He comes from Galilee to the Jordan, and John tries to refuse him, recognizing the imbalance. Jesus insists. He steps into water that moves, carries, resists, and cannot be mastered, taking the same path everyone else was told to walk. The heavens open after the refusal of privilege, not before.
Into the Living Waters Read More »
Redemption is usually dated to the first plague, or to Sinai. It begins earlier, with a woman Torah never names. Pharaoh’s daughter comes to the river to bathe—using the verb reserved elsewhere for ritual washing—and reaches for a basket she knows full well holds a Hebrew child.
Every durable belief system has to answer one uncomfortable question: what do we do about what is broken? The labels change—sin, karma, trauma, ignorance—but the problem does not. A system without redemption is not a worldview. It is a diagnosis with no treatment plan.
Auld Lang Syne is not a celebration song. It is a ritual of recognition—shared history acknowledged, time passed, bonds that held across distance and change without anyone pretending it cost nothing. It is sung as often at funerals and farewells as at midnight, and for the same reason.
On the Turning of the Year Read More »
Nearly everyone agrees that reality exists. Almost no one agrees on what it is. Plato put it elsewhere, Aristotle put it right here, Kant split it in two, the existentialists said it is what you make of it. None of them produced a map. What they produced was a posture.
On the Nature of “IS” Read More »
A short verse for the close of the season—the hanukkiah at rest, the ornaments boxed, the old year handing off to the new.
Season’s Greetings… Read More »
Across the traditions the patterns hold with striking consistency. Dreams initiate; they do not conclude. They warn before disaster rather than explain it afterward. They disrupt comfort far more often than they confirm it. Kings receive them and do not understand them. Prisoners receive them and are ignored.
A photograph stopped the scrolling: a woman at her tenth heartiversary, in a gown with a plunging neckline, the long chest scar there for anyone who looked. Most people hide their scars because the world has a habit of treating them as flaws. In Hebrew, ot means sign, mark, testimony.
The Scars We Bear…. Read More »
When the world breaks, we reach for meaning immediately. Why did this happen. What is it trying to teach me. The reaching is automatic—and it is more often projection than discovery, a rush to press the raw thing into a shape that feels rational because the alternative is unbearable.
When the world stops making sense Read More »
You are working quietly and sense someone enter the room before you hear a footstep. The Romans had a word for the sacred version of this—numen, the charge that animates a place without taking physical form. Nearly every tradition has a vocabulary for the current. Most people have felt it and filed it away.
The Current beneath…. Read More »
