A Believer's Journal

For our prompt yesterday morning at the regular gathering of the Deer Isle Writers Group was to write a piece using three arbitrarily assigned numbers. The numbers I was given were 7 and 23 and 37. Here is my piece …

It has been eighty-nine years, every one of which I count as untold blessing, since that unspeakable season of impenetrable darkness and unrelenting dread, the winter of ’37. It was not the snows. Yes, we had bad storms that lasted for days and severe blizzards that dumped feet of heavy wet snow, so that we had to crawl out the windows to get outside, the doors pinned shut by ponderous drifts. We always had snow. We were used to it. And, as a boy of seven, the more than head high piles of snow were my playground, my imaginary Everests, the setting for many an intrepid ascent by this would be mountaineer.

No, it was not the snows. It was the ice, the rock hard ice that covered everything after days of thaw and then refreezing. Thick ice, cold and bitter, inches of ice coating snow and road, trees and house. all the more when the freezing rains came, days and days and days of freezing rain, the days just warm enough to leave it rain, but the nights quickly congealing it, bowing and breaking the slender birches, bringing even large limbs of the oaks crashing to the ground, rendering movement outside all but impossible, for us, our family trapped inside the house and for the pitiful deer we spied through ice-glazed windows, slipping and sliding and falling, on their futile quest to find any exposed vegetation.

It was the ice, the ice that rendered the outside world inert and unforgiving, and the ice that hardened human souls, rendering them too callous and cold and unforgiving. It was an ill wind blowing through the streets of Weimar, bearing rumors of a camp being built on Ettersburg Hill, only an hour’s walk from our front door, a camp called Buchenwald where, we would later learn, hundreds of thousands of Jews and gypsies and other “undesirables” were imprisoned, where tens of thousands of these human beings, these children of God, died.

We did not know that then, but we knew of the movement birthed out of post-war turmoil and a disastrous economy, a revolutionary movement momentarily derailed after the failed Beer Hall Putsch of ’23, but now gaining momentum, inexorable, inexplicable, utterly frightening momentum — friends, neighbors, church members channeling pain into anger, suffering into disdain, making of blameless women and men and children a suitable scapegoat for their own feelings of loss and helplessness and despair.

It has been eighty-nine years since that dreadful winter, the winter that birthed an unrecognizable spring, and years of unspeakable horrors, but it is over. It is long over. The madness did not prevail. But its seeds, its icy and cold-blooded seeds, remain, and even now take root in the hearts of once well-meaning people, once more stifling compassion and killing mercy, as unease and dissatisfaction are wielded as weapons in a senseless war against innocents. May God have mercy on us and may this winter too pass.

When I was a boy, my father took me hiking.
When I was a boy, my father took me bird-watching.
When I was a boy, my father took me swimming.
When I was a boy, my father took me sailing.
When I was a boy, my father took me canoeing.
When I was a boy, my father took me to church.

I am who I am — a lover of mountains and birds and water, a sailor, a canoeist, a Christian — because my father took me. Because my father took me. Because my father.

Because my father took me hiking. Just my father and me.
Because my father took me bird-watching. Just my father and me.
Because my father took me swimming. Just my father and me.
Because my father took me sailing. Just my father and me.
Because my father took me canoeing. Just my father and me.
Because my father took me to church.
        But not just my father and me. Much bigger than that.
        And not just church. Much bigger than that.

My father’s life revealed a passion for something inscrutable, but deeply personal, something worthy to be desired, to be pursued, with all of one’s heart and mind and strength, the heartbeat at the center of the universe, the artist from whose hand all beauty derives, the tender teacher who reveals what is treasure and what is dross, the generous giver whose life is a pouring out and who calls us to a life of pouring out, a pouring out that leaves us, not empty, but overflowing.

I believe that America does not have to be great to be good.
I believe that virtue rewarded is no true virtue.
I believe that killing, whether done by persons or by states, is always wrong.
I believe that happiness comes not by pursuit, but by grace.
I believe that strangers shouldn’t be.
I believe that pigeon-holing is a sin.
I believe that life is precious and that death is what it seems to be.
I believe that what is truly ours is not what we acquire, but what we create.
I believe that not to risk is not to live.
I believe that art, the act of making beauty, is what we were made for.
I believe that envy belittles God’s beneficence.
I believe that I know very little, but the little I know is wondrous.

I am excited to announce that I have now published my first novel. It is entitled, “Mary Laing.”

While crossing the Atlantic in a wooden packet in 1855, Mary Laing writes a series of letters to her stepdaughter, Frances “Fannie” Laing, left behind in Scotland. The letters provide an account of the traumatic voyage endured by Mary and her family, as well as chronicle Mary’s own emotional odyssey along the way.

Forty years later, Mary reads those same letters to her granddaughter, almost thirteen-year-old Jessie Laing, hoping the letters prove a salutary guide as she and Jessie make their own hazardous journey, navigating the ocean of their shared grief.

You may order the book from the Lulu bookstore: Mary Laing. The cost there is $25.00 plus $5.69 shipping and $1.38 taxes. Or you may order the book directly from me! I will sign it and ship it to you for $25 plus $5 shipping for up to two books. You may order one or more copies by commenting on this post or by sending me an email or text.

I am thrilled to have completed this novel and am eager to share it with all of you!

This morning’s prompt for our weekly writers group was this: “You receive a beautifully wrapped gift. What is inside?” This is what I wrote …

The Gift

The gift was left outside our porch door on the morning of April 21, 2025, my birthday. When I opened the door to let Eilidh outside, there it was, an unexpected and happy surprise. The package was cubed in shape, seven inches to a side, and the wrapping simple and elegant, redolent of the much-awaited spring, a opalescent-white paper printed with sprigs of lavender. The rendering of the interwoven silvery-green stems and delicate purple flowers was exquisite, so much so that I could almost smell the intoxicating woody scent of the lavender blossoms.

In fact, I did smell that wonderful fragrance. The package was encircled by strips of a pale green ribbon, tied at the top into a simple six-looped bow. Bound into the knot at the center of the bow were three freshly-cut lavender sprigs, extending to the edges of the package, each mounted between two of the loops of ribbon, their number marking not the directions of the compass, which are four, nor the elements — air, earth, fire, and water — because they are four in number, too. Instead, the three bring to mind the primary passions of the human spirit — faith and hope and love.

There was no tag on the gift, nothing to indicate from whom it came or for whom it was intended, but since it was my birthday, I assumed the gift was meant for me. I stooped to lift the package from the grey-painted porch deck and held it in both hands as Eilidh ran around the yard, stopping here and there, now and then, to sniff the awakening earth and to do her jobs. The gift was light, of little heft, its feel giving scant clue as to what lay inside.

I did not hazard any guess. I did not want to hazard any guess, because what lay inside that package — if anything at all — did not matter to me. It was the promise of its giving, the generous act of its being shared, the enchanting elegance of its presentation that mattered to me. When Eilidh was finished and ready to go back inside, I carried the gift in my hands to my bedroom at the back of the house and placed it on a shelf of the tall darkly-stained pine cabinet next to my side of the bed where it sits even now, ever a gracious reminder that I am loved.