Dear Friends in Christ, Last Saturday the Church gathered to pray good-bye to Tom Shaw, bishop, monk, and friend. The young Sri Lankan man sitting next to me on a back pew of the glorious Trinity Church, Copley Square, had flown in from Washington, D.C. He too had been touched...
The Danger of this Moment I was enjoying my time in Maine with my family when hell broke loose in Charlottesville, rattling the national psyche. How is it possible for someone to think it is a good thing to follow ideologies that enslaved human beings in the 19th century and...
Sermon Maundy Thursday April 2, 2015 William Bradbury Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 John 13:1-17, 31b-35 Psalm 116:1, 10-17 We enter tonight the mystery of the great three days: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Day of Resurrection. They are one event, one act of salvation and...
Dear Friends in Christ, Where is God when you pray? When I pray the Lord’s Prayer my unconscious mind imagines that God is, as the prayer says, “in heaven”, which I was told as a child is a long way from here and now. Further, this “in heaven” also produces...
Dear Friends in God, I grew up a “glass half-empty” kind of guy. I was raised in a loving home in middle class southern comfort with no need unmet, yet I felt something important was missing in me. This sense of lack became the lens through which I viewed everything...
Dear Friends in Christ, By now most of you have heard of the experiment in which subjects are asked to watch a video in which people are passing a basketball. The viewers are told to count the number of times the people dressed in white pass the ball to each...
September 23, 2014 Dear Friends in Christ, On August 2, 2014 the first American, desperately ill with the Ebola virus, Dr. Kent Brantly, was flown from Africa to Atlanta’s Emory Hospital, about 2 miles from my sister’s home where I had been visiting just the day before. As I watch...
Friends, Last Saturday a great crowd of Episcopalians gathered at the Agganis Center at Boston University to witness and celebrate the consecration of Alan McIntosh Gates as the 16th Bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts. All Saints’ Choir, led by Maggie Marshall, joined the 640-strong mass choir to lead the...
Friends, On September 4th our lectionary remembers Paul Jones, Bishop and Peace Advocate, who in 1918 was forced to resign as Bishop of Utah because of his pacifism in the midst of World War I. Today most people recognize that war was a disaster in which 16 million died to...
Dear Friends in Christ, During my retreat in July at Emery House, which is run by the monks of SSJE, the religious order to which our bishop belongs, I took two afternoon walks in the neighboring Maudslay State Park, which comprises 450 acres overlooking the Merrimack River as it runs...
