(Christian Week, February 2015)
KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ “Love is better than wine,” is how the writer of the Song of Songs put it. “Love is stronger than death.”
Solomon, said to be the wisest of men ever, is credited with the words that resonate with meaning even now, almost 3,000 years later, even in our time, as insecure and fickle an age as any.
Better than wine. Stronger than death. Read More »
(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, January 24, 2015)
KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ He goes by a false name so he’s not found and killed. I just met him. I’ll call him Ahmed in this, his story. He recently shared it around our dinner table.
Cradle-to-grave without free choice Read More »
(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, December 20, 2014)
ISTANBUL, TURKEY ✦It was a Sunday, the first day of Advent, en route from Hamilton to my African home, when I toured the Old City here, a place where religions and cultures and empires have collided for centuries. This is when my guide for the day said what he did.
I had asked him about some historic notes and holy relics in the Topkapi Palace Museum, items identified as thousands of years old from ancient Israel, but looking dubiously more modern and Ottoman-like, when he told me as plainly as if he was giving the weather report that, “It’s all mythology anyway. Whatever you believe is true, that’s the truth.”
The paradox of Christmas Read More »
(Christian Week – December 2014)
Today in the food court there was a piano. The pianist, wearing a red Santa hat (naturally), finished “Jingle Bells” through the dull roar of shoppers, their winter coats unzipped, hats aside, while they sat and talked and ate KFC or New York Fries or whatever they happened to have.
Then a young woman, scarf thrown loosely over her shoulder, stood and put her cellphone to her ear. Strangely enough, she sang into the phone. And her voice, somehow, melodious and majestic, carried through the entire food court. Brows raised. Heads turned.
Hope in the food court Read More »
(UCU Standard – Monday, November 17, 2014)
MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ It’s a risky move, of course, to open up your Sunday morning message to questions. You never know who might ask what.
But this is what happened last Sunday. The minister who I listened to had a post-sermon question-and-answer session and a woman stepped forward with what they call a show-stopper.
Her voice quivering, she asked rather plainly and desperately, “So just how do you get saved?”
Salvation is a mystery that can’t be faked Read More »
(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, October 18, 2014)
KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ It’s hard to know what it means to be human some days, let alone a saint, but there are clues here and there, like in this novel, The Plague, by Albert Camus, where two atheists – one a doctor, one a journalist – have a brief conversation.
They’re in Africa fighting a devastating plague when one says to the other, “It comes down to this. What interests me is learning to become a saint.”
There’s a mystery to the whole thing, a hunger, a longing …
The long and mysterious road to sainthood Read More »
KAMPALA, UGANDA✦It’s the children who in the end will be given the keys to the Kingdom.
This is what Jesus said on the matter. Be a kid again. The way up is down. If you want even half a shot at eternal life, as if it were somehow possible, go and grow young.
Learning to be a kid again Read More »
(The UCU Standard – Monday, September 29, 2014)
MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ The problem with university life is that it can bypass your heart and feed your mind directly with foolish notions about the work world, namely that some grand career will make you a personally large being.
“Hey, look at me! I have this job now. It’s who I am!”
And maybe you’ll win much of that war that’s so well-known around the world, that is the war to get ahead.
Your life is much more than your career Read More »
