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Claire Colombo

Charged

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining

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Nevertheless

Ernest Hemingway once wrote a six-word short story that goes like this: “For sale: baby

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Two-Toned Heart

As I write this, the pope’s new exhortation, “Amoris Laetitia” (“The Joy of Love”), has

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Storied Love

  During last week’s Payne Lecture, Dr. Brené Brown reminded the SSW community that the

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Marks of Love

Before Mom died in 2004, she and my dad lived in a beach house on the west end of Galveston Island. Afterward, Dad moved to Dallas, but the beach house stayed in the family, and a number of our collective belongings remain there—including Mom’s books.

Among them are many volumes I know she read: Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea, Kathleen Norris’s Cloister Walk, and Rosamunde Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers, to name a few. Others, I know she never cracked; they’re too pristine, lacking the warps and creases of beach-combed books.

Still others I know she only partly read. I know this because of the bookmarks she left in them.

Some of these bookmarks are of the Hallmark variety, with colored tassels and wacky sayings such as “Reading is Forever!” Others come from her travels with Dad (the Moby Dickens Bookshop in Taos) or her devotional life (“Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us!”). Still others are faded dry-cleaning receipts or rumpled grocery lists.

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Anchors Aweigh

The pounding rain was the least of our problems, though we didn’t know it at the time. My son and I were traveling home to Austin after a week on the coast. I gripped the wheel and squinted into the watery I-10 corridor as Gabe pretended to read. Some cars poked along with us. Others bullied their way by in a hair-raising blur.

As we approached Katy, just west of Houston, the rain let up. I could breathe again. Tentatively, I accelerated. Buildings emerged from the mist. Gabe began to read for real. I moved back into the fast lane. Everything would be fine!

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Stardust Memories

If you secretly (or not so secretly) enjoy Ash Wednesday as much as I do, you’re probably very familiar with its central chorus: Remember you are dust, and unto dust you shall return. But have you ever given the logic of this line any thought? If so, you may have realized that it makes no sense at all—which is exactly what makes it so compelling.

For starters, check out the verb tenses: You are dust, and to dust you shall return. This admixture of present and future tense confounds our understanding of both time and identity. If we are something—dust, Girl Scouts, conspiracy theorists, vegetarians—how can we “return” to being that thing? We already are it. We don’t need to circle back to it in the future.

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Homecoming, Part 2: Beyond Complaint

In an earlier blog post, I complained about the happy-ending, “fairy-tale” aspects of the parable of the prodigal son. Homecomings, I reflected, are rarely as rosy as all that.

But in the parable’s finale, when the resentful brother complains about the party, we feel right at home. Not only do we sympathize with him, we are him. “No fair!” we grumble over our laptops and spreadsheets while others watch TV. “No fair!” we grouse when another family member gets his favorite meal—again. “No fair!” we seethe in our cubicle as a new hire moves into the corner office. “No fair!” we whisper when a loved one dies and so many, many others do not.

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Homecoming: Bunnies and Mums

I’ve been asked to write on the theme of homecoming. At first, the topic of homecoming seems sort of like a bunny rabbit. It’s light, fluffy, and soft. It brings you comfort and makes you smile. The very idea of it makes you all warm and tingly. Homecoming. It’s totally harmless. Right?

Not always. Take your average Texas high school football homecoming, for example. Anyone who has experienced this phenomenon knows how complicated and sometimes painful it can be. The gargantuan mums alone, festooned with streamers, candy, trinkets, and full-sized toys, can give a girl a backache.1 Even worse is not receiving a mum at all, or having more degrees of separation from the members of the homecoming court than you do from Kevin Bacon. Either of these things can mark you as a social pariah or, more tragically, make you believe you’re one.

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Table, Word, Poem

Dr. Claire Colombo has served on the seminary's adjunct faculty since 2012.  As a freelance educational consultant, she develops religion curriculum for Loyola Press of Chicago and is a regular contributor to their Find God magazines and newsletters.

In last month’s blog post, I mentioned an outfit in town called Typewriter Rodeo. The typewriter “cowboys” are poets. They sit at tables behind vintage typewriters and pound out poems on demand. Sometimes you can find the foursome at Book People, other times at private parties or at special events such as the Austin Mini-Maker Faire.

It works like this. After standing in line for a while—because these guys are popular—it’s finally your turn. You walk up to your poet, say a word or a phrase (chocolate, unicorns, skinned knees, Mario who isn’t here) and, if you wish, name a genre (haiku, limerick, sonnet), and then you stand back and watch ‘em go. Clackety clackety clack! Two minutes later, you hear the satisfying whrrrrrip of paper from rubber roller and are handed a custom poem in Courier 12. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, the poet illuminates the manuscript. Here is an example:

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A Central Texas Gardener

Dr. Claire Colombo has served on the seminary's adjunct faculty since 2012.  As a freelance educational consultant, she develops religion curriculum for Loyola Press of Chicago and is a regular contributor to their Find God magazines and newsletters.

I had already drafted a whole ‘nother blog post. It was about radical hospitality as the making of a poem out of whatever surprising thing comes our way. (See www.typewriterrodeo.com for the general idea.)

But on Sunday morning, as I was driving to church, I stopped for a red light at an intersection. There, I saw a neighbor of mine. He’s a neighbor because he’s always at this particular intersection near my home. If you define neighbor as one who occupies a nearby residence, however, he wouldn’t qualify, because he’s homeless.

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Bodies Inside of Dreams

Dr. Claire Colombo has served on the seminary’s adjunct faculty since 2012.  As a freelance educational consultant, she develops religion curriculum for Loyola Press of Chicago and is a regular contributor to their Finding Godmagazines and newsletters.

It’s been a wordy month. It began with the Christmas season—the Word made flesh and all that. Then came a flurry of words to meet some professional deadlines. And then came an invitation to take myself, in the flesh, to one of those wordy events you see listed in the Happenings column of the Chronicle and proceed to ignore. In this case, it was a launch party for a new literary journal in town. Not only would I attend it, the invitation went, but would I write some words about it, too?

I would. I had already planned to attend another wordfest—a reading by poet Naomi Shihab Nye—so I promised to blog about them both.

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