{This essay was written in 2017, but in the days of coronavirus seems timely to re-share. The thoughts and questions feel current. "What is the third way, the third stance and synthesis, that might help us ascend from this time having learned and evolved in important ways?"} You could say I am fond of animals; [...]
Much as I appreciate the intentions of those replacing covid-cancelled gatherings with online substitutions, I find myself unmoved by screen-time stand-ins. So many things have gone online: college courses, pub trivia nights, family reunions, dates, happy hours, book clubs, visits with grandparents, and of course, church. I honestly hope these replacements work for many people—that [...]
In quarantine, I’m of normal mood most days; other days I tear up a lot. Part of my Plan For Wellness involves feeling my feelings. Yet some days the feelings are so knotted and complex and all-inclusive that I need help teasing them out. Music helps. At times of past sadness, I avoided music. It [...]
These days my twenty-eight year old daughter calls me daily, at least once. We are uniquely close, but normally talk by phone just a couple of times per week. Sometimes less. Yet here she is, a single, social-distancing millennial whose world, like that of many, has been upended by COVID-19 economics, and who has discovered [...]
There is something archaeological about moving—the artifacts of past lives and forgotten experiences we unearth, the evidence of emotional layers long since covered over. When I recently moved, I came across a 4x6” piece of paper on which I’d written in large letters, “God is in the obstacle.” The words were likely written four to [...]
{Excerpted from Season of Wonder by Tricia Gates Brown, 2016} “…The mystery of life in its totality is incomprehensible, and what can be understood often speaks in a language so slow that we seldom stick around long enough to hear it.” —Mark Nepo As Mark Nepo states so beautifully, what can be understood of life’s [...]
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, of [...]
{The following long piece is from a book-in-progress on the subject of 'everyday mysticism.'} When I set out to attend a PhD program in Scotland—in the captivating town of St. Andrews, the stirrings of my imagination went wild. Every fantasy I’d conjured watching Jane Austen movies, or PBS’s Masterpiece, of living in a stone cottage [...]
"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 [...]
When I bumped into a friend at the local bakery, it was the week approaching June 30, 2018. 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 a sociopolitically-active progressive [...]
Sunday’s lectionary reading from Luke, about Jesus healing on the Sabbath a woman afflicted with illness for eighteen years, illustrates that in the ‘Reign of God’ as Jesus taught it, mercy is to be valued over other concerns. To Jesus, the freedom of this woman ranked so far above any law, that Jesus abraded the [...]
Interesting what sends the past bubbling up and burning. We’re at a soaking pool one evening, my then-husband and I, steeping like leaves of jasmine. A woman enters with a baby, less than two months under his little elastic waistband. My eyes gravitate toward the infant the way my eyes gravitate to all the wrinkly [...]
“Antonio” was visiting a small Oregon Coast tourist town in 1993 when he heard a man shouting to him out of nowhere. Alarmed, he quickly realized the stranger spoke to him in Spanish. “Trabajas? Trabajas?” the man yelled awkwardly, race-walking to catch up with him. “You work? You work?” Antonio, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, lived [...]
Beach is a teacher. Let it undo you. Let it rattle your perceptions and discipline your senses. Observation matters, the beach tells you, wake up. Beach is how the “aum” would look if it were a land form, extending in a line that encompasses shape and non-shape, galaxies and their smallest particles, disappearing at beginning [...]
In the fourth century, Christian teachers in an area called Cappadocia came up with a term to help illuminate the concept of God as ‘trinity.’ They called the Trinity a ‘circle dance.’* A circle dance. Imagine three dancers engaged in complex choreography. They are interlocking and cooperating in all of their movements, separating only momentarily [...]
This week an overheard conversation brought to mind a deeply regrettable goodbye. The memory stings, as such memories do; but unlike past times when I have buckled, winced, and looked away at the memory, I wanted this time to have compassion in the recalling. I wonder if we all need this: to return to regrets [...]
“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 [...]
I sit with Brother Martin Gonzales, over sixty years a monk and reflecting on the nearness of life’s end. We are at Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey on a summer day when the perfume of magnolias stretches across the way and birds sing, as he reiterates words he likes to share: “I don’t care [...]
I keep stumbling upon the necessity of social connection. In recent news stories on children’s mental health; stories about memory-function and what preserves it; stories about recovery from addiction. The potent prescription in each case, based on the mounting research of social scientists, is connection and community. We seem to need it like air, food, [...]
Along with two friends, I weekly visit Nora*, an elder experiencing the slow-motion slide into dementia. My friends and I go to accompany Nora and one another, to share soul-revealing conversation, and to keep vigil with our friend who charts the passing of cognitive abilities she always defined herself by. An inherently deep and intelligent [...]
I didn’t intend to become a spokesperson for tradition. Of those who know me best, I doubt any would describe me as “traditional” (you can ask any of my three ex husbands). But along the way, I’ve become attached to the idea that we need tradition, which some find perplexing as I’m so deeply questioning [...]
Published at Oregon Humanities She was nose down in dense clover, tail feathers up and wings askew like an ill-fated paper airplane. No movement, and seemingly no way to right her injured self from the expanses of oxalis that had overtaken my late-summer garden. Whenever a bird strikes my front window, my eyes dart in [...]
[Also published at The Christian Century.] Lent is approaching, a season associated with penitence (“regret for wrongdoing; contrition”), so perhaps we should talk about sin. Few theological concepts are as mangled and misinterpreted as the concept of sin. Yet we find the subject off-putting. We don’t understand it well because we prefer not to discuss [...]
“But I thought, of the wren's singing, what could this be if it isn't a prayer?” Mary Oliver (from "I Happened To Be Standing") One day in late 2017, I sat writing. On this morning I rode a fretful moment, the worry du jour being my first novel, Wren, for which I wasn’t finding a publisher. The challenge [...]
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 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 white-knuckled [...]