(May 15th is National Armadillo Day, I don’t know anything about armadillos, but May 23 is World Turtle Day and Pentecost, and I am thinking ahead to both. In the cemetery I met this my relation, slowly-enough paced to let me draw her with watercolor pencil. Where will she be in a week? Where will… Read More
Saturday Prayer, May 1, 2021
Prayer for International Workers Day God, we hear your voice singing …I relieved your shoulder of the burdenand your hands were freed from the basket. On this International Workers Day,we pray for justicefor workers everywhere –a living wage, workplace safeguards,affordable housing, child care,health care rightsun-tied to full-time hours,re-opening plans based in worker safetyrather than customer… Read More
Saturday Prayer, March 20, 2021
Rev. Dr. Fran Bogle, captions her photograph this way: “Threatened roseate spoonbills slowly returning from near extinction are still striving to thrive. They flash hope every time they open their wings. I’d like to be that kind of flasher. How about you?” God, I want to look in the mirrorand see my inner roseate spoonbill.… Read More
Saturday Prayer, March 6, 2021
Nancy Donovan took the picture below when it was 12℉, and the snow was falling. She is not a church-goer but she called her picture “Lilac resurrection.” God, I give you thanks,not so much for the Eastercoming in twenty-nine more days,but the everyday eastersthat look like … home from the hospital after covid,ninety meetings in… Read More
Saturday Prayer, January 31, 2021
God, I give you thanksfor the people in my life who cannot see,including my mother and father,who teach me to listen,smell and taste and feelevery alive surface of the world, and for friends who cannot hearand make an orchestrafrom all the other senses. I pray for patience with thosewho use “see” to mean understand,“vision” for… Read More
Saturday Prayer, January 16, 2021
( reflecting 1 Samuel 3) God, you who want to wake me,shake me, and just have someone to talk toin the middle of the night, I pray gratitude for the Eli’sin my life, the so-imperfect people,who were poor parents,or poor judges,who made mistake after mistake,avoided naming injustice,missed God-moments in their own lives. Yet they were… Read More
Saturday Prayer, January 2, 2021
This is the story about this picture, a picture I call “comfort and joy.” It is a porta potty at a building site near where I live, halfway between Crossroads House, the shelter for people who are unhoused and the downtown of Portsmouth. Work has stopped on the site till spring, but they have left… Read More
Saturday Prayer, November 28, 2020
(Thanks so much to Scott Marrese-Wheeler for his photograph from Hidden Farm Road outside of McFarland, Wisconsin. He quotes Neena Verma, “Twilight, the only time of the day when the light and dark meet and become one.”) God, it is the twilightof the liturgical seasonsand today my Pentecost is a heap of ashes waiting for a… Read More
Saturday Prayer, November 14, 2020
(This photograph shows what my friend Nancy Donovan has created for a feral cat who has been coming to her porch for food and a safe place to sleep for a couple years. This cat cannot bear being indoors with the other cats or near a human. Nancy writes, “Every year I make her a… Read More
Saturday Prayer, September 19, 2020
God, I need a bigger bra. I actually have wanted to say those words all my life. I lost (most) of my lockdown pounds, so I was not expecting changes of that kind this late in life (snow-kissed hair, quilted face), and I wasn’t going to risk trying bras on. I took the __… Read More
