a prophetic voice-

Death has come unexpectedly so many times in my life...intruding... insinuating itself...no, even more than that... abruptly slicing into the fiber, the essence, of everyday life and wounding me- and so many others- to the very core. Death is the great interrupter, doing so with no apology, with no apparent concern for its life-changing implications, for the pain it inflicts or the emptiness it brings or the way it overturns all that is known and safe and comfortable. Death wanders down the halls of hospitals and hospices, to be sure. But it also lurks in the dark and lonely and unexpected corridors of the mind. It reaches out its icy tendrils to grasp and hold the unsuspecting adventurer. It hides along roadways and behind highway overpasses, unseen and unexpected by travelers. Death, it seems, would like to believe that in its intrusion into our lives, it has the last, the final word. And, indeed, if this earthly plane is all one knows, all one believes, Death

Sometimes reading is hard. Oh, not the words or the way they are strung together, but what they say...the subject matter... the story they tell...the information they impart. I have just finished two hard books...very different in subject matter but both heart-rending and mind-boggling and certain to stay with me for a long, long time, perhaps for the rest of my life. The first was The Cross and the Lynching Tree, by African- American theologian, James H. Cone, in which the author links- in some dramatically intense ways- the cross of Jesus the Christ and the lynchings of African-Americans in this country in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a white American growing up in in the North during years when such reprehensible behavior was still taking place, I must confess my total ignorance of the history of what had and was still taking place during my childhood. And we learned nothing about it in school...nothing. Throughout my elementary school years I knew only

"They burned him alive in an iron cage, and as he screamed and writhed in the agony of hell they made a sport of his death." So began today's "Perspectives" column by Bill Moyers as he wrote about the horrendous death of Jordanian pilot, Lt. Muath al- Kaseabeh, at the hands of ISIS. I found myself feeling nauseated, held captive by a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as, with my all-too-active imagination, I could picture the dreadful scene. Except there was no way I could accurately do this because it is so far outside of my personal experience, so far beyond what my mind and heart and intellect could take in. Barbaric, is what I thought, what I said aloud. But in his piece, Moyers goes on to recall the death of a young black man in Waco, Texas back in 1916. No, death is too light a word. His murder by lynching and burning alive for the death of a white woman of which he was accused and convicted by a grand jury in just four minutes, in

I call you "God"... I call you "God"-    that one whom I can neither understand nor explain       who dwells in enshrouded mystery       yet manifests in my life       day after day    that one whom I know even as I am encompassed by       the Great Unknown       who fills and enlivens and empowers me       in ways both terrifying and glorious I call you "God"-    for no other human word fits-    yet even this one fits badly,    since those three small letters hold within their grasp       meanings both familiar and strange    bear definitions which vary from person to person,       time to time, place to place, even day to day       within my own experience. I call you "God"-    but Holy One, Ground of Being, Source of Life,    Creating Energy are other names to which I turn    as I seek to know you, to embody you, to honor you       with my living and being I call you "God"- and sometimes, this is enough. c