“The psalmist doesn't try to explain evil. He doesn't try to minimize evil. He simply says he will not fear evil. …When somebody takes your hand in the dark, you’re not afraid of the dark anymore.” —Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark As I write this essay in early September, I ride rapids of fear [...]
When I moved from Oregon’s Willamette Valley to the north Oregon coast in 2004, it was a leap. I parachuted out of a life that no longer accommodated into a 10-month sojourn of dis-illusionment, dismantling, and radiant transformation in a tiny Oceanside, Oregon duplex on a cliff overhanging the Pacific. The move began as a [...]
Matthew 17:14-20 may not be your favorite Jesus story if you or someone you love has chronic illness. It is not among my favorites. I live with chronic illness and am familiar with simplistic religious formulas around healing and wellness, along with the guilt or disappointment the chronically ill sometimes experience because we haven’t been [...]
As I often do, I turned for inspiration for this essay to the lectionary readings of the day. Among them: two vengeance Psalms, a grisly murder narrative from Esther, and a fire-and-brimstone ditty from the Gospel of Matthew, with its characteristic presaging of weeping and the oddly outmoded gnashing of teeth. Among them, not one [...]
"Being a Christian involves living within the tradition and letting it shape our lives. It means letting these stories have their way with us.” Marcus Borg (emphasis added) Last week I listened to the book of Genesis on audio. It had been some time since I’d read or listened through it in its entirety. What [...]
Over half of my life I operated from a perspective of scarcity. During that time, according to my skewed perception, everyone was a competitor or a critic, always judging and potentially threatening, and nothing felt secure. It seemed just when I had something in hand, it would be whisked away, so everything had to be [...]
The other day I bumped into a friend at the local bakery. It was the week approaching June 30, when I planned to participate in an ecumenical “liturgy of lament” in my small coastal community, in solidarity with protests happening across the country over family separations at the border. I thought this friend, being [...]
Jesus knew what it meant to be pigeon-holed. His town of Nazareth had a population of just a few hundred people, and most of his ministry took place around the Sea of Galilee, just 19 miles from his hometown. Beyond that, many of the gospel stories take place around Capernaum, and the distance from Jesus’ [...]
{Essay excerpted from Season of Wonder, Frederick Press, 2016} Of late, several of my close companions are animals. Two cats, a neighbor horse, a neighbor dog. I am close to them in ways I am close to few others, though I have a bevy of family and friends who keep me floating on rivers of [...]
Throughout his ministry, Jesus challenged every boundary people used to define and separate themselves—ethnic boundaries, geographical boundaries, purity boundaries, moral-legal boundaries, relational boundaries, boundaries between humans and animals, adults and children, men and women. Jesus didn’t stop at material boundaries, but went on to demonstrate with his life that everything is spiritual—there is no [...]
Luke 6:43-44: No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; for each tree is known by its own fruit. Figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. Here we are, on the cusp of the new millennium’s third decade, and all around [...]
We all have life-shaping mega-stories—or traditions—that have shaped us since childhood. And most often we don’t “fix them to our hearts and bind them to our foreheads.” Instead, they operate outside of conscious awareness. In my own life, powerful evidence of a mega-story first emerged when I was in middle school. It began in seventh [...]
“The problem with the world is that we draw our family circle too small.” Mother Teresa Until the age of ten, I lived like many American kids of the ‘70s, in a primly geometric neighborhood, cross-hatched with pavement, with matchbook yards and immature plantings. More than any tree, the television towered over my childhood. Sweltering [...]
Mark 11:20-25. In the morning, as they went along, they saw the fig tree withered from the roots. Peter remembered and said to Jesus, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree you cursed has withered!” “Have faith in God,” Jesus answered. “Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ [...]
Mark 16:9-12: Now after he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. She went out and told those who had been with him, while they were mourning and weeping. But when they heard that he was alive and had [...]
In the northwest coastal forest where I live, it is again the season of rebirth. Out of a blanket of leaf mold sprout oxalis and salmonberry shoots and dozens of other leafy species who call this woods home. Some residents stay only for days, like the tri-fold trillium, and others have lingered for a [...]
We have again arrived at Ash Wednesday and the penitential season called Lent, when some in the Christian tradition focus on sin. Others, especially post-Christians harboring a gripe with the faith, characterize Lent as a time for flagellating ourselves while simplistically ascribing to Jesus the once-for-all, necessary fix: dying as a sacrifice to “save people [...]
Have you noticed how beautiful everyone’s lives have become? People’s homes and families, vacations and outings are so artfully photographed and presented they look straight out of Martha Stewart. The trappings of fashion, or dressing up, we see in these photos have always been there. But something is new in how carefully staged we are, [...]
To envision the way “the powers” operate in our lives (see Part One for an explanation of this theological concept), it is useful to consider some concrete scenarios. For example, imagine an energetic, entrepreneurial woman decides she wants to design and make clothing, but in a way that does not exploit workers sewing the clothing, [...]
When I was a college undergraduate, my ethics teacher taught that ethics come down to this: being able to see clearly. We can engage in all sorts of philosophizing, all sorts of ethical calisthenics when we get into a quandary, but when it comes to a situation where we must make a difficult ethical decision, [...]
Last week I proceeded to share on Facebook a link to my blog “Theology of Resistance,” as I do every week or so. As with many writers, Facebook is how I reach my readers—that diverse, wonderful, readerly, thoughtful, far-flung tribe of people with the same quirky interests I have. Thanks to social media, I can [...]
Back when I was young, full of spit and fury, I relished the New Testament book of James. It is so didactic and ethical and uncompromising, and I loved it the way I might have loved an Occupy Wall Street speech. Still today, there is much I find engaging in James’ appeal to economic justice, [...]
Among global literature, few narratives are as a baldly subversive and anti-imperial as the Christmas stories, while at the same time so neutralized. The gospel writers of Matthew and Luke (the only canonical gospels with birth narratives) each in their own unique way set up a stark confrontation between Jesus and the Roman Caesars, [...]
I have conflicted feelings about effort. As a young adult, effort was my mantra. And effort, coupled with an adolescent zest to save the world, was perilous. In my early 20s, I stumbled my way through so many “good deeds,” it is painful to look back. The [...]
Economists be damned, the GOP tax plan constructed on the debunked scaffolding of trickle-down economics, keeps plodding forward. We are to believe that giving a massive tax cut to corporations and business owners will put needed cash in the pockets of poor and middle-class families because the corporations will uncharacteristically choose to invest their [...]