A to Z Blogging Challenge · Faith

K is for Knowledge

Sally3 Comments

Knowing something or somebody isn’t the same as knowing about them. More than just information is involved. …When you really know a person or a language or a job, the knowledge becomes part of who you are. It gets into the bloodstream.

Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

BUT, Mr. Buechner, what if the person that I am learning about and that I am getting to know is me?

It can’t get into my bloodstream, because it is my bloodstream!

I read a piece by Dorothy Day yesterday that said, “‘How can you see Christ in people?’ … It is an act of faith, constantly repeated. It is an act of love, resulting from an act of faith. It is an act of hope…”

How can I see Christ in me? It is an act of faith, constantly repeated. It is an act of love. It is an act of hope.

It has been a rough few weeks months years. My divorce is final. The papers came in the mail this week. It makes me question everything. How well did I know this person to whom I was married for over forty years? I knew about him, but did I really know him? Did he really know me?

I realize that I don’t even know me — but I’m working on it.

I realize, though, too, what grounds me. It is faith. It is acts of faith, constantly repeated.

I’m extending the A-to-Z Challenge into May. Maybe even June and July – we’ll see how long this takes.

Life · poetry

Red Herrings

Sally9 Comments

A life full of red herrings
Misdirection left and right
The shoulds crop up — they’re stinking
Misguiding smell and sight

You shoulda done this, you shoulda done that
Path strewn with stinking fish
I look around and listen
But can’t say what I wish

No one has lived my life but I
And I’ve lived it best I could
I say to those who shoulda me –
Have you stood where I’ve stood?

In truth, I do not say those words
But I struggle ‘neath the weight
For had I chosen different paths
What would be my fate?

Honestly I embrace my life
With all its faults and flaws
And when someone says shoulda
I just take a breath and pause

This week’s W3 prompt:

Write a poem that gives voice to what is usually left unsaid — a buried truth, a silenced voice, a hidden struggle, or the quiet ache of the heart. Let your words speak for what the world tends to overlook: an internal conflict, a marginalized experience, a truth tucked between breaths.

You may write from personal experience, an imagined lens, or even embody the voice of an inanimate object or force of nature. All forms and lengths are welcome — whether you choose free verse, haiku, sonnet, prose poetry, or something entirely your own.

Optional: Weave in metaphors of sound, silence, echoes, or resonance to deepen your imagery.

This prompt invites vulnerability, transformation, and truth-telling. Let your poem be a space where the unspeakable is finally heard.

This is my response to the W3 prompt. No one should look back at their life with shoulds. (See what I did there?)

A to Z Blogging Challenge · Faith

J is for Justice

Sally4 Comments

Justice does not preclude mercy. It makes mercy possible. … Justice is the grammar of things. Mercy is the poetry of things.

Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

I didn’t see this coming, the way a Buechner book would become a backdrop to commentary on the state of our country — but it has.

If you’ve never read anything by Frederick Buechner, let me tell you a little about him. He is a Presbyterian minister and the author of 39 books. He is witty, funny, insightful, and ultimately so very kind. So kind. One of his last books is titled: The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life. I haven’t yet read it, but I think it sums him up.

I loved this quote on justice when I read it. I can picture Justice and Mercy sitting on a teeter-totter, balancing each other. Yet here, under Trump 2, Justice has leapt from the see-saw, leaving Mercy to crash to the ground with a teeth-jarring thud.

The news is on in the background as I write — a mistake, I know. I’m semi-addicted these days. I can’t look away, even though I know I should. What’s going on in this country is neither just nor merciful. There’s no sense of poetry in anything that’s going on.

I have to confess that I didn’t see what’s going on in our country coming either. I counted on the balance of power in our government and the work of God in people’s hearts.

Yet, here we are, withholding food, drugs, and aid from people in need. Sending aid workers to Myanmar in the wake of a disaster — and then firing them! Canceling student visas and sending them back to their home country, some of them weeks shy of their graduation. Punishing, punishing, punishing anyone who disagrees or has disagreed with this administration.

Almighty and most merciful God
Where are You?
The sky is turning black
As are the hearts of my countrymen
Must we sit in a tomb for three days
Before there is a resurrection?
Or is insurrection on the horizon?
My God, My God — why have You forsaken us?

It’s kind of funny, isn’t it — that 2000 years ago, the Jewish people were looking for an insurrection to free them from Roman rule, and they got a resurrection instead.

What does God have in store for us?

A to Z Blogging Challenge · Writing

I is for Imagination

Sally2 Comments

If you want to know what loving your neighbor is all about, look at them with more than just your eyes.

Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

I recently started a writer’s group at the senior program where I work.

We’ve had two meetings, but only one person — the same person — has come each time. The last time we met I was feeling so overwhelmed with life that we hardly talked about writing until at the end when we were talking about all that’s going on these days. Something clicked in my brain.

“This,” I said, making a grandiose gesture with my arms to indicate the world in which we live, “is why writing is important. Writing helps us understand.”

It was at just such a time as this that I started this blog, although it wasn’t the country in turmoil. It was my mother’s dementia. I was having a hard time processing it.

Just like I’m having a hard time processing what’s going on today.

Writing taps into something — surely there is a word for it — that unravels the knot.

I think it has to do with imagination — with seeing with more than our eyes.

A to Z Blogging Challenge

H is for Holocaust

Sally7 Comments

It is impossible to think about it. It is impossible not to think about it. Nothing in history equals the horror of it. … Many were old men. Many were small children. Many were women. They were charged with nothing except being Jews. …

That many of the people who took part in the killings were professing Christians, not to mention many more who knew about the killings but did nothing to interfere, is a scandal which the Church of Christ perhaps does not deserve to survive.

Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

Moving on in this (un)happy week in American history, I read this by Buechner.

I have been haunted by the images from the El Salvadoran prison and the young mother whose husband is there. A clerical error. Oops. American Christians should be hanging their heads in shame. This is not what Jesus calls us to do.

I know, I know — I heard J.D. Vance called him a vicious gang member and human trafficker. Today, as I write this, the Supreme Court has ordered the US goverment to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego García, yet the DoJ can’t even say where he is. No one is doubling down on the vicious gang story anymore.

Also, no one in the government has apologized to my knowledge. Probably no one ever will.

Go on — look at the photos from the prison and tell me that it doesn’t turn your stomach. Okay — it’s not old men, women, and children, but’s it’s still wrong. This is what we as a country have done.

A to Z Blogging Challenge

G is for Government

Sally3 Comments

We need government to collect taxes, keep the roads in repair, maintain order in the streets, justice in the courts, etc., but we certainly don’t need this. They don’t pay us, we pay them, yet they’re the one who call the shots while the rest of us stand by with our knees knocking.

Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

Buechner wrote this book in 1988. I read this quote on Tuesday, April 8, 2025, when our government-country-world was in the throes of financial chaos. All because of the capriciousness of one man.

Here’s more of what Buechner said,

On both sides of the Iron Curtain, in Islam as well as in Christendom and the Third World, they have their conflicting political systems, ideologies, and holy causes to be sure, but by and large they give the strong impression of wanting little more than a chance to raise their children as best they can, keep the wolf from the door, have some fun when they’re through working at the end of the day, find some sort of security against old, and all such as that.

Their leaders, on the other hand, are continually delivering ultimatums to each other, plotting to confound each other any way they can manage it, spying on each other, vilifying each other, impugning each other’s motives, spending billions on weapons to destroy each other, and all such as that.

If at this most basic level, governments don’t reflect the dreams of the people they govern or serve their wills, you wonder what on earth governments are. … They seem to have a life and purpose of their own quite apart from the lives and purposes of anybody else. They are perpetually locked in desperate struggles with each other that have little if anything to do with the general human struggle to live and let live with as little fuss as possible. It’s we ourselves who have given them the power to pull the whol world down on all our heads, and yet we seem virtually powerless to stop them.

Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

A to Z Blogging Challenge · family

F is for Family

Sally3 Comments

The Human Family. It’s a good phrase, reminding us not only that we come from the same beginning and are headed toward the same conclusion but that in the meantime our lives are elaborately and inescapably linked. …

It’s not so much that things happen in a family as it is that family is the things that happen in it. The family is continually becoming what becomes of it. …

It is within the fragile yet formidable walls of your own family that you learn, or do not learn, what the phrase Human Family means.

Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

This is where my A-to-Z fell apart. I had planned to use a Buechner quote and make a tiny collage — about 2×2 inches. I totally misjudged how hard it would be to make those little collages every day. It was on this day — Family — when I struggled the most.

How do you fit a family into 2×2 inches? My immediate family is large: 8 children, 6 spouses/significant others, 5 grandchildren (one more on the way). I have three living siblings. Then, there are aunts and uncles and cousins. There are also friends who are as close as family. There are co-workers with whom I spend more time than anyone else so they might as well be family.

“The family is continually becoming what becomes of it…” My immediate family is in flux, with big changes at its core. It hurts to think about them.

But I do. I do think about them and the people deeply affected by it all.

That 2×2 can’t hold the bigness of it.

I think I’ll stick with words from here on out.

Uncategorized

Two Voices

Sally8 Comments

Hey kiddo!
[blah, blah, blah, ditto, ditto]
You’re not even listening but–
What?!

I listen!
You go on about this sin
And that sin — What? I have not
Got

Time — Excuse,
Excuse, excuse! Please produce
Evidence! Evidence? I
Try

To explain —
You’re not listening again.
I found the wrapper! [big eyes,
cries]

You’re busted.
The sad thing is I trusted
You. Sorry, Mom. C’mere, bug —
{{{{hug}}}}

This is my attempt at the W3 challenge this week. Poet of the Week Violet (congrats, Violet!) challenged us to write a poem in two voices.

  • Two voices. Two perspectives. Tension lingers in the air.
  • Can they find common ground? Will the conversation spark understanding or fracture further?
  • You decide.
  • Write a poem—any form, or none at all—that captures the heart of a difficult conversation.

This is an Irish form – Deibide Baise Fri Toin – that I’m slowly figuring out. 3-7-7-1 syllables. Line 1 and 2 rhyme on two syllables, lines 3 and 4 rhyme on one.

A to Z Blogging Challenge

D is for Darkness

Sally1 Comment

The original creation of light (Genesis 1) itself is almost too extraordinary to take in. The little cook-out on the beach (John 21) is almost too ordinary to take seriously. … Only a saint or a visionary can begin to understand God setting the very sun on fire in the heavens, and therefore God takes another tack. By sheltering a spark with a pair of cupped hands and blowing on it, the Light of the World gets enough of a fire going to make breakfast. It’s not apt to be your interest in cosmology or even in theology that draws you to it so much as that empty feeling in your stomach. You don’t have to understand anything very complicated. All you’re asked to do it to take a step or two forward through the darkness and start digging in.

Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark