A heart-lifting revelation

I am turning 70 this year. As Michelangelo said in his 90’s, “I am still learning.”

One thing I keep learning and relearning is that we tend to look at the very elderly and forget that they were ever the very young.

The greying or disappearing hair, the deeply-crenelated skin, the bent shoulders and back, the arthritic hands. We feel sympathy for the very old because it seems they are but remnants of a life. A crumpled leaf soon to be swept away by a random wind.

In most modern societies we tend to exalt the beauty of the young…

Called or not called,
God is present.

How reassuring,
yet how frightening.

When lonely and heartbroken,
is it good to know God is there?

Or is it deeply frustrating to know
that God is aware of our suffering,

yet does nothing to make it stop.
Nothing. Or so it seems.

Why pray if God will not intervene?
Will refraining from prayer make it worse?

God, ever present, must already know
of our joy and our suffering and fear.

Called or not called, God is present.
I guess it is for us to decide

whether knowing and accepting this tramples our…

“It’s me!” cries the wren, disdainful of proper grammar. “I told you I would be back in April, and I am a wren who keeps his promises.”

Under normal circumstances, I would be less than enthusiastic about a returning visitor blasting a greeting , just outside my bedroom window, at 6 AM.

But this is a House Wren, an officious and pompous herald for all the returning migrants winging it back to New England in April and May. Spring has no longer just begun. It has now taken full and boisterous possession!

Ounce for ounce, House Wrens have got more…