“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 [...]
My first novel, Wren, has been newly released as an audiobook! What readers are saying: "What a good listen! An engaging story by a fine writer with a gift for spiritual insight. Get this audio book. You'll be glad you did." The Rt. Rev. Jake Owensby, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Louisiana “Wren [...]
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 [...]
Why Spiritual Ritual?* Learning to kneel took decades. It was not something I did in my upbringing; and before I could kneel, I needed to know why. Now I kneel at a communion rail each Sunday as I take in my hands a small wafer and drink a swallow of strong wine from a common [...]
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 [...]
“LiFT” A close friend is going through a time. Many of us have been there: that place where old habits and excuses catch up to us and we are shunted onto new pathways by necessity—if we are to survive, and most certainly if we are to thrive. These crossroad life experiences are painful, but they [...]
“Wade in the water. God’s gonna trouble the water.” In the centuries-old spiritual, we’re told to wade into the healing water because God will “trouble” the water. In the song, “to trouble” is an old word meaning “to stir up,” and doesn’t necessarily have the modern meaning of trouble as “distress or pain.” But my [...]
The Hulu series “The Handmaid’s Tale,” based on the novel by Margaret Atwood, takes place in a dystopian United States where the vast majority of inhabitants can no longer have children. In response to this crisis, an authoritarian governmental structure allows those in power to subjugate fertile women, forcing them to work as “handmaids” (sex/birth [...]
Last week I watched the new documentary about Mr. Rogers entitled Won’t You be my Neighbor?, so he is impressed on my mind as I absorb details of the mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, in the community of Squirrel Hill, which was Fred Roger’s real neighborhood. My heart is a [...]
Have you ever participated in a Maundy Thursday foot washing? I find the ritual amusing. What amuses me is the awkwardness of most people, the squeamishness about touching others, the discomfort with an act so unfamiliar and so intimate. I’ve observed many people choosing to pair up with a close family member for the act, [...]
“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 [...]