Category: City Grace
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unless a grain of wheat
‘Sing to the Lord a new song;’ a song is a thing of joy; more profoundly, it is a thing of love. Anyone, therefore, who has learned to love the new life has learned to sing a new song and the new song reminds us of our new life… How can we choose unless we…
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crabapple liturgies
A buzzy dialogue of my vuvuzela and another’s down the street provides an ersatz brass underneath the jubilant clang of pots and pans. We create our thanks in city jazz.
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starlings in the park
The New York I’ve found there is much smaller and more intimate. I have fallen in love with the intimacy of the neighborhood: seeing the same faces, the same dogs, the same birds.
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morning prayer with robins
This morning at the duck pond with my customary cup of coffee, I looked up over the brim to see a family of robins trolling for worms in a grass as green as the cover of my London Review of Books. The sunlight hit each and every blade, you could count them, like Monet. At…
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love in the time of corona
Our welfare simply is wrapped up in the welfare of the other, and we do not have a choice about it. — Marcus Mumford Marcus Mumford’s acceptance speech of the Steinbeck Award this past September links Steinbeck with Lewis, ostensibly, and, more subtly, draws on the thought of Rebecca Solnit on the communitarian responses to…
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transcendent horizontals
I try to articulate to the friar the thought that has been forming in my brain each day on the Q train. Praying is just the acceptance that I will wake up each day and do the same things. But each daily task—saying my prayers in the morning sunlight or gloom of rain, making breakfast,…
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moral, believing, narrating
Sitting on a small wooden crate outside the coffee roasters on West 10th Street, in what I call the Corgi District of The Village, I take in the pedestrians on this street, while I make inroads on this everything bagel. There is a couple talking to a cyclist in the road. There is a long-haired…
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the arrangement of God
John Chrysostom preaches jazz— I stay up all night to hear it, see it—fire raining outside moussaka diner Eucharists, eyeing out eternity in intimate, bright-eyed company, seeking, like Lazarus’ dogs, to lick away wounds, peel back the sores scarring the world’s dermal divinity. Until we see it: a love-encrusted world, and we are baked in…
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bodega kadesi
In the bodega kitty-corner from me, where I go to purchase emergency toiletries, there lives the most mystical marmalade tabby. This is not my usual bodega—the Yemeni operation up two blocks, which I support with ferocious loyalty after their fire in June. I believe my monthly purchase of Ben & Jerry’s pints is more than…
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John Chrysostom in the MRI
At 7 AM, the hospital is empty, clean and quiet. I patter in slip-grip socks to the bathroom and back to sit in front of the television detailing grisly morning news reports. I squeeze my ears shut, trying to move the sound of the TV screen to the background, like a picture watermark in Microsoft…
Renée Darline Roden © 2024 