The Fourth Wall

This last fall I went on a spiritual journey that I had not been on before.  Accompanied by Paul Tillich’s The Courage To Be, I read and considered that the God, and I’m not sure if I should capitalize that usage or not, I had worshiped my whole life might not be real.  Or might…

does God really share Godself?   are we made participants in the divine Nature?  there was that one time  on my knees using the seat of the chair as my coloring table next to my childhood crush Sarah, I filled in Jonah’s sandals with a brown Crayon all the while my father, the pastor, worked the…

it’s April, the spring showers are trying to grow something under my feet and in my soul I had lunch with my son today, a possibility that will disappear in the fall when he’s gone   I only recently discovered that his senior privileges allow for him to meet for lunch in the middle of the…

Almost an hour after I had fallen asleep my eldest daughter woke my wife and I from our vacation property rental bed.   “Mabel keeps gagging and isn’t responsive”  My faculties are subdued if not compromised by 100 mg of Seroquel, a mood disorder drug I’ve been taking for almost two years.  My groggy calculations based…

Baby Names Book There would seem to be a basic logic about the way relationships work that suggests the more opposite you are, the better it works.  Nothing about the human condition can be reduced to an axiom, but the wisdom in this case does seem to be conventional.  Yin and Yang.  North and South…

Lottery Ticket We open our Christmas presents on Christmas morning.  That was a holiday shakeup for me when I got married.  My family of origin opened presents on Christmas eve.   The compromise that has elbowed its way into our tradition is a larger extended family gathering that includes a White Elephant gift exchange on…

Headstones Three days before Thanksgiving our family gathered for an occasion of mild emotional stress.  Crouton the hamster died of complications due to something mysterious.  The girls, who were the hamster’s legal guardian in the sovereign nation of the Carney family household, reported that Crouton displayed cold-like symptoms the day before.  I’m suspicious of this…

There’s a pumpkin sitting next to my yard waste bin that’s been there since late fall. It greets me every evening when I arrive home.  It’s Roy’s.  That is, it was the pumpkin that we purchased for him that he failed to carve.  On the evening that we carved pumpkins, an evening of cherished family…

This article first appeared on Good Faith Media. I’m working on paying attention to what I pay attention to.  Lately, I’ve wondered why we often find the most visceral versions of ourselves appear in the social media comments section. Why, in the anonymity offered through these platforms, do we permit instincts to govern our behaviors…

This article first appeared on Good Faith Media on February 4th, 2025. The long unredacted article can be found below. My father pastored a small town non-denominational church in northern Wisconsin.  In the 1990s, Tomahawk’s economic existence consisted of two paper mills and a Harley-Davidson plant.  I’ve frequently described my father’s parishioners as Flannery O’Conner…