The amount of incense smoke that darkens a temple’s ceiling demonstrates the popularity of that particular god.
I remember watching the darkness in my bedroom when I was small, hypnotized by grey-pink flecks while I waited for sleep.
“Everything’s a mystery and I’m just another small part of it,” said a woman at a gas station in Barstow.
Strange how something you’ve heard a thousand times can suddenly knock you over.
It seems like a tragedy to go through life not knowing the names of the lights overhead.
And so much space there’s nothing to think about except something resembling god.
Now they’re saying the virus spreads by talking and breathing. We can kill each other just by being a person.
I hear the undoing of a lock and her voice calling behind me. “Thank you, darling. Pray for me.”
There was a time when I would count how many words I said each day. At night I logged the number into a notebook. Sixteen. Twenty-three.
A note on Barnett Newman’s portrait of “the agony that is single, constant, unrelenting, willed—world without end.”
Once again, the question that haunts me when I approach any kind of altar: Am I allowed to pray before you if I don’t understand you?
Ash Wednesday and people walk the streets with smudged crosses on their foreheads. A beautiful ritual, ancient and haunted.
The machine says tens of millions of people will flood into Las Vegas as well as Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, and Houston.
Billboards along Interstate 90 tell me that God owes us nothing, love is an action verb, and the key to forgiveness was hung on the cross.
The first gods must have been born while we slept.
I went to a 700-year-old church on Sunday morning and the service was purely tonal because I don’t understand Finnish. It was the most moving sermon I’ve ever heard.
Now begins the season of Arvo Pärt, of private hymns and gloom and trees that look like old gentlemen.
