Mystical Murmurs: My Interfaith Life

So we're learning this morning, incrementally, that there's a good likelihood that Andreas Lubitz, the promising young pilot who apparently crashed a Germanwings flight on purpose, suffered from a mental illness of some sort. That his doctor had signed him out of work for the day of the flight. That he flew anyway. And during that flight, something in Andreas's head went terribly, terribly wrong. Now 150 people are dead. Moms and daughters. Opera singers. German schoolchildren. Little babies. It's all very tragic and terrible. But Andreas wasn't a monster -- he was a person like you and me. And he had an illness which he did not want his employer to know about. And you know what? Although I hold him responsible for those deaths, I don't blame him for that impulse to keep his problem secret. In an age when ads on TV deal with issues like painful intercourse after menopause, erectile dysfunction, and overactive bladder (do you see a theme here? We're e

I wouldn't ordinarily put a smiley-face into one of my posts, but I really am happy over something, so there you have it. A happy daisy. Our Head of Reference demonstrated, at a staff meeting this week, how he uses a certain database to track people down through public records (all nice and legal!). So ... I tried it. you see, at the tender age of 20, I got married for the first time. What was I thinking? I wasn't. The marriage lasted just short of three years, though we didn't live together quite that long. Our divorce became final in January of 1977. I did hear from my ex twice after that, in the summer of 1977, and again in the summer of 1978, as we both moved on with our lives. I moved to Philadelphia, and he went to work abroad. But I always wondered, you know. And I felt more than a little guilty, because the source of unhappiness in the marriage was me, all me. I went through that marriage like a dose of epsom salts, and emerged pretty much unscathed, I don&#

Well, let's hope so. In scenic South Jersey, we have had our largest snowfall of the year (so far) -- about 9 inches, in my yard. I took the easy way out and stayed home yesterday, catching up on the end of Downton Abbey's 5th season, and crocheting like crazy on a blanket I'm making for my son. The snow fell, the dogs reluctantly went outside when asked, and after dark the brutal cold descended again. 5 degrees this morning -- I believe that's a record-breaker for us. On the subway, all the riders looked cold and tired. We are all tired of this Endless Winter. And as for Boston -- I can't imagine how tired of it they are! Relief is apparently on the way, and will arrive next week in the form of much milder weather and a lot of melting. At lunchtime, I felt some actual March warmth in the sun (as I foraged for food across the ice). Let spring come quickly!

I get around round get around I get around, I get around (ooh--OOH--ooh) I get around .... I'm dating myself, of course, but nobody says this like the Beach Boys. And that's not my car in the picture, either, just one I stole from Google Images. I'm more the humble Honda type than the Mustang type. Well, the New Seminary has kept this Olde Seminarian on the move. In addition to a lot  of writing, first-year students are charged with observing, or participating in, varying types of religious services. Though I was a bit intimidated by this at first (I am Episcopalian, after all!), I've come to love worshiping with people of different faiths. My first forays were in traditions close to my own Christian tradition, which let me put a toe into familiar waters. My initial experience was attending a service at Union Church in the Wilderness. They aren't kidding about the wilderness -- the way there took me a long way down an unmarked, dark country road tha

It's been gray and dark here, last weekend especially. The skies hovered close above my house, while the rain poured down. It was so dark, even near the noon hour, that my electric window candles in the living room remained lit. Then the rain ceased for a while, and the skies lightened. I ventured outside, because it was unusually warm. The light is different in winter, I think, especially on a gray day. Trees' branches stand out sharply, black skeletons against the sky, and their every movement in the wind is visible. The lawns are bare of leaves now, and the grass dormant, yet every tuft of grass stands out in sharp relief, every undulation in the lawn is now visible. These details are not so easy to see during the riotous growing season, when all my lawn becomes a mass of seething green. Looking around, I saw squirrels' nests in a couple of trees. If the trees were in leaf, I would not have seen them. And then I saw it, in a neighbor's tree, about three house