By Maria Psalm 130: 1-6 Psalm 40:1-3 1 John 4: 7-19 When I was 16, my mother, sister, and two close family friends, Judy and Elizabeth, went on an epic road trip from Maryland to the Southwest. We made a stop to visit the Grand Canyon, but our main destination was Glorieta, New Mexico, to […]
Anger
By Denise, 1990s “God is a righteous judge who expresses his wrath every day. If he does not relent he will sharpen his sword, he will bend and straighten his bow. He has prepared deadly weapons he makes ready his flaming arrows.” Psalm 7 I used to take great offense at Old Testament readings that […]
Grief and the pandemic
Maria May 2020 The fact is that I thought about starting this blog a few weeks before she died. I was even tempted to call it “Dying Would Be the Easy Part”. She and I would write together about the really hard conversations we were having, about how to arrange care for her as she […]
Justice: Is it Un-American?
Denise ~1992 Resurrection Farm newsletter Meghan McKenna, in her tapes on justice in the Bible redefines it for us. God’s justice is that everyone gets what they deserve. And everyone, being a child of God, a creation of the Almighty, a beloved of the Creator, deserves life, a full life, a life of being valued […]
Common Ground
Denise Autumn 1990 Resurrection Farm newsletter The great truths of Christianity are mostly always paradoxes. “To lose your life is to save it.” “Even though he dies, he will life forever.” “Blessed are they who mourn.” Jesus was the God-man, the victim-savior, the died-risen. To be a follower of Christ is to be able to […]
Autumn Leaves
Denise December 1988 St. John Catholic Church newsletter It seems to me that the leaves were particularly beautiful this year, a glorious burst of bright colors. I thought, how typical of our surprising God that he gives to the trees their greatest beauty and radiance right before they die for the winter. It usually seems […]
Why I didn’t become a nuclear physicist
Denise, 2007 When I was a junior in high school, in 1959, I got a 99 in the standardized test for biology. I was very pleased with myself and toyed with the idea of becoming a scientist. Nuclear Physics sounded good, although most of what I knew of it came from science fiction movies and […]
I Am the Revenge of My Grandmothers
Maria, January 2020 I think that my very life is the revenge of my foremothers, all of them. I’ve thought many times about my grandmothers. One was Anastasia, who I never met. She died 5 years before I was born. But I know that she was born at the turn of the last century to […]
Magoo: a Dog Story
Denise, 2004 We wanted a small dog, a Benji, a pupnot a hulking Heinz 57 like you. Sad, nearsighted Doberman mix,sitting in the cornerlike a chastised child. “She shakes hands.”The woman said.And you did, raising a black and tan paw.And we fell madly in love with your lop-eared faceand decidedly goofy demeanor. You moved right […]
The Sound of Winter
Denise, 2006 The winter of ’86 was especially bitter. An early December blizzard left mountains of dirty brown snow on the shopping center parking lots and later snows froze on the roads and sidewalks. The holidays had been particularly restless ones for Dan, who disliked holidays, birthdays, and anything requiring emotional participation. So one morning […]