Here’s a color image of the painting I described in my Christmas Eve sermon:
Caravaggio’s “Madonna of the Loreto”
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Daily Archives: January 1, 2010
Night – The New York Review of Books
There’s a deeply moving, brief essay by Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books. Judt is a historian whose work I respect immensely. I began reading him during 1989 when the Iron Curtain was coming down and Corrie and I were making plans to live in Germany. I have followed his work ever since. He is an astute and perceptive commentator on current events, especially in Europe. His deep knowledge of European history allows him to see things that go unnoticed by others.
He was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gherig’s disease) in 2008 and is now paralyzed from the neck down. This meditation focuses on his experiences during the night. It’s available here: Night – The New York Review of Books.
He describes an existence that most of us find unfathomable–an active mind trapped in body that can’t move, but through which he continues to have feeling. He will continue to write these brief essays for the NYRB and they promise to give insight into this disease but I feel somewhat voyeuristic as I read.
His essay does raise questions about the relationship of body and mind that have long intrigued me and about which I may write more substantively some day.
Re-reading old sermons
In Maryanne Robinson’s Gilead, the elderly Protestant pastor is going through decades of sermons, ostensibly to put them in some sort of order for posterity. His sermons are written on paper. The exercise gives him the opportunity to reflect back on his ministry, on those many years of being with his congregation, on the changes that took place over those decades, and also, to ask about the meaning of it all.
I haven’t preached anywhere near as many sermons as that, and I’ve preached in several different contexts but I do go back and look over what I’ve written before. It is fascinating to do so. I find myself drawn back into the life of the parish in which I preached the sermon and very often into the mood of the time, even if fewer than five years have passed. Rereading those sermons often brings to mind members of those parishes, the struggles they were going through, and, inevitably, those people who have departed this life.
Very often I go back over past sermons in hopes of finding some nugget to include in the sermon I’m currently writing. This week, not having to write a sermon for the First Sunday after Christmas Day, I went back over some I had preached over the years. Given the heightened anxiety over terrorist attacks again, I thought it might be of interest to others:
Preaching Grace on the Square 