Skip to main content

Death is a Comma

When you lose someone you love, it frightens you. Not just for the loss of them. Your grief opens up the possibility that you will lose everyone you love. But if everything is process, nothing is broken, and maybe nothing needs to be fixed. Rachel Naomi Remen We humans give tiers to love. Those that are more important, and even most important....

Continue reading

The Bishop Came to Our House

Yesterday, in church, the Bishop came to our house. She wore her gold hat and white robes. She carried a carved shepherd’s crook, because she is the shepherd of our souls here on earth. At her side stood a tiny woman called the Bishop’s chaplain, as if the Bishop gets to travel with her BFF spiritual friend always. The Bishop was...

Continue reading

The Devil You Know

I saw the book at Novel Bookstore in Memphis. Its vivid orange and black cover drew me in. I realized the author was Charles Blow, who I had followed on Twitter before I got off Twitter. I always liked what he had to say. In the back of my brain, I seemed to recall he had moved from somewhere in the North to Atlanta. I picked up “The Devil...

Continue reading

Matters of the Heart

We kids loved Pogo. The old comic books were stacked in the attic of our duplex on Belhaven Street. They lived there with everything else from Mother’s “Before Us” life. Her heavy bowling ball from her competitive bowling days. Her very own ice skates she wore to glide on lakes so frozen you could drive a car across them. That...

Continue reading

White People’s Fake Fear

One of the major rites of passage in my young life was finally getting old enough to shop with my friends in downtown Jackson. We spent many a Saturday morning planning where we would shop as we walked up and down Capitol Street, the city’s main commercial artery. The plan was to ride the bus from our Belhaven neighborhood to downtown—all...

Continue reading

Where Do We Go Now?

Where do we go now? The Guns and Roses refrain keeps traveling through my brain. I’m in flux. We’re re-establishing a presence in Memphis, renting an apartment downtown until we can hopefully find a condo. I’m so place oriented, y’all. This splitting back into three parts—New Orleans, the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and Memphis—has...

Continue reading

What We’ve Made of Christianity

The Easter service was lovely, it really was. My favorite person was in church, and she tootled her fingers at us during the passing of the peace. And yet it wears me out, what we’ve made of Christianity. Today, the Gospel reading on the most momentous day of our religious year began with Mary Magdalene. Early in the morning, Mary Magdalene...

Continue reading