Author: Tim

• No-one On The Stairs

  I, too, have read a book of lyrics before dawn. The birds were waking slowly on the lawn with not-yet-morning, browsing-in-the-modes attempts at song. I, too, was glad the roads were silent as the silk the geisha wears. No-one in the parlor, no-one on the stairs.

• Collect for Nostalgia Sunday

  At the bottom of the sea and seldom seen earth’s bowels begin: an enigmatic maze whose passages volute upon each other (lost, the traveler there). Sickening, the sense of rushing night, of sudden distance gone when once the dragon’s doors are passed. Those doors suspend upon a one-way hinge and let no traveler back. Lift…

• Moon Sonnet

  I’d say you didn’t find it as you, hoping,flipped the pages of the Book of Women’s Curses(while I hovered like those hospice nurses,in a hush). I’d say you, fiercely hoping,didn’t draw this blood when you’d concoctthe proofs that God is dark, that He coercestears. But now, I sense the brine my versessound to you. A…

• Eden

  The first responsibility of the father is to create Eden, place the child in it, show him its beauty, and allow him to tend it. He will fall again, of course, and create within himself the world anew, and finally be exiled and alienated to wander abroad. But that is his business; yours, is Eden.…

• The Healthy Ratio

  Note the ratio of prohibitions to permissions in Eden: one prohibited thing to many, many good things, and all good things are there for the enjoying.  This is the rule for healthy discipline from earthly fathers, too. The child’s universe must have in it a few prohibitions but the focus is on the panoply of…

• Even a Child is Known By His Doings

  You should teach your children to love the good and to hate evil.   If this teaching is not the foundation of everything else, then the else is sophistry.   Let’s shed all the faux-sophistications about parenting.   Let’s not twitter on and on about this and that but fail at the foundational task:  people,…

• Speaking Like a Father

  At the beginning the father is not afraid to command in hard and succinct language. One of the signs a man has enough vir-tue to be a father is that he speaks and enjoys receiving direct propositional statements. Later, he may offer an explanation which is short and direct. This is a nod to the…

• Paradise is Home, Home Is Paradise

  Christian parents need not worry that they are too “fleshly” if they enjoy making their homes comfortable and pretty.   Children should always remember their homes with tears of fondness, and this tear-evoking memory ought to be a memory of physical comfort and beauty as well as warm hugs.   Indeed, “Paradise” and “home” are psychological synonyms.…

• Wisdom

  Wisdom In the Old Testament, the tool of training is the law but the goal of character training is Wisdom. Many have tried to define wisdom but most definitions beg the question by simply burying the definition in the premise. It is the ability to use knowledge correctly, some say (but what is “correctly”). Or,…

• Love and the Principle of Parsimony

  Doubt the historicity of the Crucifixion if you like, but the narrative of a God who goes to hell in the place of his alienated child is the only cosmic story that embraces love as we know it. And love is valued, universally, far more than other parts of human life, which makes it first…