My grandmother did not pass on to the afterlife without leaving me something. After a life that spanned nearly a century, three generations were on hand to send her off to her Maker. Her funeral was simple and heartfelt, if a bit unorganized. The priest asked my aunt, just before the procession bega

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?