YOKED

The morning light licks the corners of my face, repeatedly, until I consent to opening my eyes. She makes her gradual way across the bed, nudging her most promising sign of hope unto the tossled ivory. The sun is far more gentle than any alarm clock I’ve ever fought, though no less insistent. In such radiant self-giving, how many times can I roll over? So we strike a compromise: I will flip my pillow and “rest” my head, but promise to keep my eyes a flutter, little windows parted slightly for the streams of her still light. Sometimes I up the bargain, telling her that there is really no better way to receive her glory, no greater praise of her warmth, than to surrender consciousness upon her lap, just a little. She will often reply by shedding new light upon the floor, warming a most suggestive path out into the kitchen. My stomach grumbles. Are you sure you don’t want to try freezing time again? I ask. You, me and the sheets, forever curled in our secret morning splendor...

She was entering her senior year, at “the college,” shorthand for Harvard University’s undergraduate school. But already she was planning to take her postgraduate career across the country to golden California. This much I overheard from a stranger, riding on the “T.” With one hand gripping a side rail and two feet spread upon the shifting floor, I stood, balancing the East Coast ride as if I were surfing the Pacific ocean. I laughed to myself about the irony of the ride and the Harvard student’s remarks: my home state was becoming her adventure destination, just as Boston has become mine. As I listened to her muse about the unique California culture and its endless sunshine, everything about her dreaming was immediately familiar. The wonder, the excitement, the stereotypical assumptions-all that goes along with moving into the unknown, it was all there, but written in the opposite direction of my own great move. California is as exotic to her, I thought, as Boston...

When the subject of religion pops up at the dinner table, or a cocktail party, or a first date, most people will hold their breathe in hopes that it will quietly pass or nervously fold the topic into their lap napkin. It is flagged as a source of political controversy, or worse yet, a volatile time bomb of people’s most emotional, subjective, and inflexible beliefs. And you just don’t tamper with belief if you want to keep things civil. As a student of ministry and theology, however, that is exactly where I am asked to begin. Temperamental religious perspectives are my occupational hazards. Religion is the burning building that I am bursting into as everyone else is running out. I am running into the flames for a living, because religion has been the source of my most luminous joy and singeing discomfort. Some of it has breathed wisdom and consolation into my life, while other statements of belief have left me injured from the fierce licks of patriarchal language, ...

Walking around Cambridge, it is impossible to say where Harvard University begins and ends. The town is full of the redbrick, white framed Georgian buildings that so distinguish Harvard architecture. These dignified walls and buildings line the edges of Harvard square, a tourist hub and central pulse of transportation. They extend outward, down the forked web of avenues to the 9 graduate schools connected to the University- schools of medicine, dentistry, divinity, law, business, design, education, public health, and government. It is unmistakably a center of learning, with a graduate student population double the size of its undergraduate students. I do not mean to rhapsodize the university for its grandeur and prestige, or even to place it at the center of the Cantabrigian universe. In fact, I have not yet developed any particular intimacy, or personal bias for the institution, apart from the fact that I am just entering its divinity program. I am but a stranger in a ...

In 1492, Christopher Columbus set out on the high seas in search of a better trade route to India. Instead, he landed upon the shores of the Americas, which for his people was truly a new world. With that said, my appreciation of American history has evolved since the fourth grade. The binding of my Elementary school textbooks and the narrow, Eurocentric story contained there within has been busted open by the knowledge that thousands of Native American tribes populated this continent before the European arrival and were flourishing in ways that European society could not measure. Disease, violence, deceit, and arrogance were heaved like cargo unto this “discovered” land and that only approximates the real story of the New World. And yet, as I prepare to move to Boston, I can not help but feel the tingling excitement and naïve optimism of moving to a place that is, for me, a new world. I have lived in California my whole life. Actually, my recent sojourn in Northern Cal...

Jules squirted some sunscreen onto her palms before massaging it into her shoulders and the hard to reach blades of her back.   As the thick, white lotion spread, its scent drifted through the salty ocean air and I recognized it immediately.   Bonne Bell cotton candy lip balm.   I wore it religiously throughout seventh grade, convinced that icy pink was a good look for me.   It was the kind of silvery shade that older, high school girls were wearing.   I had a sparkly pink mini-skirt to match—one that received loads of compliments.   I do not miss the goopy feeling of synthetic gloss smacked across my lips, but the smell, oh God is it delicious!   It’s sinfully sweet, even better than real cotton candy, with an aftertaste of some inscrutable, tingling mint.   After all this time, more than a decade, the scent still moves me and I have to control the urge to reach over and smear Jules’ Ocean Potion’s SPF 30 all over my lips, just for old time’s sake.

There are times when just looking out at the world is too much. With impeccable self-possession, she flaunts color, texture, pattern, dimension, and flickering foils of light.    All cascade through my gossamer lens and I am overtaken by the presence of these things.   Only then do I see why photos and video recordings are so widely cherished—they hold the focus, which hurried eyes that have seen-it-all can not grasp.   Yes, much is required to give pause, to linger longer and let all that in. Oh, but how I long to receive the world, to be daily engorged with streams of color, shapely spectacles or just plain matter.   All of my patience and attention I will exchange for one glimpse of that deep-down presence in things.   Yet, after my eyes roam the rolling country, tracing every verdant dip and golden contour, they fall upon him – a glorious human face – and I do not know if I can bear it any longer.   I must look away.   All that beauty looking back at me.