I took the Mount Olive train to Gethsemane and slept through the Conductor’s call for tickets until, somewhere near Dover, or maybe it was Denville, keeping the vigil came back to me, so I woke up — It’s as if the rail car were a little grotto I saw with a friend from year’s ago, […]
The Death of Poverty
A couple years back I was riding a taxi through the Sahara during a terrible sandstorm on what should’ve been a one-way road (but wasn’t) with zero visibility. There were seven of us crammed into the taxi, a rundown Mercedes Benz, and the driver had what appeared to be the early stages of glaucoma in […]
Family, against all odds
I had a friend in college who once said to me that, though he considered himself an atheist, he wanted so badly to believe there was something, anything out there watching over us with tender love and care. He just couldn’t. I was always struck by this because I felt the exact opposite: whereas he […]
A Tiny Smidgen of Hope
In the midst of the election aftermath, I admittedly feel a lot like I’ve been thrown into one of those impressionist or baroque paintings on the walls of Hogwarts. I can see everything happening around me, as though it’s happening in a world I don’t belong in or understand. And I can do little more […]
The Prophet and the Lyre
sometimes I can’t speak to you (but the poet can) when words fall on deaf ears, I am mute despite my screaming, that all these years what you hear you only heard in song, so you wonder why I keep on talking, and the truth is, it’s just for me, because we love to hear […]
All Hail the Storm King
There’s something monstrous and all-encompassing about New York City, as though the longer you’re there, your memory of the way the world works elsewhere is slowly cached until it fades into oblivion. Everywhere about the City, nature prevails. The pigeons come close and tilt their heads to look at you as though you’re the one […]
Making Sacred Space Where There is None
There’s this moment during a misty rain in New York City where if you look up to the skyline, the familiarity of the buildings you’ve grown accustomed to seeing in the sunshine is lost to the low-hanging clouds. If you squint, you can see one of the taller towers just peering through the fog but […]
Lead Us Not Into Penn Station
I’m not sure why, but lately, I’m hypersensitive to all the sounds that surround me. Maybe it’s because I’m used to a more rural environment that the sounds of the City are just that jarring to me. Maybe it’s because I’m living just next to the Garden State Parkway, which leaves in its wake a […]
Changing Trains
There’s this moment after leaving the Secaucus station where the train ducks into a tunnel, and the deeper into the dark it goes, the quicker the air pressure changes as if to suck the little sickle cell up the vein to the heart of Manhattan. From under the Hudson, all the passengers are adjusting their […]
Stories from Morocco, or Remembering My Encounter with the Muslim Faith
With all that’s been said about Islam lately, I thought I’d take a moment to republish something I wrote after returning from my time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco. This is a slightly edited version of a talk I gave to local churches and a local rotary club in Tennessee: Act 1. Arrival. […]
