Outside the Sanctuary
On April 27, 1959, my grandmother Wilkerson died.
I traveled with my parents to a church in Snellville, Georgia. I was not admitted into the building. I remained in the car — a black Ford coupe — parked on gravel beneath open windows.
This was the second death of my childhood. My grandfather Powell had died in July of 1957. I remember more of him. He was sixty-four. She was eighty-six. I was too young to understand death’s permanence, but I felt his absence. I also felt, without language for it, the fracture between him and my mother, and her refusal of affection toward the woman who became his companion after divorce. Even as a child, I sensed something torn.
But my grandmother Wilkerson’s death was different.
It was my first existential crisis.
From the sanctuary, across the gravel parking lot and through the open windows of that black coupe, a hymn drifted toward me:
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee;
Let the water and the blood,
From Thy riven side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure,
Cleanse me from its guilt and power.
In films, that hymn is often reduced to shorthand for naïveté — a prop for simplistic faith. But it was nothing of the sort to me.
I was a boy sitting outside a church, trying to locate my grandmother inside those words.
Where is she?
And by extension — where is he?
That question has never left me.
Now, more than sixty years later, I sit in church again. It is Lent. Deaths have layered themselves over time, one pressing upon another. Each carries weight.
But there is one whose weight eclipses the rest.
Beth.
Her absence is not historical. It is immediate. It still crushes me.
The boy in the black Ford coupe asked, Where is she? about his grandmother.
The man in the pew asks the same question now.
Where is she?
I weep for her.
And yet, in ways I do not fully understand, I sometimes experience her not as memory alone but as presence. Not as an “It” confined to the past, but as Thou — to borrow Buber’s language — encountered in moments that are unsummoned and enlarging.
I fear wishful thinking. There were long years — decades — of silence. I know what absence feels like. This renewed sense of nearness feels fragile.
But here is what steadies me:
When I sense her presence, I do not become smaller or more withdrawn. I become more loving.
If it were fantasy, I suspect it would narrow me. Instead, it opens me — toward patience, toward tenderness, toward others.
If love reduces the dead to memory alone, then death wins twice.
I am not ready to grant it that victory.
The boy is still listening through open windows.
And even now, I think I hear the hymn.
On Invisibility and Malted Milk Balls
Yesterday I was in a small country store studying chocolate labels like a pharmacist—dark chocolate, no salt—because loving someone long enough means you know exactly what they can and can’t enjoy.
While I was at the counter, the owner, the finest example of a grumpy old man that I know, and I—an apprentice grump—were grumping about feeling invisible.
You reach a certain age and the world doesn’t quite look at you the same way.
Then I glanced at the two women behind the counter and said, “You know who else feels invisible? Women.”
They smiled. Not bitterly. Just knowingly.
And I said, “When you become an old man, you finally learn what it’s like to feel like a woman.”
I gathered my purchases, turned toward the door, and announced to the entire store:
“Wait. Where are my balls?”
Malted milk balls.
Today, on Valentine’s Eve, I’ve discovered a new problem.
I now have to hide my balls from my wife.
Marriage is humbling.
The Middle of Hope
This morning’s worship service caught me off guard.
The reading was Micah, chapter 4—the vision of swords beaten into plowshares, nations unlearning war, people sitting unafraid beneath their own vine and fig tree.
It is a beautiful passage.
Almost too beautiful to trust.
Which may be why it has endured.
As the words were read aloud, an image returned to me—not as memory, but as presence.
It was an image Beth kept close.
A poster she chose.
A prayer she lived with.
At its center: a battlefield grave marker.
A helmet resting on the butt of an inverted carbine, the rifle stabbed into the earth.
Dog tags hanging quietly from the stock.
The sign of a soldier buried where he fell.
Nearby, the words:
Blessed are the peacemakers.
I first saw it in 1972.
I was young, unsettled, and already committed to enter the service of the United States Navy. The war was unpopular. The country was divided. And I was trying to make sense of my own decision to serve.
There were nights when I wondered whether duty and peace could inhabit the same body.
When I first saw the image, I took it as affirmation.
My service was sacrifice.
My sacrifice was a pursuit of peace.
I did not think that belief was naïve.
I still don’t think it was simple.
Years later I realized, Beth chose that image—not as endorsement, but as prayer.
She did not display it to resolve the tension.
She displayed it to live inside it.
This morning, Micah 4 reopened what I once thought settled.
Micah does not offer reassurance.
Micah offers an end that has not yet arrived.
Before plowshares, there is judgment.
Before fig trees, there is disarmament.
Peace, in Micah, is not imagined.
It is adjudicated.
Violence is not denied.
It is named—and then relinquished.
Suddenly, the image Beth loved no longer functioned as approval.
It stood as witness.
The rifle in the ground has not been transformed.
It has only been stopped.
Silence is not the same thing as peace.
Sometimes it is only what remains when the carrier is gone.
The weapon is quiet not because the world has learned peace, but because someone paid the cost before it did.
That realization did not undo Beth’s prayer.
It completed my hearing of it.
Blessed are the peacemakers names the way.
Micah 4 names the end.
The grave marker names the cost in between.
Hope has a middle.
And the middle has graves.
Standing there in worship, grief did not isolate me.
It did not collapse into memory.
It opened into communion—mediated, costly, and real.
Not nostalgia.
Not recollection.
Communion through what she loved.
Communion in the way of seeing she inhabited.
The call that came with it was not loud.
Live this way.
Do not turn aside.
Do not lie about the cost.
But I left accompanied.
February 1 Is Not a Sacrament. Every Moment Is.
February 1, 2026
When I wrote the date this morning, the thought came uninvited: I made it.
A date without weight, really—only the first day of a month we agree to call new. Nothing turned. Nothing reset. Time itself remained unmoved.
Time, as I know it, is not a doorway. It is a point. A single place on a long—perhaps endless—line. Not the past, which memory keeps revisiting. Not the future, which imagination rehearses. Just this narrow location where I am allowed to stand.
Yesterday was a hard day.
That may be why the thought lingered. Not because the calendar advanced, but because I am still here. Still breathing. Still present at this point on the line.
I didn’t make it there.
I made it here.
And here is different.
February 1 is not a sacrament.
But this moment is.
The Velocity of Mercy
I remember a reckoning.
It was the kind of afternoon that should have been filled with the sounds of play, but instead it was filled with the smell of gasoline and the realization of a terrible mistake. Several children had been playing—mixing fire and fuel. When I first heard the cries, my mind, seeking refuge in abstraction, thought, They really shouldn’t do that; people will think they are hurt.
But when I crossed the yard, the abstraction vanished.
I found a child smoldering. Small flames still flickered at his skin. I could see the white of his bone. He was entering shock, and in that clinical stillness I knew that shock—not the fire—would kill him if I didn’t anchor him to the world.
In that moment, I did not ask whose fault it was.
I did not wave a finger at a boy whose flesh was charred to lecture him on the dangers of fire.
I did not demand proof of his standing before deciding whether he deserved help.
I sat in the dirt. I looked him in the eye. And I asked him if he played baseball.
For fifteen minutes, we didn’t talk about fire. We talked about life on third base. We talked about the velocity of a well-hit ball. We talked about anything that would keep his heart beating until help arrived.
The Second Crime
I have been thinking about that boy lately as I watch our systems of enforcement—particularly when the law is applied with speed but without mercy.
I believe in the law. But I also believe a profound truth: justice without mercy is another kind of crime.
When families are left smoldering under the weight of systems they did not fully understand, or when individuals are crushed by rigid bureaucracy in the name of order, our first instinct must not be to wave a finger.
The Roman jurists had a name for this failure: Summum ius, summa iniuria—the extreme application of law that becomes the greatest injustice. The second crime is not the violation itself, but the refusal to see the human being burning in front of us.
The Call of the Witness
As an ordained minister, I find myself in a predicament. If I do not speak about this injustice, I am complicit. If I do speak, I know some who currently listen to me may choose to walk away.
But I remember the boy in the yard.
If I could sit in the dirt with a child who had broken the rules and choose his life over his guilt, how can I remain silent now?
Our job is not to stand over the suffering and demand to see their papers.
Our job is to sit in the dust, recognize the humanity being charred, and talk—steadily, patiently—about the velocity of a life worth saving.
On a whim... 