My father passed away almost eight years ago. A good friend called him my “lodestar parent,” and losing him left a hole in my world. While he rarely offered course corrections and was adamant that we captain our own ships, he lived a life you could nonetheless safely steer by. He exhibited patterns of integrity, courage and grace. He made hard moral decisions (often at great personal cost), was generous even when his means were limited, and always welcomed in the stranger. I have missed him very much, but in these fraught times I miss him more. Recently, as I was facing some hard decisions, I tried to imagine what…

Not too far from my home there is a beautiful garden cemetery. It was designed from the outset to be a place of beauty and inspiration, offering solace to those who mourned, while inviting the living to reach higher. For well over 100 years all of Boston’s “good and great” were buried here under imposing monuments or in its hills and dales. This place is special to me, and I have been going there regularly for decades. It has been a place of Sunday rambles with my family and friends, and quiet walks of personal reflection and solace. It has worked on my psyche as the founders had hoped —…

Recently I was talking with a group of young people who are struggling to find any personal relevance in religion. All of them grew up in homes where their parents were believers and active members of the Church, and almost all of them have continued to be engaged with religious activities. For now, they are still showing up, but they just aren’t feeling connected, inspired or engaged. These are such good people, thinking deeply about what it looks like to live a life of meaning, and yet they are wrestling and weary. At the moment I mostly listened, but ever since, that conversation has been taking up a fair amount…

Lately it feels like everything in my life is on fire. Simultaneously. Not a small brush fire here or there that needs a bit of quick attention and management, but frightening conflagrations that threaten to consume and destroy. There is a lot of fight and flight and not enough peace and quiet. And for me it means that feeling tired and unsettled is the default. In my more objective moments, I realize that some of this is just a feature of my personal phase of life, but there is also something else at play. So many others seem to feel the same, as if we are all being pushed to…

This year it feels like a tender mercy that the Fourth of July falls on the sabbath. Given our recent national struggles, a self-congratulatory and raucous celebration might not hit the right note. But perhaps a sabbath is exactly what we need right now – the chance to rest from our labors, reflect on where we have gone wrong, and recommit to creating a better future where we live more harmoniously with our fellow citizens. Today, instead of centering our celebration on parades and fireworks, we could use the stillness of a Sunday to sit with the powerful and holy truths that motivated the first Americans as they created a…

For the last week or so, I have woken up every morning feeling depleted. I am able to go about my work and accomplish methodical and thoughtless tasks, but those that require deep thinking seem overwhelming. It is almost as if my brain has decided to put itself to neutral and is just going to stay there. One day I was moving through the world reasonably well, and the next day everything just felt like too much. That is probably because everything really is Too Much. I don’t think that feeling is in my imagination, (it really is too much, isn’t it?) or that it represents a failure of character…