“Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor […]
Anxiety and the Kingdom Read More »
Most people who have heard of the Omer think of it as a countdown. Forty-nine days between Passover and Shavuot, ticked off one by one until the calendar moves on. That framing is not wrong, exactly—but it misses almost everything that matters. A countdown measures distance to an event. What the Omer measures is something
A Special Pascha Essay — Part Five of Five Mary. The fourth essay ended there. One name, spoken before sunrise in a garden, and then silence. That is not where the story ends. It is where it begins again. The men and women who scattered in Gethsemane, who hid behind locked doors, who walked away
The Fates of the Followers Read More »
A Special Pascha Essay—Part Four of Five The city is quiet. Shabbat is ending. The first pale suggestion of light has not yet reached the horizon over Jerusalem, and the streets are empty in the way that streets are only empty when something has just finished and something else has not yet begun. In a
What the Silence Held Read More »
A Special Pascha Essay—Part Three of Five The Greek word is stauros—a term that can denote an upright stake or a cross structure more broadly; the exact shape is not specified by the text. The T-shaped cross of Christian iconography, the crux immissa of later tradition, is not specified by the text and was not established by early
The Weight of the Wood Read More »
A Special Pascha Essay—Part Two of Five Thirty pieces of silver. Counted into a hand in the dark, somewhere in Jerusalem, while the city was still full of Passover pilgrims and the smell of sacrifice still hung in the air from the Temple courts. The amount was not arbitrary. Zechariah 11:12 names it as the price a
Thirty Weights of Silver Read More »
A Special Pascha Essay—Part One of Five The room is close and warm. Twelve men have gathered in Jerusalem—a city swollen beyond its seams with pilgrims, the air thick with smoke from the Temple courts, the sounds of an ancient festival pressing through every wall. Their teacher rises from the table. He removes his outer
The Blood and the Cup Read More »
Some things cannot be spoken. Not because the words are forbidden, not because the throat has closed from grief, but because the thing itself stands outside the reach of language. Words require edges—a beginning, an end, a container that can hold meaning. Some encounters dissolve those edges entirely. What remains, when the edges are gone,
Every so often, someone asks me a question that gives me genuine pause. My niece recently asked my thoughts on the concept of the firmament—not the flat-earth notion that has found a second life on social media, but something more considered. She sent along an image: one of those collectible display bubbles, the kind used
The World in a Bubble Read More »
“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
Treasures and Masters Read More »
