The Divine Hours of Lent

Today marks the one hundred and eighteenth anniversary of my mother’s birth. Today is also the third and last in a triad of commemorative days.in this year of Our Lord 2008. In a way, I am glad of that fact. I’m not much, really, on anniversaries or dated remembrances. Oh, I may note them as…

Today is a major anniversary in my life. Or more correctly, it is what our children in their growing up would have called a major weekiversary, for it marks the end of the first week and the commencement of a second week of something that matters to me more than I would ever have thought…

Sam and I have been married for almost fifty-three years. To make the thing even worse, we have known each other for all of our combined hundred and forty-nine years. He was precisely one on the day that my parents introduced us by placing precisely two-weeks-old me in the bassinet beside his in the Cradle…

A long, long time ago, I wrote a series of books…more correctly, I wrote a cache of stories that ended up in a series of small books…that have shown up over the years in several permutations, most recently as the “Stories from The Farm In Lucy” Series. Those stories were, in retrospect, a lot like…

One of the great things for me is that for the last few years, I have been asked to do two days of the speaking at the Noon Day services that accompany the Calvary Waffle Shop. And by custom–it’s hardly old enough to be a tradition at this point and God forbid I should ever…

Calvary Episcopal Church is one of the oldest churches in Memphis…so old that it is wedged in, quite literally, amongst all kinds of office buildings and municipal and county court houses and administrative buildings. It sits only a couple of blocks north of Beale Street and only another three or four east of Front Street…

February 6, 2008 – Ash Wednesday Ash Wednesday at last. Lent really is here now, and it’s one, slow, steady progression from now to Easter. I like that idea in theory, anyway…that idea of unremitting progress toward a holy day…except that Lent is not as even and unpunctuated a progression as that makes it sound…

February 5, 2008 Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, religiously speaking. Culturally speaking, it’s New Orleans and strings of cheap, glittery beads, and trombones in parade. Over the years, the ‘culturally’ part has managed to trump the ‘religiously’ part for most of us. Mardi Gras is a carnival long severed from its observant roots and re-planted…

With the exception of Christmastide itself, Lent is probably the best known of all the seasons in the Christian year. Technically speaking, it comences each year on Ash Wednesday which, in this case, would be day after tomorrow. But that is only true when one is speaking technically. For me–and I suspect for most Americans–Lent…

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