Dear Friends, The October leaves are here — bright shades of orange, red, yellow.  We’ve enjoyed the warmth of an extended Indian summer.  In November brown leaves will be harvested, blown from their tentative hold on the branches and scattering in the wind.  Thus the season’s popular name.

Dear Friends, The caption reads: “Is God keeping you from going to church?”

Dear Friends, Our visit to Italy this summer found us standing in the Coliseum listening to our guide tell us about the construction of Rome’s first permanent amphitheater, built to seat 50,000 spectators and covering 6 acres.  He said, “It has eighty entrances so huge crowds could arrive and leave easily.”

Dear Friends, I have an increasing love and appreciation for our homecoming service.  Only one out of my 24 was rained on.  A week or so before each one I look carefully at the long-range forecast.

Dear Friends, Several summer-reading books have captured my imagination.  One, especially, is written by a former Episcopal priest and bishop, Richard Holloway, which he calls Looking in the Distance.  His title comes from the poet Vasilii Rozanov:

Dear Friends, I know it’s a bit unusual to officiate at your former wife’s wedding, but you have to understand that the end of our 33-year marriage was not the end of a relationship. We’ve shared love of two terrific grandchildren, watching them move through their growing-up years—Alex and Hannah will soon be 20 and […]

Dear Friends, I want to tell you about my summer plans, both to share this part of the journey and to let you know where I’ll be, and who will be ‘on call’ during those times when I’m away.

Dear Friends, “Religion is the birth-to-death process of re-connecting with other people, with an ever-changing, aging, failing, growing self, and with Nature.”

Dear Friends, In 1840, at the dedication of a new church in Lexington, Massachusetts, designed by his friend Charles Follen, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Know then that your church is not builded (sic) when the last stone, the last rafter and clapboard is laid, not when we have assembled, not when we had adhered to […]

Dear Friends, “You can’t step in the same river twice,” the saying goes.  I’ve taken groups on the Boston trip about 24 times in the past 23 years:  22 times with the Coming of Age class, and two adult group trips.  No two are exactly the same.