history. The Jesus Story is about radically transforming history and individuals so that we don’t just keep handing on the pain to the next generation. Richard Rohr, “Transforming Pain” […]
Summer in Omelas: What Are We to Do With All This (Climate) Grief? Part 1
Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence … has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God — not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our […]
Alchemy in Grief
One of the recurring emotions families experience in the midst of grief is guilt. They feel guilty about “things done or left undone.” They feel guilty about still being alive. When my dad’s mother was dying of pancreatic cancer, he was just a teenager. He once told me how he avoided her room during the […]
