I aim to take the poet's words to heart to practice resurrection by every day do(ing) something that won't compute, going with my love to the fields where we will lie easy in the shade. This sabbatical time of refreshing will alternate between quieter periods of retreat, reading, writing and visits with family and friends with more active weeks of travel and touring, concert-, theatre- and museum-going, and attending conferences and conducting interviews. Accompanied by Ruth, my marriage partner of thirty-three years, we are designing a set of experiences and daily routine that will draw on tried and true sources of refreshment for the Christian imagination including Scripture, daily prayer, literature (fiction, poetry and drama) and music and the arts.

The overall agenda intends not only to revive my personal imaginative energies for ministry but to do so in a way that will fuel my calling in this last act of my fulltime pastoral calling to lead my congregation toward becoming the center for faith and the arts that it envisions as a significant dimension of its mission to be Church for the Boulevard here in west Los Angeles.