I’m sorry: my absenteeism at this intersection can be attributed to a number of things lately, the most pressing of which is my forthcoming book with author and Christian addiction specialist Jonathan Benz. The book (Prodigal Church or a version of it) is now officially under deadline and by April 1 I’m to have a manuscript to the publisher (which we will announce shortly, with a hard decision pending). So I’m having to take a writing “sabbatical”—although that term makes the next few months sound misleadingly restful and enjoyably languorous, like sipping cappucinos in a Paris coffee shop while penning poetry. The reality is that I’m a bit under the gun.

So regrettably we won’t catch each other here hardly at all during the next couple of months….but I’ll be back.

For the time being, here’s a poem, “The Departure of the Prodigal Son,” by the poet Rainer Maria Wilke, an excerpt of which will appear within the pages of Prodigal Church—and which asks the question “What drives you to go forth?”:

To go forth now
from all the entanglement
that is ours and yet not ours,
that, like the water in an old well,
reflects us in fragments, distorts what we are.

From all that clings
like burrs and brambles–
to go forth
and see for once, close up, afresh,
what we had ceased to see–
so familiar it had become.
To glimpse how vast and how impersonal
is the suffering that filled your childhood.

Yes, to go forth,
hand pulling away from hand.
Go forth to what? To uncertainty,
to a country with no connections to us
and indifferent to the dramas of our life.

What drives you to go forth? 
Impatience, instinct, a dark need,
the incapacity to understand.

To bow to all this.
To let go–
even if you have to die alone.

Is this the start of a new life?