Two years shy of my thirtieth birthday, but anticipating I made a pilgrimage to an old family friend living on the Pine Ridge Reservation of the Lakota Sioux in South Dakota. On his kitchen table, the former Vietnam veteran, school superintendent, medicine man, Basel Braveheart had splayed open C.G. Jung's  Red Book.  The landscape, the smell of horses and sage, comes to mind as I read the vivid account  On the Rez  by Ian Frazier, a gift of my mother. She did, after all, take on two foster teenagers while we lived for a year on the Rez when I was just the age of my daughter, turning four.  We read because of who curates the canon for us.  After a 19-mile walk from Boston to Concord Free Library, I snapped a picture of Henry David Thoreau's drawing of the phallic fungus in  Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A.  a documentary by Jonathan Katz. While my wife Emily (B.A. '03, MSW '12) drives over the Tappan Zee bridge, I do my best audiobook voice

Part I: Saints, as beacons of the Church. Part II: Cultic notes on Black Saints in Early Modern Global Capitalism Train tracks into the city crossed a bridge. Trash and foam marked the rocks of a stream well below. It was probably full of cats, the bag floating, bumping. A sudsy water from industry runoff By the time I walked the tracks with my father, shanties of aluminum roofs,  with cement blocks and masonry floors in some cases, actually strong enough to have survived an earthquake the year before. America was her name, a paraplegic who beamed and in her way welcomed me with a joke, pointing to a picture on the wall, an artist's conception of Jesus. There for half an hour and walking back to the Godparents program I followed the woman, my guide, Soila. I told my dad, in the country for a rotary water project, about America. Maybe he thought of Jessie Crow a 92 year old Lakota elder wasting away from cancer in her home isolated on the Pine Ridge Reservation who my mother would v

"I'll step down from the Council," I announced last night at the Pastoral Council meeting.  This move to allow freedom for activism comes upon the completion of my first term, not until September, but in order to give ample time for elections.  "I know you've given it great prayer and discernment," Amy Logan, our Council Chair said.  One of the treasured experiences was my role offering the following at one of the first lay-led prayer evenings held over zoom, New Year's Eve 2020. ~~   I love icons. Icons are everywhere. They literally crowd ever inch of wall space. The moment I entered the threshold of this oxymoron of a man, a hairy bald man, this stranger’s house, he is a priest of the Russian Orthodox giving a few of us a tour inside his home. What I see is not a story, not a hobby or collector’s passion. Thousands of small painted icons hung on the wall, and between gilded frames is plush red padding, the icons are pillow quilted into the fabric of t

 Walking into Boston, I admired the newly constructed metro line set to run test trains this Friday. The Boston skyline shone, as I was about to learn with the offices of state street securities and Black Rock , financial enablers of nuclear weapons, war and climate destroyers. In my hands for company I carried  The Feel Trio, a collection of poems by Fred Moten. On the 28 overpass I stopped in my tracks reading, " I burn communities in shadow, underground, up on the/ plateau..." "...o, for a muse of fire music!" Assembled at the Sam Adams statue,  30 others contingent the War Industry Resisters Network: #ResistWarIndustry (Primary) #PeopleOverPentagon, #CommunityNotConflict, #ProfiteersMustPay..  Rep. Mike Connolly Rep. Mike Connolly of Cambridge and Somerville 26th said, "The number of unhoused doubled in the last decade, even before the pandemic--we see it at CASS . Instead of the war machine, build affordable housing! ...in Massachusetts we have Raytheon an

 It was July. The Trident Nein were in lockup for their Independence Day action at Electric Boat. A march from Durham, North Carolina to New York was underway. 150 women and children stopping in 60 towns for shopping and handing out leaflets against nuclear weapons. Mary Regan, a college student, had recently filed for conscientious objection. In Germany, women dug trenches for a camp near the Hasselbach gate  to protest the installation of cruise missiles. Already for a year, tens of thousands of women had experienced an alternative lifestyle at encampments for peace.  On May 19, 1982 Lynne Jones called on an assembly of women from eleven countries that while difficult, 30,000 women had formed camps encircling the nine-mile fence around the Greenham Common British Air Force Base. Kay Camp, that afternoon, called US activists to become Greenham women, telling the group of the Seneca Army Base in Romulus, New York which stored the nuclear weapons that were to be shipped to Greenham Comm

 Good Friday--I made a solitary walk for War Tax Resistance, Somerville-Walden Pond, seventeen miles.  First Entry-- Here I am this morning 15 of April 2022 Taking a walk with my self. My faith has been drawing me, over the years, to reconcile bodily, enactment of God’s cross, but today this is a morning walk, we’re walking the path along the minute man trail, I’ve love to add history I’m downloading this app as I pass the community gardens talking now  on my way to Davis Square Turning now to the gospel the readings of the day for the triduum, just want to remark that I’m beginning this with the desire to create looking at the hyacinth and the daffodil as I diary with the spirit of Thoreau with his impulse toward creativity and simplicity walking this l-shaped route this morning out to Concord and turning toward Walden pond where I’ll meet Emily where she’ll be with friends this afternoon, it’s a gorgeous moon, sitting low in the sky, a giant globe.  2nd Entry-- My thoughts are really

  Fight the plight   Come to the catechism of the poor persons.   The age of conviction may as well be now. We were former persons. Veterans, we work, were former union members. We got degrees in college. You call us homeless, forget we are persons, a misnomer that goes about solving nothing. Who we are matters because you are dealing with a person. A broken down reality, who all the time must wipe your tears, who must wait on you. Patience, come quick, one paycheck away, one health care crisis away and another joins us on the front lines. “Every major ill in this country is embedded in the person that is homeless,” as Willie Baptist says. The antibodies are right here—we are survivors who just couldn’t afford a place to stay.   Should you be in doubt, rest not. Should you want to shed a tear, go not to your sister or your brother. For we are persons. a family denying the cry of the poor. Like wolves “shedding blood and destroying lives to get unjust gain” says the prophet Ezekiel. The

Hunger Walk organizers encouraged walkers to make their own route. Inspired, I walked to Walden Pond  twice! I walked each time for about seven hours (April 15, 17 miles; April 29, 21 miles). The two jaunts were prayerful mornings of solitude as the photos below show. The Hunger Walk has very close ties to our home church. Originating from members of our very own Paulist Center, we proudly support Emily's ministry organizing chefs of the Supper Club. For more about our family involvement, see my video story on our fundraising page:  2022 Walk for Hunger  Update, together we've raised $1337 dollars. Thanks to everyone's support!  Spy Pond Arlington Meadow 4.15 Trail bordering Arlington Meadows 4.29 Hancock-Clarke House, Lexington 4.29 Bedford Depot Me on the Old Reformatory Trail 4.29 Toni Morrison Society's "Bench at the Side of the Road" in Walden Wood Brister Freeman's Hill 4.29 Walden Pond grounding walk 4.15