I admit with embarrassment that I found myself, on a recent evening of very low energy, staring at the concluding segment of a television show called “Extreme Makeover.” The three women featured—note that they were all women—had been shown earlier looking the way most of us l

My mother went under the knife last summer, sacrificing her left breast to the unkind god of cancer. The uncontrolled dividing by abnormal cells, which raised a tightened, angry welt on her breast that her doctor had recommended watching for over a year, turned out to be an aggressive tumor. After t

One of my oldest friends has become a stranger. Gradually, each yearly domino has come to bear on its predecessor, until the cascade has landed here: from closest of friends to bare acquaintance. My attempts at staying in touch are met with silence. Take a hint, I tell myself.   But I can&rsquo

With each passing year, I think more fondly of a not-so-distant time in my life: my last child was a toddler, and my three older children attended the elementary school where my husband taught sixth grade. We had just built a house in the mountains, and our nation of six was secure and thriving. I w

On the Monday holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr., my two older daughters and I have for some years participated in a march for peace and signed a “Women for Peace” petition. It is a small rite of passage. Those daughters, now in college, signed their way through their formative year

Two friends have taken their own lives within a short time: one by consuming more of the drugs that were killing her anyway; the other, also enslaved to drugs, who hastened his death with a bullet. The phone rings: there has been a suicide. A life is ended. Just like that.The avoidability of these d

Psalm 150 happened in our youth center last night, although we might have to change some of the words to make it an exact fit:

          Praise him with bass and lead guitar

It had to happen. Just as the shoemaker’s children go barefoot and the carpenter’s children live under a leaky roof, I knew this day would come. I am a church worker whose daughter has stopped going to church. My daughters have grown up with the church as their second home, because it wa

If marriage is a source of sacramental grace, why are we as a church so uncomfortable about sex?

Spring break, in our mountainous part of the country, does not always coincide with spring. The chill of winter often lingers past the vernal equinox. Today, for example, it is snowing on our poor, tentative tulip shoots. The wind is at war with forward progress, and the ice on the road has kept us