Our dog Baudelaire is coming to the end of his life. And while he is 17 and I get that 17 years is a pretty darn good run for a dog, that doesn't mean that I am feeling any less sick about this news.

In moving across the communion rail, I see one pair of hands after another. Each of them is held out in this beautiful gesture of openness, a gesture that embodies the words of Jesus’ first disciples: Give us this bread, always.

A handwritten card is a sacrament. When it arrives in the mail, you hold in your hands the beautiful evidence that we are in relationship.

This Lent, I’m engaging in three prayer practices, each of which is holding unexpected gifts.

I mean that there is an element to our grief when a young person dies that is not there in the death of an elder. That’s because, after such a death, we mourn not only for our loved one’s absence but also for the decades to come that we now will not and cannot share.

Part of me – or let me risk being presumptuous here and say: part of us – wants to distance ourselves from faith because so many screwed-up and hateful things have been done in the name of God.