Annie Dillard, in her radiant book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, tells of a girl blind from birth who had an operation which restored her sight. When the bandages were removed and she was led into the garden, she saw what she described as “the tree with the lights in it.”
Lately I’ve been savoring Thomas Traherne’s book Centuries of Meditations, in a wonderful contemporary edition by David Buresh called Waking Up in Heaven. I heartily agree with what C.S. Lewis wrote about this book, calling it “almost the most beautiful book in the English language. I could go on quoting from it forever.”
On July 20, 1969, the first man landed on the moon. One spring morning about the year A.D. 33 the first New Man landed on the earth. His spaceship was a tomb, and He left His pressurized linen suit inside and walked out into a garden.
This prayer seems appropriate as we approach Good Friday in the midst of a pandemic. It was composed by Marguerite Teilhard de Chardin, a former President of the Catholic Union of the Sick, and sister of the well-known writer, Pierre.
Personally, I am not in the habit of observing Lent in any formal way. I do not give up chocolate or coffee or anything else—at least, not intentionally. But willy-nilly I always end up surrendering something, because that is what Lent does: it drives us, as it did Jesus, into the wilderness.
What follows is a chapter I originally wrote for my book Practicing the Presence of People, but decided at the last minute to drop. Perhaps I felt, at that point in my life, that it was too personal to publish. But now here it is.
Many years ago the Lord revealed to me my besetting sin, and He did so through, of all people, a satanist.
For many years Steve Bell has been in the top rank of Christian singer-songwriters. Now, later in life, he is showing himself also to be a gifted writer of devotional prose.
One day when Fred Rogers was a boy, his grandfather said to him, “You made this day a special day, just by being yourself. Always remember there’s just one person in this whole world like you—and I like you just the way you are.”
The first thing I do at the start of a new year is to clear off my desk—not just to find places for all the physical odds and ends that have accumulated, but to organize my ideas, sorting through the various notebooks and scraps of paper where I’ve jotted down thoughts that came to me on the fly.