Category Archive

On Monday night Richie and I sat outside on our vintage lawn chairs — turquoise, circa 1955, to go with the new house– and watched the kiddos “water the plants” aka play with the hose. We talked about his experience growing up in a Catholic family in New Jersey and I learned things that I did not know about my husband of almost seven years. Simple …

Maybe you are familiar with this paradigm: Unquestioning Believers (in Jesus Christ as Savior) are number one, Doubters and Sometime Questioners of Faith are in second place, and the Poor Souls who claim an agnostic or atheist identity and/or who choose to live their lives outside of the church are on the bottom. They are losing the race of life, …

We are back from our first ever all-ages mission trip to New Orleans led by Chloe Clark-Soles. I feel the need for a religious expletive here, like an Amen or Hallelujah! There were a lot of variables that could have not gone well as our group travelled to a new city with two pregnant women and one two year old in high summer. But the …

In one week we go to New Orleans to work with children in the lower 9th ward. I find myself considering them in little moments throughout my days: these kiddos I have never met. What are there stories? What has life looked like through their lenses? Where were they when the waters were rising after the levies broke? Who grabbed them and lifted them up? Who loves them fiercely and who do they love?

OK, sometimes the Bible can be a little kinky. I am really enjoying this week’s passage from Galatians, chapter 5, “For you were called to freedom, sisters and brothers; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You …

A seminary professor of mine, Stephanie Paulsell, once talked about a dilemma she experienced as part of the diverse worshiping community of Harvard Divinity School (HDS). HDS is both an ecumenical and a multi-faith environment, and every Wednesday we would gather to create ‘suspended space’ and to worship together. At times it got confusing and awkward, as you would imagine, …

Theologians talk about a ‘God-shaped hole.’ I wonder if most of us don’t also have a specific ‘church-shaped hole’ that we long to fill with intimate, life-giving community. As we move through life we look for safe spaces to bring our weary souls and for circles of people to trust to teach us more about the wisdom of Jesus.   …

What gives evidence to the wind?

Artists have a hard time capturing and portraying the movement of the air. It is much easier to simply allude to the wind by depicting the objects that it moves: stalks of wildflowers dancing on a breeze, ripples of waves on the surface of a pond, hair blown across the cheek of a beloved.

“I hope that readers, whether or not they are religious, will be able to take away Jesus’ message: Don’t be afraid. That they’ll find ways to act; to feed others, to accept being fed by others; that they’ll be willing to open up to people very different from themselves.”
Sara Miles, author Take this Bread

This week we conclude our book and celebrate the seventh or final Sunday of Eastertide. Honestly, maintaining a feast mindset and searching for the liberating message of the resurrected Christ in scripture, in life, in community for 50 days can start to feel like hard work.
There are a lot of reasons for this. Often it is when we have time to rest, as we are invited to do during Easter, that the demons which we keep at bay by being busy make themselves known. So we can start to crave a distraction.
Also we live in a dominant culture with a weird relationship to food and feasting. As Sara so bluntly puts it “As a nation, we’re obsessed with food, afraid of it, and deeply out of touch with what it means to sit down and eat real food with other people. We’re surrounded by abundance, we’re fat, and we’re starving (288).” It is hard to develop a healthy relationship to feasting when we are bombarded by aggressive advertisements for cheap calories and surrounded by a national discourse that values cheap, quick words over deep engagement with complex issues.