We’ll pass it on to you . . . These words, from the musical Hamilton, are a father’s promise to a new child: “We’ll pass it on to you, we’ll give the world to you . . . .” The song is a pledge full of hope and, for contemporary audiences, full of dramatic irony. We know that the world the American revolutionaries passed on to their children was like the one we pass on, a troubling mix. They had... Read more

Love in the open hand I remember discovering Edna St. Vincent Millay in high school, reading sonnet after sonnet with the thrill of discovery that comes when you find a poet who speaks what you hadn’t realized you felt or wanted or dreaded or hoped. It was the tender, tentative season of first boyfriends and the first flickerings of high romantic longings. The sentimentalities of popular songs of the period didn’t last too long, though some of them still have... Read more

A Way of Knowing I’ve been reading an engaging book on “Faith, Hospitality, and Foreign Language Teaching” by David Smith and Barbara Carvill called The Gift of the Stranger. Among the authors’ many inspiring ways of linking language learning to the ethic of hospitality was this: that hospitality is a way of knowing. Not just a virtue, but an avenue of understanding, instruction, insight, awareness. It is only when we welcome the stranger, opening our homes, minds, provisions, time, hearts... Read more

Like pollen or manna This phrase, “like pollen or manna,” tossed off in Ellen Bass’s strong, startling poem, “Saturn’s Rings,” stopped me short: I love the story of manna in the desert—such a strange and haunting image of God’s imaginative provision. It has remained since childhood one of my favorite Bible stories. Asked one time by a retreat leader to do a “six-word autobiography,” I wrote “Eat the manna. More will come.” The narrative behind that cryptic exercise would tell... Read more

Going about our business “For us, there is only the trying,” Eliot writes in “East Coker,” speaking as a poet who has no way of assessing the success or failure of his work: “The rest is not our business.” His sober reminder has been helpful for me and, I imagine, has helped others who have worked with words or clay or paint or wood or children or irrational numbers or the flickerings they follow through an electron microscope. My business... Read more

Their humble little souls Two beautiful boys I love learned last night that their beloved dog, Miles, has advanced lymphoma and will die soon. Their parents who love him, too, had to tell them. It’s how many children learn their first lessons about loss—if they’re lucky children, and don’t live in war zones or places to which pollution has been exported or where pesticides fill the air they breathe. Those children learn about death in other ways. Wislawa Szymborska writes,... Read more

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his I spent a delightful couple of hours the other day watching a grandson compete in a gymnastics tournament. The grace and discipline he and others exhibited in tumbling and vaulting, front and back flips, and in an intricately choreographed final dance were not only impressive, but moving. I loved the unabashed pleasure they took in what their young, lithe, healthy bodies could do. I thought of the line in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “As... Read more

by every word Ever since I first heard it in Sunday school I’ve been stirred by the mysterious declaration in Deuteronomy that we do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. In ancient Hebrew the word for word was dabar, which meant thing. Utterance brings forth some thing into the world. In speaking we participate in the work of creation, which happened by means of utterance: “God said ‘Let there be... Read more

from what black wells of possibility, how a thing will unfold . . .             from A.R. Ammons, Poetics I’ve noticed myself using this verb with some frequency lately, speaking of what I see unfolding in a little boy I love as he quietly goes about his own learning. Or what is unfolding in our marriage in this season of life as we make our way through adaptations and losses we didn’t fully anticipate. Or what is unfolding on the... Read more