memento vivere

It has been common, perhaps since the advent of print news media, for religious leaders to publish meditations or words of comfort or exhortations in response to national (or local) crises or on national (or local) commemorative days. As you may have noticed, I am not one such religious leader. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that I don’t really consider myself a “religious leader”; I am neither a pope nor a bishop nor a Martin Luther King, Jr., Billy Graham, o

When Emily and I were married, twenty-plus years ago, some good friends gave us a Christian book on marriage as a wedding present. In the first few years of our marriage we read through it at least twice, and still to this day we apply a number of the principles that we learned from it. The overall premise of the book is that God’s design for marriage is not to make us happy, but to make us holy. One of the points that the author makes is that we tend to think of the pursuit

One of the many things I love about the parish I serve is how long it takes the congregation to pass the peace. In many churches in the US, at the peace folks will stay nestled in their pew and only greet the people in their immediate vicinity. Not at All Saints’! Here, it’s as if the captain has turned off the fasten seatbelt sign and all are suddenly free to move about the cabin. Which is a beautiful thing. As some more seasoned Episcopalians will remember, before the 1979