Sunday Best – December 28, 2025
Dear friends, as we near the end of the year, the concept of liminality is on my mind. I’m reposting a streamlined & revised version of a reflection from 2020 here, as it is echoing for me now.
One of my favorite words from divinity school is “liminality” – it’s a description of the betwixt-and-between, the neither-here-nor-there. The gap between life and death is liminal space. The pause before the chorus Good Vibrations is a liminal space. The end of a calendar year, or a season of life, is a liminal space.
There are just three rules to this in-between-ness, as far as I can tell.
First, we’re not allowed to stay. By definition, liminal spaces are not permanent.
Second, we can’t go backwards. Only through.
Third, in the liminality, edges are blurred, and boundaries are stretched.
Impossible things become possible.
What could be?
Sunday Best – December 21, 2025
Dear ones, today marks the solstice.
May knowing the darkness
help us celebrate the light.
Brighter and brighter from here.
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
– Wendell Berry
Sunday Best – December 14, 2025
As we zoom towards year end I’ve been cleaning up around the office, which makes some things stand out with new sparkle.
This tiny plant stake that says “I’m rooting for you” might be just a cute garden pun, except that it comes from a colleague who actually IS rooting for me, through the easy times and the tougher ones alike. What a huge gift to know those few precious people who have our backs, who see the best in us, who lighten our loads and brighten our spirits.
Dear ones, may we be cheered on in our endeavors.
May we root wholeheartedly for others,
through sunshine and storms.
Sunday Best – December 7, 2025
Our building has finally come to the end of a long maintenance project, and the final step was a professional window washing to clear away the last of the construction dust. What a great way to welcome the holiday season!
The long awaited day came, and I wrestled the screens out of the way before the team’s arrival so they could reach every nook and cranny. But the next morning, all was still hazy, splattered and smudged.
As I was craning my neck to inspect the defects, I drew my finger along the glass. Much to my dismay, and then embarrassment, and then amusement, I realized that the smudges were all on the inside of the windowpanes! I’d waited six months and then silently sat in resentment over the lack of help, when all along all I had to do is bust out the windex.
Ten minutes later and all was sparkling.
Dear ones,
May we own up to our smudges.
May we tend what needs tending.
May we help things to shine.
Sunday Best – November 30, 2025
I love that travel can allow us to see our own homes with fresh eyes. And I have the same experience after gathering with loved ones – a chance to return to myself with added clarity, a renewal born of remembrance.
Dear ones, time flies away.
We are so often scattered and scared.
May we recognize the stranger who knows us by heart.
May we feast on our lives.
Love After Love
Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
This poem can be found in The Poetry of Derek Walcott or in many online settings.