Vision of the Shepherds/At the Manger

January 4, 2024.Reading time 18 minutes.

Sections Five and Six of WH Auden’s “For The Time Being.” (FTTB)(For section four: click here) Well, I’ve gotten a bit behind schedule, and so we’ll cover two sections today. But this isn’t bad, really, because it will allow us to continue the compare/contrast of two groups of characters. As you might recall from last […]

The Summons

January 2, 2024.Reading time 28 minutes.

SECTION FOUR OF WH AUDEN’S “FOR THE TIME BEING” (FTTB) (For Section Three, click here)After a break for New Year’s weekend, let’s continue with our conversation about WH Auden’s “For the Time Being,” (FTTB) and section four, in which we meet the “Wise Men.” I should note that this is all a bit out of […]

The Temptation of St. Joseph

January 2, 2024.Reading time 21 minutes.

SECTION TWO OF WH AUDEN’S “FOR THE TIME BEING” (FTTB) (For Second Two, click here)As I’ve already said previously, this is my favorite section of the entire poem, and a bit of writing/theology that’s been deeply influential to me for thirty years. Auden’s depiction of Joseph here, to me, is spot on for what he […]

The Annunciation

January 2, 2024.Reading time 9 minutes.

SECTION TWO OF WH AUDEN’S “FOR THE TIME BEING” (FTTB) (for section one, click here)Auden locates the Annunciation in “The Garden,” which we seem led to believe is Garden of Eden. In that Garden, each of the four Jungian “Faculties” — Sensation, Feeling, Intuition, and Thought— get a chance to speak. As a licensed administrator […]

Advent

December 26, 2023.Reading time 10 minutes.

SECTION ONE OF WH AUDEN’S “FOR THE TIME BEING” (FTTB) Advent is the season we have just finished —the season the Consumerist Cultural Christmas calls “The Christmas Season.” But, the Christmas season starts on Christmas Day and, like that earworm torture of a song, it does indeed run for twelve days. But to counter that […]

Calm is a Form of Resistance

December 22, 2023.Reading time 12 minutes.

“Silent night, Holy night…all is calm, all is bright.” Just days from now —and like Christians all around the globe— we’ll sing these words on Christmas Eve. We’ll light our candles, hold them high, and experience a brief, blissful moment of “calm.” There is something in this ending to Christmas Eve worship that always calms […]

Incarnational Seeing:

December 13, 2023.Reading time 10 minutes.

The Sunday before Advent starts, we actually get a pretty good reminder of the power of Incarnational Seeing. Incarnational seeing is my language for what others call the spiritual practice of “paying attention.” There is a lot of buzz in the culture right now around the concept of “mindfulness” as a tool for reducing stress […]

Same Old Lang Syne (Fogelberg cover)

December 12, 2023.Reading time 7 minutes.

“Die Hard” is to Christmas movies, what this song is to Christmas music. Listeners will no doubt forever debate whether it is, or is not, a Christmas song. One thing is clear: It definitely creeps into playlists this time of year. Over the past few months, I been learning it on guitar (because that’s my […]

Driving Gratitude

November 23, 2023.Reading time 13 minutes.

On this Thanksgiving morning, I’m posting a picture that shows you what I see every day as I am driving home from North Oak Cliff. This pic from the great Justin Terveen shows a much more swollen river than usual…I mostly post it for how the buildings look…because that’s how it looks, every night… I […]

Sixty Years

November 22, 2023.Reading time 11 minutes.

Today is the sixty-year anniversary.Sixty years is a very long time.But, for all of us who grew up here in Dallas, our city still lives with the legacy of the Kennedy assassination. This is a very old song I wrote to name what it felt like to grow up here, in the shadow and shame […]