Finally… as promised! I’m diving into the work to turn the blog you’ve come to love into a more complete resource! Over the next three years, every hymn in Singing the Living Tradition and Singing the Journey will be re-examined; with the help of other colleagues (musicians, educators, and ministers) each hymn will be more deeply researched, with information …
Beloveds, It’s getting harder and we don’t know what to do about it. In his song “My Oh My,” David Gray sings What on earth is going on in my heart As it turns as cold as stone? Seems these days I don’t feel anything ‘Less it cuts me right down to the bone What …
Delivered April 21, 2019 at First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church of Kennebunk. Earlier in the service, we read The Cloud Spinner by Michael Catchpool. All stories are true. Some of them even happened. The Gospel of Mark tells us that “when the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome …
Delivered April 15, 2019 at First Parish UU Church of Kennebunk, ME Reading Matthew 21:1-11 (NRSV) When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, ‘Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a …
Note: The original sermon, delivered at the West Wing Weekend on September 27, 2018, may be seen here; it includes multiple references to the show. The sermon below was delivered with the title “T.H.I.N.K” at the Unitarian Universalist Society of Oneonta, NY on October 28, 2018. How many of you grew up watching Mister Rogers …
(Click here to listen – as delivered at the UU Congregation of Saratoga Springs, NY – thanks to soloists Nancy Kass and Laurie Singer) Fans of the TV show The West Wing are familiar with character President Josiah Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen. President Bartlet is smart as a whip, deeply religious, and a gregarious …
I wrote a song. And instead of performing it for a few friends, or maybe a small congregation, I first performed it on a big stage, with thousands of people watching – and singing along. How am I feeling about it? Good. The Sunday afternoon reprise went better, partly because I knew folks were going …
(As delivered on May 6, 2018, at the UU Fellowship of Bennington, VT) Reading “A Ritual to Read to Each Other” by William Stafford If you don’t know the kind of person I am and I don’t know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and …
Click to listen here (as delivered in Nantucket on March 18, 2018) Let us pray. Now… some of you instantly bowed your head a bit, maybe you closed your eyes. Perhaps you took in a deep breath as you waited to hear how I started the prayer and to whom I addressed it. Others of …
It’s been over a week since my last post, in part because I have been wrestling with an unruly piece that isn’t just a poem but also a song lyric. Yeah, the not-at-all lyric writer is composing a song. I suppose it makes sense, given my musical propensities, to begin understanding the poetics through music. I …
Oh dear readers, it has come to this: the section on metre where Stephen Fry leads us coyly into writing limericks. He disguises it, of course, by teaching us about amphibrachic trimeter and catalectic amphibrachic dimeter, which are the external and internal lines of a limerick – all very academic, you see. But the end …
I’ve been spending the last few mornings discovering the monsters that live in the Poetic Sea, down in Ternary Bay… I mean, what else am I to think, when rhythms, meters, and devices are given names like ‘anapaest‘, ‘dactyl‘, ‘molossus‘, and ‘tribrach‘? It’s not been a bad journey to this part of the Poetic Sea, …
I’ve been slowly working some exercises on various poetic metres, finding over and over that my verse sounds strained and my rhymes are forced. At times I’ve leaned too far into alliteration and have needed an avalanche of Advil to get through it. I have been frankly embarrassed by the poetry I’ve been writing, even …
I’ve been released from the heroic formality of iambic pentameter – Fry has moved us on to other rhythms, rhythms that – as he points out – feel easier to speak between breaths. In the exercises over the past couple of days, I’ve written a lot of dreck, but occasionally have had moments of meaning …
Here I am, six days into this new spiritual practice of finding and celebrating my poetic and lyric voice. And I’m neck deep in these lessons Stephen Fry keeps hurling at us. First he has us writing in iambic pentameter, which is fine but is also the earworm of poetic metres and I wind up speaking …